Edwin gives detailed testimony of his arrest and interrogation in Honduras.
- Chapter:
- Chapter 5: Guerrilla Experiences
- Interviewee:
- Edwin
Transcription
[The Honduran army was also conspiring with the Salvadoran army?]
Yes, they took part, they were coordinated. When the army carried out operations in this area the Hondurans participated in some military sieges in the border zone to keep people from crossing over into Honduran territory. They knew what was going on. They led a lot of patrols into guerrilla zones here.
A sergeant once said to me, "Damn…" That's the word he used.
He had helped me a few times and I had given him rides in mu truck. He would even help me unload merchandise at the stores where I sold goods.
"They just killed some of my troops on Chupamiel hill," he told me.
"What are you doing over there? It's not your responsibility," I said.
"We went into a minefield. Two of my men were killed, others were injured."
"It was scary," he said. "You could have driven us off a cliff before, when you gave us a ride."
One time, I had given about eighteen of them a ride in the truck, and that made them mad. "You could have driven us off a cliff!"
So they held me and later they let me go. They held me there for 45 days after presenting me to the media. That's when the human rights groups began to investigate whether we were being tried. Because at that point we were still under the category of "disappeared".
There was a soldier, a policeman, he was the only one who would give us a piece of tortilla every eight days when he was on watch. Nobody was allowed to bring us food, otherwise the would be considered guerrilla collaborators.
I remember when one said, "Come on, guanaco, get up, you're going to do push-ups,"
I hadn't eaten anything, I was a dead man walking. I weighed 75 pounds at most. I was so thin, and I had lean against the wall when I stood up up because I got dizzy. They were torturing me and I was not getting any food.
Finally, a captain came and asked, "Who has been mistreating you?"
"That guy," I said.
He called him and said, "Look, come here."
"I don't want to have any stains on my record as an officer, regarding human rights."
"Free them tomorrow, I don't want any stains on my record."
"I'm going to show you what I don't want done and I'm going to do it to you," he told him. So he had the same things done to the policeman.
"I'm going to do it even worse to you. When we sent you here, we sent you to watch over them, not to mistreat them," he said.
"Wow," I thought to myself. "There are still people with some humanity inside the army."
So after about 45 days they told us, "We're going to release you."
But before that, on an earlier day, they came and said, "Come with us."
They blindfolded me and took me out. I could tell we went down three flights of stairs.
They said, "We have Juan." He was my superior in Honduras. They had captured him too.
So they started, "Look, where is the truck? The Mitsubishi pickup?"
"I don't have a Mitsubishi."
"Yes you do, you were driving the Mitsubishi," he said.
"You drove Salvador Guerra in it," he said.
He was one of our commanders, who we brought here from Nicaragua. I brought him. I hadn't said anything about the car. I had only taken responsibility for the truck that I was arrested with.
"You had another pickup at your house, a Datsun," he said.
"No," I answered.
I could hear someone moaning in the other room. I thought to myself, "Well, he is going to confess everything I have been holding on to for so long."
They told me, "Kneel down over there!" I knelt down blindfolded, they tied my hands together and on top of that they put handcuffs on me. He put his foot here and pulled my arms up.
"Start moving, straight ahead! Don't stop."
I was walking hunched over, running into walls.
"Turn around! Now come back!"
They had me hunched over for five hours. After that, one of them said, "I'm going to show you something."
They had managed to get ahold of a picture of my eight year-old daughter.
He showed it to me and asked, "Is this your daughter? And do you love her?"
"Yes. Why?"
"I'm the one asking the questions!" He beat me in the head with a stick like this, BAM!
I could barely move my head after that. They held me there for five hours.
I thought, "They know what they know and there's no reason for me to keep quiet."
"Yes, it's true," I said, "I brought Salvador Guerra to such-and-such place. But that was the only time."
"Well, imagine how long you've been holding on to that without saying anything."
After five hours he said, "Take him back."
"Stand up!" he said, knowing I couldn't stand.
When I was finally able to put both feet on the ground, I fell down immediately.
He said, "Pick him up! Take him away!" They dragged me.
They threw me in the cell. The guy on duty was the one who always gave us half a tortilla. He took it from the thieves in the other cell.
"It hurts me to see this," he said. And then he confessed to me, "I am also Salvadoran," the policeman said.
He was a relative of the teacher Chinchilla, the one they killed, he said, from Yurique. His last name was also Chinchilla.
He told me his story: "I came here and was involved in some things until they captured me. I have collaborated with them so they don't do anything to me, and now I'm part of this unit. But it hurts me, what they do to people."
He was the only one who helped us. Eight days after they put him on guard duty, they transferred us to the prison in the department of Gracia de Lempira. They held us there. That's where there was the guard who mistreated us the most. He took advantage of one of the women. At night he...he practically raped her, because she didn't want anything to do with him. The girl was 17 years old. They raped her and I found out eight days later because that same policeman told me.
"Damn!" Argueta told me. That was the policeman's last name. "I wish I could beat him up! What they did to that girl, it's not right."
"That's what the repressive forces are like," I said. "You can't expect anything good from them."
After that, I felt more pressure for human rights. The International Red Cross was able to verify where we were being held. After 45 days without trial, they started to tell them that they were violating our human rights.
So they transferred us to Gracia. They put us in a truck but they had put lime on the truck bed. It took five hours to go from San Pedro Sula to Gracia. We bounced around in that truck and our nose and eyes were full of lime. There was a very young girl, she was about one year old, and she was breathing in all that lime. When we got there, they unloaded us. I wanted to go to the bathroom to urinate so I told that to the judge.
"Go ahead, take the handcuffs off him," he said, "You don't have anything to do with them anymore."
I could see the judge was angry! He could see the condition we were in, and the little girl too. He could see the little girl's nose was full of lime, and ours were too. I spent more than half an hour really wanting to urinate and I couldn't because of everything we had been through.
"Alright," said the judge, "Now you are under the court's authority and they can't mistreat you anymore."
They held us there, they put us in jail. They called the warden.
"These are some detainees who are going to stay here. Let them get cleaned up."
My beard had grown so much, I looked exactly like what they always said, that we were hairy guerrillas.
Then the warden told me, "If you want, go and take a shower." He lent me a razor and I shaved. They gave us clothes to change into.
The warden said, "Look, I'm in charge here. They can't do anything else to you. If you need anything…"
They brought us mattresses and treated us well in that jail. There was a doctor working there who I'd met when I was a boy. My family always had friends in these border towns. They heard when we came out in the press, that so and so was from Arcatao. He was curious and he asked the warden, "They just brought some guys, and I think I know one of them. Do you think I could see him?"
So he told me, "There's this doctor who might know you and your parents and he'd like to come see you."
"If you allow it, OK," I said.
I didn't recognize him.
"Damn, how are you? If you need anything, I'm here for you. I live here, I have my own practice. Tell the warden that we're friends, and I can help you with anything."
The good thing was that I could relate to people, so I became friends with the whole jail. I became friends with a congressperson. They would come to visit me. They would take me to the office to talk with them, to watch television with them.
So eventually the warden asked, "Do you play soccer?"
"Well, I'm not that good but I like it," I said.
"Well, get some shorts and we'll take you out to play."
He began to take me out in the afternoons. First he would have a guard come along with us, but then he said, "No man! You're not going to run away, you don't have to worry about him."
We managed to establish a good relationship. It wasn't a relationship between prisoner and warden at all.
Later he told me, "You know, I consider you a friend, it's like we knew each other from before."
He also told me his story, that his parents were Salvadoran, and that they had also suffered repression. They had fled and ended up in the city of Gracia.