Word: marquez
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...downtown Los Angeles, just east of Little Tokyo, one of the only active construction sites is a 53-unit apartment building at Alameda and 4th Street. Valentin Marquez, 41, father of four, does foundation and concrete work. Before this job he says he was out of work for a year. He is now struggling to keep his house. "The company I worked for for 18 years went bankrupt," he says. His colleague, Alonzo Chavez, 34, worked for the same contractor and then took a job in a burrito factory at minimum wage. Both non-union men, hands gray with concrete...
...Marquez's tour is part of El Salvador's "Route of Peace, a network of rural, war-torn communities trying to rebuild themselves through tourism. Ironically, the project, which can include 15-day-long packages for tour groups, is now funded in part by a $184,000 grant from the U.S., which had helped bankroll El Salvador's right-wing military during the civil war that killed 75,000 people. Unlike U.S. historic battleground sites, with musty replica uniforms, powderhorns and recitals of textbook war accounts, here the guides are those that did the fighting. "This is guerrilla tourism," Chica...
...Tour guides say talking about the war has become a form a therapy. "For four years after the war I had nightmares every night, but talking about it with groups has helped me to overcome some of those issues," Marquez says. "Now I remember it like a movie or a dream." For others, the memories are still more like a nightmare. "This is something we still haven't gotten over yet," says a soft-spoken Maria de la Paz Chicas, one of the few survivors of the El Mozote Massacre, in which the military murdered 1,700 villagers...
...civil war ended 17 years ago, but Marquez is again leading groups through these forested hills with guerrilla warfare on her mind. Only now, those following her are Salvadoran students and American and European leftists stepping gingerly in their Reeboks and khaki shorts, and stopping frequently to drink bottled water. Welcome to El Salvador's new guerrilla-tourism industry. (See pictures of Colombia's guerrilla army...
...should get going before it gets too dark," Marquez calls out in Spanish, watching the sun set over the mountain ridge and pulling out a flashlight - a visual aid that would have been much too risky to use during the rebels' deadly cat-and-mouse game with the patrols of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army back in the '80s. On the short descent back to the revolutionary museum which houses the twisted carcasses of several attack helicopters downed by the guerrillas, she points out a crater where a 500-pound bomb was dropped by the army. Nearby is a bunker...