... it might not dissolve into its reverse." (13) Didion uses her personal experiences as well as her typical American ideals of security to characterize this unstable region. Her repetition and continual development of key ghastly images referring to the "mechanism of terror" lead us to wonder, what exactly her intention is in this first chapter on Salvador. During the beginning of the chapter, Didion continually uses the passive voice in order to describe to us the numbing effect of life in El Salvador. For example, she describes the immigration process as one that "is negotiated in a thicket of automatic weapons." (13) She then goes on to tell us that, "Eye contact is avoided," (14) and that, "Documents are scrutinized upside down." (14) Furthermore, she describes the scene on the streets as, "Black-and-white police cars cruise in pairs, each with the barrel of a rifle extruding from an open window...Aim is ...

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