Trinidad describes her experience of the 1986 “Desembarco” invasion in Arcatao, the involvement of a particular commander, and the resettlement process.
- Interviewee:
- Trinidad
Transcription
There were fifty families here; we were the first fifty families to resettle because most of the people came later. When these families resettled, a colonel came. I’m going to call him that, although I’m not sure what he was, but he was a high commander in the Armed Forces, and his name was Cáceres Cabrera. If that old man came here maybe everyone would mob him. Because he’s the one who did the massacre here. He killed seven comrades and he made them all get naked in front of the church steps. And he made everyone, women, children, go inside the church.
There they hung up a man whose name was Inés Recinos, and another man whose name is Melecio. I don’t know his last name. When I knew him before his name wasn’t Melecio, but now I know him as Melecio. I don’t know what his nickname was. They cut a bloody cross in his chest with a bayonet.
It wasn’t just the army, because there were clowns, there were people here that knew them. They beat so many people. It was that Cáceres who had the church bells taken down and taken away. He made a big hole in the church, he found some plates, he found the alms, which people called “San Bartolo alms, alms of the saintly”. He found them all in a box and took the money. He only gave a few scraps to some older men who had worked all day carving the hole, because they were carrying a little device. Whenever the device made noise they would carve the hole and take out a few things. But the good thing was they didn’t kill us all.
[And the men?]
The men that were naked, yes. They killed them, only three remained.
[And they killed them in front of everyone?]
No, they took them away. And they kept them for three days so that we wouldn’t go bury them. When we finally buried them, we couldn’t put them in a mausoleum or anything. So they are still in the same place and we haven’t been able to take them out. We are fighting to get them out, because we finally have that chapel where we’ll take all this and people can come visit. You’ll be able to enter too. We’d really like to improve the town, which is already doing much better. We have a museum, and we have the chapel where we’ll bury the bodies we are able to exhume.