Perquin, El Salvador – Efrain Perez moves with a shuffle as he escorts visitors through the Museum of the Salvadoran Revolution.
His halting gait, the result of shrapnel, has slowed the ex-guerrilla’s body, but not his mind.
Perez, 38, rattles off the dates of battles and assassinations, lists the names of obliterated villages and fallen comrades. He leads guests through rooms filled with propaganda posters, Soviet- era surface-to-air missile launchers and grainy black-and-white photos of the “heroes and martyrs” who died in a brutal conflict that already has slipped into history.
“When you live it, when you know the consequences, it sticks in your mind. You don’t forget,” said Perez, who became a Marxist guerrilla fighter after his mother, father and brother were killed by army soldiers near the start of El Salvador’s 12-year civil war in the early 1980s. He was 11.
Under other circumstances, the artifacts on display at the museum, a one-story tin-roofed building perched on a hillside, might have been stashed in private homes or left to rust in the jungle. Perez himself might have frittered away his days among El Salvador’s unemployed.
But today he and many former rebels have a surprising new profession: tour guide.
While El Salvador’s tourism ministry labors to attract conventioneers and sun worshipers to Pacific beach resorts, many former guerrillas are developing a new “alternative tourism.” Since peace accords were signed in 1992, thousands of curious visitors from Latin America, Europe, the United States and Canada have been drawn to this remote village 10 miles from Honduras and other sites in this violence-haunted republic of 6.9 million people.
Centered on old killing fields and rebel camps, “turismo alternative” has brought vanloads of day-trippers to villages linked to the struggle, which claimed 75,000 lives and left 8,000 people missing.
Among the most infamous is El Mozote, a rural hamlet where 900 men, women and children were raped, tortured and massacred by government troops on Dec. 11, 1981.
“There’s a new generation that’s realizing the history of Salvador,” Perez said. “Always there’s an ignorance, of not knowing anything, and we have to change the mentality.”
Many sites are operated not by the government but by its former enemy, the former combatants of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, a coalition of communist and leftist forces. The country’s tourism ministry doesn’t support the sites.
“The war, lamentably, is part of our history,” said Minister of Tourism Jose Ruben Rochi. “We can’t forget what happened in the decade of the 1980s.”
The museum’s guides, all ex-guerrillas, work six days a week from 6 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The compound includes a store that sells snacks, Che Guevara T-shirts and books about Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic anti-war cleric who was assassinated by government agents while saying Mass in 1980.
