On our return trip, flying from San Jose, Costa Rica to New Orleans, from one safe haven to another, our plane touched down in what were unsafe places--mainly for the citizens there--that were about to become even more unsafe: El Salvador and Nicaragua. Security at the San Salvador and the Managua airports was controlled by soldiers with automatic weapons.*
In Managua, walking out to the plane before boarding the flight, passengers were checked with a handheld metal detector. My pocket knife set of the alarm. The soldiers took my knife and attached a baggage ticket to it so that ideally it would have been sent along to New Orleans with my baggage. Not surprisingly, that didn't happen.
Our next connecting flight, in San Salvador, was delayed for some reason, and the airline had a bus or buses take us to the San Salvador Hilton for a buffet lunch, shown in these two photos. I'd lost the prism or viewfinder to the camera when I was briefly lost on Cano Island, so I took these photos not by holding the camera up to my face but by holding it at waist or chest level and looking down into it.
The infamous El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador took place on 11 December 1981. Mark Danner's reporting on the massacre took up the entire 6 December 1993 issue of The New Yorker. This buffet made me think of all the poverty I'd seen on the trip.
*By comparison, security at U. S. airports was only beginning to be taken seriously in 1974, after hijackings to Cuba in the late 60s and early 70s, but not seriously enough that I had to hand over my pocket knife before boarding the plane in New Orleans on the way to Costa Rica. I don't think we even passed through metal detectors.
