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Essay on Don't Be Afraid Gringo
Don't Be Afraid Gringo is the account of Honduran Elvia Alvarado, a campesina (peasant) organizer with the National Congress of Rural Workers (CNTC). Medea Benjamin compiled this book based on approximately thirty hours of taped interviews with Alvarado, who focused on the increased climate of fear in Honduras as it became the unwitting middle ground between the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the growing strength of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, which threatened to topple the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government.
Honduras served as the base for the Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras. Alvarado was imprisoned and tortured twice because of her activities. She was already on the military's blacklist because of her organizing work with the peasants when she agreed to tell her story and she increased the peril to her own life by having her testimonio published. Alvarado's is a story of poverty, suffering, and abandonment on the part of her government, her church, and her men. Like Chungara and Mencú, this undereducated woman unmasks her society's totalizing and redemptive paradigms. Of the church she says: "They wanted us to give food out to malnourished mothers and children, but they didn't want us to question why we were malnourished to begin with" (16).
Of the myth of marriage: "When men and women start living together, there's a tremendous double standard. Because the women have to be faithful to the men, but the men don't have to be faithful to the women... Men kill their wives for sleeping with another man" (46). Imprisoned, tortured, threatened with death, she subordinates all to her people's cause. "Every time I leave my house," she remarks, "I'm not sure whether I'll come back or not. I'm ready for everything, and I'm not afraid to die. Because I know the campesinos will continue the struggle, and that my death will be part of that struggle" (137).........
