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Daniel and Sombra Negra

posted 8 years ago by Apis (1624)
5 replies | jump to latest

We always knew that Daniel did bad things while in the army. In this episode we discover what's exactly he did. He was a member of Sombra Negra (Black Shadow) which was a real organization in El Salvador, and still exists to this day.

Members of Sombra Negra were Police officers and Military personnel who got fed up with high crime rate and decided to take matters into their own hands. So, they formed a vigilante group that went after hardened criminals and gang members. That would make them (Daniel included) good guys, right?

The only problem with SN was the way they killed those criminals - they tortured them first. This detail is probably what's bothering Daniel so much that he kept asking people for forgiveness throughout the episode.

[–] chrisjdel (2714) 8 years ago

In season 1 he told Madison he was led into a room with a chair and given a choice: be the man with the knife, or the man in the chair. Which would imply that he himself was involved with criminals and this was his captors' way of having a little fun. Getting one of their prisoners to torture another for them. Apparently he must've shown some real talent for it. So maybe ... they made him an offer he couldn't refuse? Better than their original plans for him. This is assuming he told Madison the truth of course. Which we don't know. It certainly wasn't the whole truth.

[–] Apis (1624) 8 years ago

I remember that conversation now. Until this episode, we presumed that Daniel did bad things in Salvadorian civil war (even in this episode he mentions killing communists). But then they dropped the name Sombra Negra, and the above information is what Wiki says about them. I think the series made a mistake of using the name of the real group because it sounded sinister, but it doesn't fit in to the rest of information they told us about Salazar so far. They should've used a fictional name for the group Daniel was a member of, or not mention the group at all.

[–] Popcorn Kernel (2368) 8 years ago

Or maybe wikipedia doesn't have the full story?
They also tortured dissidents and journalists, executed people without any trial.
He was not a good guy even if some of his victims were gangsters.

[–] Apis (1624) 8 years ago

I've been thinking about it, and the truth might be that Daniel did bad things in the civil war, but simultaneously as a member of Sombra Negra he tortured and killed gang members (SN mostly kills members of Mara Salvatrucha).

This would fit well into the story. Dante is the one who created the misunderstanding by being impressed only with the Sombra Negra part, and not with Daniel's whole war record.

[–] chrisjdel (2714) 8 years ago

Still a lot of missing pieces in Daniel's background. That experience he related to Madison sounds like it was early in his life, late teens or early twenties. What happened between then and the time he left El Salvador is a blank space right now except for this tidbit about Sombra Negra (and the fact that his reputation was notorious enough to precede him). I thought it was interesting that he told Dante he'd lost count of how many people he killed, to project the impression that he could care less, when in fact he knows exactly how many it was - 96, he said earlier. For him the detached brutality is a behavior learned out of necessity, for his own survival, but deep down inside it's not who he is and all the bad things he's done have been weighing on him for a long time.