Our Christmas Day guide didn’t look like an ex-guerrilla. In his late 50s, slight, wiry and well turned out, Matilde spoke to us in measured tones, possibly adapted to his foreign audience. This consisted of me, Carolyn, the author of the El Salvador part of the book, and Dave, a mountain-climbing Yorkshireman on a month-long jaunt down Central America. Matilde explained the background to the civil war that blighted this beautiful mountainous part of El Salvador throughout the 1980s. As we walked in the mid-morning sunshine, he relaxed and spoke more naturally. He told us how he joined the guerrilla movement after government bombs destroyed his family home. He had been making his living from the land, but was now an insurgent in a movement protesting about El Salvador’s social inequalities. The guerrillas were being ruthlessly pursued by the country’s military and Matilde went into some detail about the hardships involved – days with little or no water and learning which twigs you could eat for sustenance.
If that sounded harsh, it was nothing compared to what we were about to see. We arrived in a small, poor village called El Mozote, a few kilometres down the road from our base in Perquin. In December 1981, El Salvadoran troops had rounded up all the men, women and children in the village. After killing the men and adolescent boys, they raped and killed the women. They then killed the children in one massive assassination, international forensic teams later confirmed. The youngest of the children killed was 3 days old.
Cold facts on paper, but they had an extraordinarily raw affect when we stood in the well tended children’s memorial garden on a beautiful sunny day. A wall with all the names of the children under 12 massacred that day stands there – 140 in total with an average age of 6. A local senora showed us round the village. With one little child running round her, and heavily pregnant with another, she explained how she happened to be out of the village on the day of the slaughter. Three of her brothers and three of her sisters were not so lucky.
Signs of the violence remain. We saw a bomb crater and bullet holes in houses caused by air-force strafing. Much of the ammunition was US-supplied. Under Reagan, the American government used millions of dollars of funds each day to help the El Salvador government crush the red ‘threat’, which apparently included newly-borns.
A pretty intense experience, especially for Christmas Day, although we did do some normal festive drinking and over-eating (including some mince pies battered after more than a month in my backpack) that day – more of which later.
If that sounded harsh, it was nothing compared to what we were about to see. We arrived in a small, poor village called El Mozote, a few kilometres down the road from our base in Perquin. In December 1981, El Salvadoran troops had rounded up all the men, women and children in the village. After killing the men and adolescent boys, they raped and killed the women. They then killed the children in one massive assassination, international forensic teams later confirmed. The youngest of the children killed was 3 days old.
Cold facts on paper, but they had an extraordinarily raw affect when we stood in the well tended children’s memorial garden on a beautiful sunny day. A wall with all the names of the children under 12 massacred that day stands there – 140 in total with an average age of 6. A local senora showed us round the village. With one little child running round her, and heavily pregnant with another, she explained how she happened to be out of the village on the day of the slaughter. Three of her brothers and three of her sisters were not so lucky.
Signs of the violence remain. We saw a bomb crater and bullet holes in houses caused by air-force strafing. Much of the ammunition was US-supplied. Under Reagan, the American government used millions of dollars of funds each day to help the El Salvador government crush the red ‘threat’, which apparently included newly-borns.
A pretty intense experience, especially for Christmas Day, although we did do some normal festive drinking and over-eating (including some mince pies battered after more than a month in my backpack) that day – more of which later.
1 comment:
Hi Jol. Looks like you made it to Perquin after all! I've been following your blog with great interest. Thought your entry 'El Mozote' was really moving, too. Quite a tale you told. Have you seen one of our tourism leaflets yet? Happy New Year!
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