Photojournalist: El Salvador experience similar to Iraq

Photojournalist Diane J. Schmidt will be presenting work from 1981 travels in El Salvador October 9th at the Sacred Heart Retreat Center. — © 2008 Gallup Independent / Cable Hoover

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Staff writer

GALLUP — Photojournalist Diane J. Schmidt says her violent brush with El Salvador’s Civil War is a story that has taken her almost 30 years to tell.

And through a coincidental meeting with a Gallup resident, Schmidt, who lives in Corrales, has agreed to give a slide presentation based on her book-length memoir, “Darkening of the Light.” Schmidt will give the presentation during an evening retreat from 6 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 9 at the Sacred Heart Retreat Center, located 2 miles south of Gallup. The event, which includes Mass, dinner, and Schmidt’s presentation, has a $20 fee. Reservations must be made by Monday.

El Salvador was a country steeped in violence when Schmidt talked her way into a magazine assignment from the German publication Bunte. Archbishop Oscar Romero’s assassination in 1980 was followed by the brutal rape and murder of four American religious workers — Maryknoll nuns, Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel, and Maryknoll volunteer Jean Donovan. The U.S. was supporting the right-wing Salvadoran government’s war against leftist rebels, and the country’s impoverished peasants were caught in the crossfire.

Schmidt stepped into the fray with the plan of writing an article about El Salvador’s feudal oligarchy, the ruling upper class that owned most of the country’s land. She also arrived with the idea that Americans were “the good guys” in the war.

In a recent interview, Schmidt said her German surname and her letter of assignment from Bunte caused members of El Salvador’s military and wealthy land owners to mistakenly assume she was a neo-Nazi sympathizer to their cause. In actuality, she was a liberal Jewish woman from the suburbs of Chicago who was quickly catching on that all was not as it seemed.

This early “comedy of errors” quickly dissolved. “Mutal suspicions with my charming hosts quickly deepened as haunting clues they dropped about the assassinations of Archbishop Romero and the four American church women catapulted me into a quixotic investigative quest,” Schmidt writes.

That quest sent her into the countryside in search of a judge who had signed an order for the exhumation of the bodies of the four slain American women. And she believes the quest lead her to narrowly escape la boca del lobo — the mouth of the wolf — a possible death at the bottom of a ravine.

“Telling this story is a healing experience,” Schmidt said. She hopes that people interested in Latin America, history, politics, religion, and photojournalism will attend. “I think the story is about a somewhat naive, idealistic, perhaps ambitious journalist ... ,” she admitted, “who found herself in a moment in history that was pivotal for Latin America.”

Schmidt is now shopping her manuscript around to different publishers. She believes there are similarities to what the United States did in El Salvador in the 1980s to what it is doing in Iraq now. According to Schmidt, a chance encounter with Sister Mary Matthias Ward, the director of the Sacred Heart Retreat Center in Gallup, led to the scheduling of Thursday’s presentation. Ward, who is an Ursuline sister, was interested in Schmidt’s story and interested in sharing it with a local audience. Schmidt said she is also willing to return to give the presentation to interested classes or community groups.

Reservations: (505) 722-6755.
Information: dianeschmidt22@hotmail.com