Damián describes the massacre of La Quesera, in San Vicente province.
- Chapter:
- Chapter 3: The Years of "Guindas"
- Interviewee:
- Damian
Transcription
I told my wife,"Let’s get away from the group, because how are we going to hide if there are so many of us?"
So we took off for a ravine, by the side of a very steep hill. We hid behind some rocks. There were other people with us, there were about seven of us. There was a young woman with her partner, he was holding a boy by the hand, and the woman held a 10 month-old baby girl. The girl was crying from thirst.
"They’re going to kill us," the people said, because they used the children's cries to find us.
So the woman tried to breastfeed the baby but she didn’t have any milk left. She didn’t even have a bit of sugar to make her some sugar water. Nothing. Because we had all been fleeing for seven days already, exposing ourselves to all kinds of dangers. So... I was close to the river, and about fifteen minutes after we left the rest of the group, a group of soldiers came down the river, others came upstream, and there were others behind us. They surrounded us, while the airplanes dropped bombs from above. Bombs were falling all around. There was a "little wasp," there were five helicopters, a "gradilla", another airplane they call the Ranger and about three "fugas", fast ones. The airplanes would take a nosedive, drop the bombs, and fly away. Then they would go do the same a distance away. There were always people telling them where to drop the bombs. There was an old woman carrying a crucifix like this, the Lord of the Esquípulas. And every time a plane passed by she’d say,
"Oh, Lord of Esquipulas, please make the airplane drop its bomb far away."
She would put up her crucifix like this—she was a woman of great faith— and then the bomb would explode far away from us. No bombs fell on the people. But that was a different day, it was an earlier occasion when I saw that. On the day when the soldiers came and the troops surrounded a handful of people, everyone was crying from fear. People were saying to the soldiers,
“You’re going to kill us!”
“No, we’re not going to kill you”, the soldiers would reply, “We’re going to get you out of here. You’re going to starve to death. We will give you..."
In order to calm the poor people down. That’s how they got them out of the ravine near La Quesera and the town. They took them to a main road that led from the Lempa River to a place they called Monte Nuevo. Once they got the people onto the road, they say they gave the order to a squad of soldiers:
"You take twenty, you take another twenty, and you take those other twenty."
That’s how they divided everyone, separating people into groups of about twenty. Then they made each group go 30 feet into the hills, lined them up, and machine-gunned everyone. They all died. The whole group of people. We heard the gunshots, while we tried to stay very quiet, trying not to make any noise.