El Salvador is both a country caught in a devastating internal conflict and the setting for Art Keller’s February 1985 arrival in a militarized landscape. The novel contrasts its outwardly peaceful countryside with the political violence beneath it, then brings that tension into focus at Ilopongo airfield, where military aircraft and guarded hangars frame Art’s movements.

Setting and Social Order

El Salvador is described as a small country on the Pacific coast of the Central American isthmus, roughly the size of Massachusetts. Its economy is characterized as a coffee economy rather than the banana economy associated with neighboring Honduras. The prosperity suggested by coffee cultivation, however, is sharply at odds with the distribution of land: the Forty Families, described as about two percent of the population, own almost all of the fertile acreage, much of it in large coffee plantations.

The account connects that concentration of land to a longer history of hardship. As more land was devoted to coffee, less remained for food; by the mid-nineteenth century, many Salvadoran farmers were left close to starvation. The country’s agrarian inequality is therefore not incidental background to the conflict of the 1980s. It helps explain why demands for labor and land reform found support among campesinos, workers, students, and priests.

Civil Conflict

The narrative presents the serious escalation of violence as beginning in the 1980s, when campesinos joined the Martí National Liberation Front or workers’ unions, while students and priests helped lead reform efforts. The Forty Families responded by forming ORDEN, a right-wing militia whose name means order in Spanish. The account underscores the political meaning of that name: the order ORDEN defended was the established social arrangement, not a resolution of the grievances driving protest.

ORDEN’s membership included many active-duty Salvadoran Army officers. Under its violence, campesinos, workers, students, and priests disappeared; some bodies were later found on roadsides, while others were left in school playgrounds as warnings. The countryside that appears green and peaceful from the air is thus revealed, through Art’s knowledge of the conflict, as a place marked by organized killing.

The novel does not present the Martí National Liberation Front as innocent of violence. Art recognizes that it committed murders and financed itself through kidnappings. But he distinguishes those acts from the far greater scale and resources of the Salvadoran Army and ORDEN, whose violence was organized and extensively supported. The contrast makes the conflict more than a simple opposition between virtuous rebels and a uniformly powerful state: both sides used violence, but they did not possess comparable capacity.

United States Support and Human Cost

The United States enters this account through its Cold War policy. Many ORDEN officers had received training at the School of the Americas, while the Salvadoran Army received American Bell helicopters, C-47 transport planes, M-16 rifles, and M-60 machine guns. These forms of support strengthened a campaign directed not only against guerrillas but also against farmers, students, teachers, factory workers, and priests.

As Art’s plane lands in February 1985, he reckons the death toll at 75,000 and the number of refugees and homeless people at roughly one million each. His estimate describes a country he thinks of as a mass grave, setting the scale of civilian loss against the apparent calm of the landscape. The passage gives a population of three and a half million in its description of the country’s social order, then cites Art’s later estimate of five and a half million in his account of the dead and displaced; it does not reconcile the different figures.

Ilopongo Airfield

A later scene places Art and Sal Scachi at Ilopongo, a busy airfield crowded with military aircraft, helicopters, transport planes, and the personnel needed to maintain them. Sal drives a jeep past this concentration of military infrastructure to a row of ten numbered hangars. The door of Hangar 4 opens, the jeep enters, and the door closes behind them.

The scene makes Ilopongo a concrete point of contact between the country’s military environment and Art’s actions there. Its aircraft and guarded hangars establish the airfield as an active military site, while the arrival at Hangar 4 ends on a closed door rather than an explanation of what lies inside. El Salvador’s narrative significance rests in this conjunction: a society shaped by land inequality and mass violence, and a setting in which military facilities become part of the story’s immediate geography.