Military Retaliation

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Ramón describes how the capture of a member of the National Guard by the guerrilla unleashed more violence at the hands of the military; an example of this was the massacre of six women at El Rincón.

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Transcription

The guerrilla captured a guardsman, they disappeared him, they tortured him and killed him in El Perol. The well at El Perol, down below. So the guardsmen and the military let loose the repression. Dora is a witness to how they tortured her father, trying to get them, everyone, to tell them the truth, to tell them where the guardsman was. What they did immediately was they killed Meliton, a famous teacher who was from here. They killed him at the Sumpul, that was their revenge. Then the rest of them, Don Gerardo’s son, that’s how things were unleashed here. We didn’t know about any of it. We heard the names and the denunciations in Archbishop Romero’s homilies. But the loss of that guardsman led to the massacre of the women in El Rincón. I can tell you, there was so much rage and cruelty, and from then on they never lost that rage. The war had begun here. I mean it was a horrible kind of war, because it was like the soldiers were hunting people, they became evil.