Rosa explains her role in political organizing, she recounts the 1980 El Rincón massacre and the killings of her parents, and describes the role of clandestine militias.
- Interviewee:
- Rosa R.
Transcription
Well, my responsibility was to spread out as much as I could to continue organizing people and to let them know how important it was to organize and fight for our own rights. I would go back and forth from El Alto, El Portillo, El Norte, Los Guillenes, and then I’d come to Los Ramírez, Las Minas, Las Vueltas, La Ceiba. But in those places there were already people organizing. What happened was that we always think that whoever is closest to you, even if they are saying the same thing, you don’t believe them. But if you see people coming from somewhere else, then you believe them. So we used an exchange system. People from elsewhere would come here to give a talk at an assembly, while those from over here would go elsewhere. That was a way of supporting each other. Maybe that’s why it’s easy for me to be a talker, a loudmouth, because that was my role at the time—to socialize.
[To motivate the community through speeches?]
So what I’m telling you about the clandestine militias, that was to see how to defend the masses in the face of major repression. We’d already had the massacre on May 8 at El Rincón, when they burned the women— [In what year?] May 8, 1980. Then the massacre of May 14 in Las Aradas. Then on July 14 in Los Duboncitos, in the same village, the village of Manaquil. They had already killed my father, then they killed my mother. So we said, “No, we can’t just sit around waiting for them.” What did we start with? On the road we made a ditch across the road. Then we’d lay down some sticks and throw some dirt and leaves on top. What was the objective? That some of them would fall. This would stop them while people got a chance to get away. Those were the functions of the clandestine militias.