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My contacts repeatedly emphasized those facts in introducing me to potential participants. Personal relationships have affected my ability to gain access to key pieces of data that another researcher would have had to obtain in a different way. While they may just have been making polite conversation, particularly in Central America, participants mentioned their respect for the way foreign news media covered their wars. As Leurs, a European journalist who coordinated media policy for a faction of the Salvadoran guerrillas, noted when speaking with me: “There was a conflict between the foreign press and the government and the armed force.

83 To help promote more diverse views, the Church had founded YSAX in late 1978. The use of radio as a mode of information incorporated the oral tradition of popular communication into a mass medium. The station’s programming tended to be didactic, with an emphasis on Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero’s Sunday homilies and the commentaries of Ignacio Ellacuría, the philosopher who was rector of the Jesuit university. 85 While nominally independent, they illustrated Gramsci’s contention that journalists were in fact aligned with the dominant hegemony.

Writing was the authorized version, not always complete or even reliable, but the safe, accepted account. While the rulers wrote, the common people expressed themselves in less formal media, such as street theater. One of the few examples of popular expression from the colonial period to survive is The Güegüence. The word refers to both the Beowulf of Nicaraguan literature and the main character of the comedy-ballet originally performed in a mixture of Spanish and Nahuatl. 10 Driving the story and the character is a set of survival skills that Nicaraguans call malicia india, the tricks that a subaltern group uses to protect itself against a power structure that is stacked against it: The character, the Güegüence is a merchant, who wears a mask, hiding his real thoughts.