Lidia describes her experience of the 1986 “Desembarco” invasion of Arcatao in detail, pointing out how the arrest of foreign journalists changed the course of events.
- Interviewee:
- Lidia
Transcription
There was a military operation here. The “desembarco” happened on April 8, and they killed people.
The military rounded everyone up in the town square and Colonel Cáceres put them in
the church in order to kill them all, to massacre them.
He said, “I don’t even need half an hour to pulverize these people.” He said that as he sharpened a big knife. All the children were crying from hunger.
They were locked up from 6 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon. They wanted to kill them. And then someone spoke up—what happened was, that day, they had arrested two international people. In the morning, they captured them during the desembarco and took them to San Salvador. They called Madison in the U.S. They were two journalists from Madison. They let people know that civilians were being killed here, that it wasn’t armed people they were killing, it was civilians.
The people in Madison said they would speak up for Arcatao and they formed a sister city relationship with Arcatao. That’s when the repression stopped, they stopped killing people they rounded up. They told the government that if they kept massacring people, they would stop giving aid. Because Madison was helping the government come drop bombs here, and other things, machine-guns. They told them to treat civilians well.
But from that time on, the city of Madison developed a sister relationship with us. They defended us. If not, they would have killed us, because they took two men to kill them at Amate.
They took two others to Portillón. In the meantime, they kept us at gunpoint inside the church… ready to massacre us, just like in El Mozote. In El Mozote, they massacred a large group of civilians inside the church. They wanted to do the same here.
But Colonel Cáceres took off right after Madison called. He left right away.