En diciembre de 1981, el ejército salvadoreño asesinó a más de mil personas en el caserío El Mozote y comunidades aledañas, al norte del país. Eran los primeros años de la guerra y las atrocidades de la masacre pautaron la crueldad para el resto del conflicto. En este capítulo Serafín Gómez, un guía turístico poco común nos conduce por los territorios que presenciaron la masacre más grande de América Latina y sus testigos, que a 25 años de la firma de la paz, libran una batalla monumental por mantener viva la memoria de los seres queridos que perdieron.

[Institutional voice]: On January 16th, 1992, El Salvador signed a Peace Accord that ended 12 years of war.

(AUDIO ARCHIVE: ALFREDO CRISTIANI’S SPEECH ON THE PEACE TREATY, FORMER SALVADORAN PRESIDENT)

[Institutional voice]: On December 29th, 1996, it was Guatemala’s turn.

(AUDIO ARCHIVE: ÁLVARO ARZU’S DISCOURSE, FORMER PRESIDENT OF GUATEMALA)

[Institutional voice]: After two decades, the war wounds are still open. Pie de Página’s Ximena Natera and Radio Nacional de Colombia’s Lorena Vega present War witnesses: voices against impunity, stories about the battles for memory and justice in El Salvador and Guatemala.

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(AUDIO, XIMENA NATERA, LORENA VEGA, AND SERAFÍN GOMEZ INTRODUCE THEMSELVES)

[Lorena Vega]: He is Serafín Gómez Luna and is a joyful man. He is a little bit over 40 years old, has dark skin and has indigenous traits. He has been a tour guide for a decade and as we travel through the roads of the Morazán department located in the North of El Salvador, Serafín tells us the story of the place.

[Serafín Gómez]: This is Arambala. Here the church was destroyed, they threw five bombs of 500 pounds. It was rebuilt and now has a new design. After 1982 the people left the town and only went back in 1993 after the peace accords were signed…

[Ximena Natera]: This was one of the most struck regions by the civil war that destroyed the country during the ’80s. 37 years ago, these roads witnessed the biggest massacre of Latin America’s modern history: El Mozote.

(NORTEÑO MUSIC PLAYS AND ROAD NOISES)

[Lorena]: To arrive in El Mozote from San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital city, we cross the country from the west near the Pacific coast to the border zone with Honduras in a journey that lasts just 4 hours.

[Ximena]: It is a tiny country with a population of just 7 million people. However, it is in a constant spotlight for the brutal violence of its’s gangs or for its’s citizens emigration to the United States—a matter that bounds it permanently to Mexico.

[Lorena]: We have a small amount of news from El Salvador back in Colombia. We know that here took place a Peace process in the ’90s and for that reason, there were people showing it as guide route in the negotiation process that in 2016 led to the end of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—the oldest guerrilla in the continent. 26 years have passed since the Peace Accords that ended up the Salvadoran civil war. In 12 years this conflict left 75 thousand deaths, hundreds of massacres, more than 8 thousand disappearances and a million of internally displaced persons. The rifles were silenced but this didn’t mean ease to the victims. If it had been the case, we wouldn’t be here today.

[Ximena]: Serafín guides us to La Joya community on the high lands of Morazán. To get there we went through dirt roads and crossed a river without a bridge. Half an hour later, the first houses start to appear. On the outside of one of these houses, Amadeo Martínez waits for us. He is working in the garden.

(SMALL TALK WITH AMADEO MARTINEZ)

[Lorena]: Amadeo welcomes us in the entry of the house then offers us some coffee. He talks to us as for as if we were good friends. When we finish our coffee, he takes us to a small yard fenced with a mesh next to his house. In the center, there is a stone wall surrounded by plastic flowers. It has 23 memorial tablets, each one has the name of a relative. They all died the same day.

[Amadeo Martínez]: Here lie the remains of my family, we have this small monument with the bones they found…They are buried there.

(ORIGINAL MUSIC)

[Ximena]: Today Amadeo has 45 years old, in December 1981, he was 9.

[Amadeo]: In that time still existed the Guardia Nacional. They were always patrolling the hamlets and searching for the older people: the parents. Already chasing them. Why? Who knows

[Lorena]: This zone was one of the bastions of the subversive groups and for that reason, La Guardia looked for guerrilla members in the hamlets in that way they could also intimidate the young men.

[Amadeo]: In the early afternoon of the 10th, we started listening shots by the Torola river.

[Lorena]: When the military was close, the men hide in the mountains for a few days as the women and the children stayed in the hamlets. But this time Amadeo’s father fears the worst.

[Amadeo]: In the afternoon my dad says ”maybe it’s going to get ugly” because the other people were already leaving to sleep in other houses.

[Lorena]: Amadeo’s father wants to take the whole family out of La Joya, but as it is too late, he only manages to leave with his two older sons to a neighbor’s house. He comes back hours later willing to bring with him the whole family.

[Amadeo]: In the early morning my brother, my dad and I tried to take my mom out of there but she didn’t want to leave.

[Lorena]: Amadeo’s mother thinks it’s not necessary to run away and prefers to stay in the house with the younger sons: a 7-year-old girl, a 6-year-old boy, and a 1-year-old baby.

It’s the same in the other houses. The men leave with their older sons and the women stay with the younger ones.

(MUSIC AND SOUND RECONSTRUCTION)

[Amadeo]: When it all started: the bombing, the shooting, helicopters everywhere. We started to realize that this was no good.

[Lorena]: On the morning of December 11th, the Salvadoran Airforce’s planes drop bombs to everything that moved and the soldiers enter the houses yelling, insulting and pointing their rifles to adults and children as well. Amadeo runs away to the bushes. His father manages to somehow hide them behind some agaves’ fleshy leaves where they barely fit.

[Amadeo]: In that time the people worked a lot the henequén. It is one of the plants that I have seeded in front of the house. They have spikes and we called them ’mezcalares’. We managed to get in there and we didn’t come out.

[Lorena]: They can’t move or make a sound.

[Amadeo]: My dad, my brother and other men that lived in the quebranchos were there quietly and we didn’t realize that they were close. It was so silent and the planes were flying low and we were just covered by some bushes.

[Lorena]: In their hiding place, the group listens to the screams and sees the soldiers murder their neighbors.

[Amadeo]: They arrived at that house at 2 in the afternoon to kill all the people from that little house (…) when it started they pulled out the children and took them to the river bank. They raped some girls. They were like 15 or 16 years old. We witnessed all that.

[Lorena]: There in the bushes with spikes, Amadeo spends 8 days paralyzed.

[Amadeo]: The only thing we could chew to keep the mouth wet were these guayabo’s sticks, leaves and peels so we could survive.

[Lorena]: A tremendous hunger and the bad smell coming from the house make them leave their hiding place. The military is gone and they start the search of their loved ones with the hope of finding them hidden in the nearby caves. Amadeo’s father looks for his wife, while the two children walk through the rubble of La Joya for two hours. Haltingly, Amadeo tells what he saw in a house.

[Amadeo]: It was written on the wall: ”A dead child is a future guerrilla member dead”. Illogical sentences as we didn’t know what a guerrilla was at that time. The purpose was to kill everybody as we were supposedly guerrilla but we were just… we are just farmers. We’ve been working all our lives. It’s dreadful.

[Lorena]: Amadeo sees again his father and that’s the last memory he keeps from those days.

[Amadeo]: I remember that my father hugged us and told us: we are the only ones left, they killed all your family. From that point, I can’t remember… Just imagine you have not eaten well in days and someone gives you this news… it could kill you the shock.

[Lorena]: How many of your family members did they kill?

[Serafín Gómez]: If you count cousins, grandpas, aunts because most of them were children and women, they are probably 25. Almost no men or adults were killed. My mom and my three brothers were the closest ones. The others were cousins, brothers, uncles, aunts, grandpas, and grandmas.

(MUSIC)

[Ximena]: What has come to be known as the massacre of El Mozote was really a slaughter in El Mozote village and seven other Morazán’s communities: Ranchería, Los Toriles, Arambala, Jocote Amarillo, Pinalito y Cerro Ortiz, and La Joya: Amadeo’s home. It was the beginning of the ”Operación Rescate”, rescue operation or ”Yunque y Martillo” executed by the Atlacatl Battalion and other military units from the zone between December 10th and December 13th, 1981. This raid tried to eliminate the guerrilla’s popular support.

We know by the Truth Commission and survivors’ testimonies that in every stop the army systematically murdered the inhabitants, raped dozens of girls and women, killed the animals and burned the trees, plantations, and house. According to official figures during those days 986 persons were murdered: 479 women and 558 children, of these children 254 were less than five years old.

(MUSIC)

[Lorena]: A Guerrilla’s group of children passed nearby 15 days after the massacre. One of them was Serafín: our guide.

Serafín was 10 years old and a few months before he had joined the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMNL)’s troops.

[Serafín]: As we were kids, we didn’t know what had happened: the dimension of it. I had to be in the war since I was 10 until I was 22. I was forced as we were under big repression at that moment.

[Lorena]: Who took you there?

[Serafín]: The thing is that my parents and I couldn’t live in the house anymore and they told us: ”look, we will take you to this place, to a shelter”.

[Ximena]: As the Salvadoran State raised the repression against the people, the clandestine signal of Radio Venceremos—the Guerrilla’s official voice—was persuading the farmers to join their troops.

[RADIO VENCEREMOS’ ARCHIVE]: These are just some of the places you could go to join the troops of victory. ”To face the imperialist attempts that try to maintain subjected our homeland, the guise is to increase the popular organization and to take up arms against the dictatorship. Farmers, students, and unemployed people join our troops and the revolutionary army.)

[Lorena]: This message arrived at Serafín’s house and his parents think that the best option is to give him to Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo’s shelter, one of the four forces of the FMNL.

[Serafín]: They took us to a school as they were going to safeguard us because we could live no longer in our houses and they would give us security and everything (…) we took normal classes like math. They also gave us classes where they teach us Farabundo Martí’s biography and told us this country is in a war and that kind of classes.

(ARCHIVE: 80’S NEWS CLIPS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH)

[Ximena]: At that moment, the country had been in war for two years. The armed conflict broke out in 1979 in the context of the Cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The land tenure was highly concentred in a few hands and the country had suffered half a century of abusive military regimes. After a decade of social conflict, factions of Farmer and students’ movements created guerrilla groups that later combined into the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.

[Serafín]: From 1972 to 1980 it was like sin, a crime in this country if you demanded your own rights or better life quality or a better job, education, healthcare… you were a subversive or a communist.

[Ximena]: The world found out about the massacre 7 weeks later. Journalists Raymond Bonner, Alma Guillermo Prieto and the photographer Susan Meiseas arrived at Morazán where they met Rufina Amaya, one of the survivors of El Mozote massacre.

On January 27th, 1982, Alma Guillermo Prieto reproduced Rufina’s words in an article published in the American newspaper Washington Post:

[Rufina Amaya´s testimony]:”They started with the women around noon. They picked up first the young girls and took them to the hills. Then they chose the older women and took them to the Israel Márquez’s house in the plaza. We heard shots. Later they continued with us, by groups. I hid and climbed a tree when they wanted to take me to Israel Márquez’s house. I saw the Lieutenant. He was shooting people himself.

[Lorena]: As the years passed by more testimonies appeared. These were denied by the Salvadoran and American governments as the United States had supported the right-wing dictatorships in Latin America. For the remainder of the conflict, they claimed that the dead bodies were guerrilla members killed in action.

On October 26th, 1990, in the heat of the Civil War, the farmer Pedro Chicas went to San Francisco Gotera’s court in the Morazán’s municipal capital and officially report that his entire community had been murdered by the Salvadoran Army.

[Ximena]: Wilfredo Medrano, a lawyer in the ”Dra. María Julia Hernandez” Human Rights Association, remembers well Pedro Chicas as he assisted the victims from the very first moment. We met him in his office in San Salvador before taking our path towards Morazán.

[Wilfredo Medrano]: He was the complainant and we joined him as he took legal action. He told how they had murdered the children, how they entered the hamlets, how they took out of their houses the families and how they destroyed and killed domestic animals. He described the crime scenes in an objective way. He should also remember that he was interrogated in a time when the safeguards of due process were not respected and the judge himself was an inquisitor that intimated the victims.

[Lorena]: The complaint was archived until January 16th, 1992, when the war was officially over. 11 years had passed since the massacre.

(PEACE ACCORD’S BROADCAST AUDIO)

[Ximena]: The Civil War stopped after two years of talks mediated by the UN between the Salvadoran State and FMLN’s high ranked members. The Peace Treaty was signed in México’s Palacio de Chapultepec. There were Alfredo Cristiani, back then the Salvadoran President, and Salvador Sánchez Cerén, Guerrilla’s leader and current president of the country.

[Lorena]: The world praised the Accords for being the first of its kind in Latin America. They allowed the demobilization of the insurgent forces, military structures, and the feared death squads. They changed the electoral system and designed a plan to distribute land among the poor.

[Ximena]: The new Peace discourse led to the return of many of the displaced persons to their homes. Amadeo Martínez could return to La Joya after 12 years of wandering.

[Amadeo Martínez]: When the Peace Accords were signed, it meant the end of the daily confrontations. We thought it was the perfect time to go back to our roots after a long time of being wandering. It was better to rebuild our hamlet and the local boards started to merge.

[Lorena]: The victims think it is the perfect time to talk about the conflict crimes and joined by ”Dra. María Julia Hernandez” Human Rights Association decided to go to the San Francisco Gotera’s first instance judge. The same one where Pedro Chicas had testified before. The court ordered the first exhumations.

[Wilfredo]: The first Discovery in El Mozote were 147 children’s bones, most of them no older than 9 years old and two adults, one of them a pregnant woman, that was the first shock. Then all the lies from the government’s institutions fell apart.

[Ximena]: In the exhumations took part The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team that had experience from the horrors of the Southern Cone’s dictatorships… They could no longer say that the dead bodies belong to Guerrilla members killed in action.

[Wilfredo]: They had denied it. They said that the massacre was a fairy tale. But now the people started to realize the seriousness of the El Mozote massacre. It is the first to come out in public. It is the first one where the brutality is discovered and the people start to say: ”See… it was all true”.

[Lorena]: The brutality is also left exposed by the investigations of the Truth Commission that was created by the Peace Accords and led by Colombia’s former president Belisario Betancourt.

On March 15th, 1993, the Truth Commission published the report named ”De la Locura a la Esperanza: la guerra de los Doce Años en El Salvador”

[Ximena]: It was established by the Truth Commission that the authors of El Mozote massacre were the Atlacatl battalion, Third brigade units and the Command Center of San Francisco Gotera

The Commission found a dozen of members of the Salvadoran Army as the masterminds behind the massacre and even linked General José Guillermo García, El Salvador’s former Minister of Defense, for not leading investigations and clarifying the facts.

[Lorena]: But 5 days after the report’s publication the Salvadoran president, Alfredo Casiani, the high ranked members and The Legislative Assembly approved an amnesty law.

[Wilfredo]: It is a law that meant the exoneration from criminal and civil liability to members of the Salvadoran Army and the FMNL members as well. At that moment all these people were being processed. They got benefits from that law and the incarcerated persons were freed from prison as if they had not committed any crime.

[Ximena]: The Mozote Massacre’s victims and other victims of the conflict were left in limbo.

The Amnesty Law halted all the investigations and blocked the start of a truth and reparation process in which the war criminals revealed the location of mass graves, talked about the missing people or even asked for forgiveness.

With this paper they tried to erase 12 years of Salvadoran history and the national guise was ”forgive and forget”.

[Wilfredo]: Practically that was what they wanted. To wipe the slate clean and if you lost your loved ones learn to bear it because here we are not investigating anybody. That was the spirit that this law brought. That was their idea to reconcile the country. But really the society was not reconciled.

[Lorena]: The Amnesty law left deep wounds in the Salvadoran society and started the victim’s crusade against impunity.

(MUSIC AND AMADEO MARTÍNEZ HOUSE’S AMBIENT SOUND)

[Amadeo]: They arrived at sunset, took people out of their houses and made them lay face-down on the ground without a reason. That’s how the nightmare started for the ones who died that day on the other side of the hill. You could hear screams of fear and voices of young girls subsiding in the silence…the dreams of so many innocent people. That’s the justice that I want and wait tirelessly.

[Ximena]: In December 2016, government’s coroners handed him over the remains of 23 of his relatives in an act of reparation, including the remains of his mother and his three little brothers.

[Amadeo]: That’s what we need: Justice, for all the parties involved that destroyed innocent children’s dreams. That’s what hurt me the most because they were defenseless children that died without knowing anything, they took them away from their future. Jail is little punishment for them, however, personally, I’ve said that we’ve got to forgive each other and we’ve already forgiven, but we want justice.

[Lorena]: It’s the end of the afternoon and Amadeo says goodbye with a hug and gives some fruit and bread so we can eat on our way back. Before we leave he thanks us for listening to his story. He tells us that very few people are we willing to talk about what happened.

We go back to the road. Serafín rushes us so we can make it to Mozote before it gets dark.

[Ximena]: We arrive at the place where it was located the old church in the village. There it was built the Monumento Histórico El Mozote, a memorial with almost a thousand written names of the murdered persons.

It’s a Wednesday night and the memorial doesn’t remember death. It’s a park where the children play and it’s allowed to jump, scream and laugh.

[Lorena]: Serafín what is this?

[Serafín Gómez]: It is a burial place. They were buried in 1991 in the first phase.

[Ximena]: It is a cemetery?

[Serafín]: Yes, it is a general tomb for the people that were not identified at that moment. The memorial was created in 1991 and it symbolizes a family: a father, a mother, a boy, and a girl. As a way to pay tributes, they made the monument to the people who died in the massacre. It says: ”El Mozote never again” because it is a historical place… symbolic of the present and future generations. What happened in El Mozote should never be repeated.

[Ximena]: Serafín knows the story because his job is to tell it to the tourist that arrive here looking for hints of El Salvador’s war. When the conflict ended, he was 22 years old and had few skills besides his war abilities. He created ”La Ruta de la Paz”, a tour that tries to protect the historical memory, with a group of former Guerrilla members.

He also knows the massacre because he lived it. Even though being a guerrilla member protected him, in a certain way, horror also touched his home.

[Serafín]: Here is my aunt Natividad Luna Pérez and my cousin Octaviana Luna that was 1 year old. Other family members were murdered not exactly in El Mozote but in the Ortiz Hill another massacre that was not investigated. We consider that there were murdered 60 families.

[Lorena]: How many family members did you lost?

[Serafín]: I think… 12 family members. Here are missing some. From El Mozote are 11 family members. They were walking between El Mozote and Ortiz Hill and were caught by the Army because they were escaping of the military operation as well.

[Ximena]: What does it mean to you obtain Justice?

[Serafín]: Justice is what happens when people have access to the truth or when a government answers to the people’s interest of finding the truth: who were the authors?. It is certainly not the intention to throw them in jail as they wouldn’t fit as they are too many. The idea is to create a precedent and take them to a court and tell them: ”Look… you’ve made this mistake. Ask for forgiveness to the families. And to the families that still have hope and want to find their loved ones, go tell them: ”Here they are”. I think that is restorative justice.

(MUSIC AND CREDITS)

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Institutional voice: On the next episode

(EL MOZOTE’S HEARING AUDIO)

Institutional voice: Military to the dock. Those allegedly responsible for the massacre face their decisions on the court after 35 years of El Mozote.

Institutional voice:”War witnesses: voices against impunity” is a sound documentary series presented by Pie de Página and Radio Nacional de Colombia. This work was made thanks to International Women’s Media Foundation’s initiative: Adelante.

Visit ”War witnesses” onwww.radionacional.co/testigosdelaguerra

or in www.piedepagina.mx/testigosdelaguerra

Script and Investigation: Lorena Vega y Ximena Natera

Production in El Salvador: Víctor Peña, Juan Carlos, Jessica Ávalos, Julia Gavarrete, y Jonatan Funes

Original Music: Santiago Flores

Sound Editor: José Luis Mantilla

Web: Cristian Anzola y Fernando Santillán