Emeteria describes the brutal massacre of six women in the town of El Rincón on May 8, 1980.
- Interviewee:
- Emeteria
Transcription
On May 8, 1980, the Atlacatl Batallion came. That’s the one that came and carried out that massacre in which they killed my husband, my daughter, and five of my nieces. I am here telling you the story because my oldest son and I ran. He came to our house at six in the morning. We had already heard that some troops had arrived in Manaquil, and I said to my son, “Chepe, don’t you realize the troop is coming?” “I do,” he said, “they’re getting to Manaquil.” My daughter-in-law arrived, and said, “Chepe, I’m leaving. I’m not going to stay here because they’re going to kill us. Juan Chato is coming and he’s going to kill us.” “Well,” he said, “you’ll have to see.” So what did I do? I grabbed a little sack and I put two blankets in there. One for me, one for them, and we were on our way. We went on the run because we thought they were going to find us there. The other women stayed, they were younger and had children. One of them had five, the other had four, the other three, the other two, etc. They all had children and couldn’t run away with the children. They are the ones who got killed because they stayed. And we ran. That night we slept far away from the houses and the next day when we were close to Los Amates, we heard someone say, “they say up in El Rincón they killed some women and they can’t find them. They’re lost.” We arrived so we could to bury them and realized only saw four of them had been thrown together somewhere. They killed them inside a house and they threw them on the side of a ravine, by a house. They threw them down the ravine after strangling them. My daughter, they even cut off her head. Another one of my nieces was about to give birth, and what they did was they ripped her open and took the child out of her womb. Her mom told me she heard her screaming. She said in the meantime she was locked up inside with seven children, two of her daughter’s children and one of her daughter-in-law’s children. No, it was actually eleven children, her daughter-in-law’s and two of her daughters’ children. She was crying with the children, and she heard her daughter screaming when she was getting killed. After that, they took the other two women to another house they had up the hill. They had forty loads of firewood in a corridor, and they say they put them in there alive and set them on fire. They were burnt to death, yes, they were burnt to death. One of them was overweight, they found a bunch of ashes, and a pool of oil next to where she had burnt to death. They found her heart, they say, and they put that in a bag. They put her heart and the other woman’s ashes in a bag to bury the six women together. Yes, that happened on May 8, in El Rincón. Well, it was tough. I can tell you the story because I am alive. If I had stayed there, they would have killed me when they killed my daughter-in-law.