Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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The former martial arts editor of Soldier of Fortune magazine, Lima had, by the time of his excursion, already developed quite a résumé. He had spent time in Guatemala in the employ of an American company instructing that country’s right-wing militias in “anti-insurgency and light weapons.” He had then worked for “one of the largest landowners in El Salvador, training a small army to combat guerrillas on the huge cotton plantations.”² Now he was “back to go surfing.” True, he had surfed in Central America during his previous visits to the region, using “my Indians”—a term Lima repeatedly deploys—to maintain security while he sought temporary solace in the waves.³ But this trip was different. This one was for plea sure.

The politics of Lima’s account were predictable. El Salvador was “a country gone mad with bloodletting,” he wrote, leaving little doubt as to who was responsible. The left-wing insurgents were the “hostile attackers,” while those he trained to “defend and protect themselves” possessed “[f]aces lined with years of torment and hunger,” “[f]aces that would rather farm and raise children than fight.”⁴ But Lima was no angel. There was a young “whore” he berated for her gold-toothed ugliness, telling her in English that “[t]his revolution is prettier than you are.”⁵ And his story dripped with the hypermasculine sensibilities of the Reagan era, employing militaristic language to describe the act of wave riding: “guiding a high-tech projectile at maximum cruising speed,” “honing in on a long-distance target,” “stringing staccato explosions of power with long-range speed bursts,” “blasting his moving target with pinpoint accuracy.”⁶ Given the contentiousness of U.S. foreign policy during the Reagan era, it is not surprising that Lima’s account evoked outraged responses. “[P]lease do not publish any more articles by soldiers of fortune who deal in death for the highest bidder and who happen to surf,” a Californian wrote in one of several critical letters to Surfer.⁷ Others found nothing to criticize. “There might be a lot of political unrest and foreign influence in the internal affairs here,” conceded a surfer serving in the U.S. Army in Honduras, “but we are trying to modernize and stabilize the situation at hand.”⁸