The Day After
Monday, March 16, the day after the elections was my friends Federico and Marina's last day in El Salvador. We decided to take a quick trip the National University before they had to leave to catch their flight. We took a short walk from our hotel and ended up at an entrance on the west side of the campus. We started to walk in through a vehicle gate, but the security guard called us over to where he was checking the IDs of everyone walking in. Federico completely wowed him with a line beginning "Nosotros somos obviamente extranjeros..." ("We're obviously foreigners...") In this case it was enough to get us in.

Once we got inside, it became clear that the security guard who let us in had not been reading the grafitti painted on the walls, which ran from hammers and sickles to Latin-socialist heros to contemporary Central American artists and writers. Perhaps they would not have counselled friendship with "obvious foreigners", particularly those coming from the north! Federico explained that, in the tradition of Latin American public univerisities, the Universidad Nacional was considered autonoma, which explained the left-wing iconography.
This portrait of Che appears to the right of the stage in the main auditorium.



Slightly blurry (mea culpa) portrait for Archbishop Romero in the main hall of the auditorium building



A soccer game at the university in the shadow of the San Salvador volcano