Celso remembers how he and his family were surrounded by soldiers during the Guinda de Mayo in 1982.
- Chapter:
- Chapter 3: The Years of "Guindas"
- Interviewee:
- Celso
Transcription
During the Guinda de Mayo, a large group of us were in a ravine that we called Acapate. At about 5 in the afternoon I said to them, "Look, we're surrounded," I said.
"They can't do anything to us at night, they won't see us running," I said. "They are going to cordon us off so that we can't escape."
So, "I'm going now," I said, "I'm getting out of here, because otherwise we're never getting out."
"No, you have to wait," the rest of them said.
"Well, I'm going," I said.
So I set out with the kids, two on my back, and the little girls each carrying another kid, and we took to the ridge. We climbed and got out of the circle they had put up. In the early morning helicopters came at about 5 dropping off more troops. Yes. We were hiding in the brush. We couldn't do anything. We could hear a great noise, all the people running, and maybe those chasing them too, you could hear the noise. Yes. But we were up higher, as I said, and as night fell we set off again, higher. We were in the mountains now. And we didn't know if we should go see what had happened, how could we go alone? So we watched for two days on the road to see if someone we knew would pass by so we could go out. Finally I saw one of the people who had been with us there. I went out to him in the road,
"What happened, did they get out?"
"Yeah, they got out, let's go!"
And we went up to the place where we had been hiding.