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A Political History of Surfing

RAFAEL LIMA CAME FOR THE WORK but returned for the waves. A thirty-year-old Cuban American journalist and screenwriter, Lima found El Salvador much to his liking. The surf at La Libertad, the coastal town roughly twenty miles from the capital, was “clean, fast, [and] uncrowded,” he wrote in a photograph-studded piece for Surfer magazine. El Salvador provided “some of the best waves in Central America,” including a “long, howling, rock-strewn, hollow point break” that, with a six-foot swell that “held up all morning,” left him and his companions “[s]urfed out.”¹ Accounts touting the discovery of waves at such and such a place are hardly unusual in the surfing literature. They are, in fact, the bread and butter of the genre. What distinguished Lima’s travelogue from others, however, was both its timing and the nature of its author’s employment. The year was 1982—deep into the Salvadoran regime’s violent crackdown on peasants, union organizers, human rights activists, and other civil society elements—and Lima was returning to the country after a stint training some of the paramilitary forces carrying out much of the regime’s repression.