“Guerrilla Universitaria”

Travel writer Paul Theroux was visiting El Salvador in the late 1970s to deliver a lecture at the National University in San Salvador on “little known books by famous American authors.” With the literary event concluded, it occurred to him that he had “nothing more to do in San Salvador.” He then had a question for his local hosts that no one seemed to have a good answer for: why was there a mural of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in the university during the rule of a right-wing dictatorship? Theroux had visited the National University at a time when it was actually open. In 1972, the military regime forcibly closed it using tanks and artillery and kept it shuttered until 1974. In 1980, the military/civilian junta once again moved troops onto the campus, leaving dozens dead and offices and classrooms destroyed. The government did not open the university for four years.

American novelist and literary journalist Joan Didion described the state of the campus after visiting in 1982:

Another foreign correspondent described the government's justification for closing the university: “It claimed, with some plausibility, that it was a recruiting and training ground for rebels. Some of us sneaked onto campus soon after the closure and found some classroom blackboards still covered with diagrams for bomb-making.” The paradoxes that Theroux and Didion experienced lay at the heart of El Salvador's emerging ideological and eventually armed insurrection.