Marta recounts how she and her family fled during the “May Guinda” and the hardships they faced.
- Chapter:
- Chapter 3: The Years of "Guindas"
- Interviewee:
- Marta
Transcription
It was a canton and there was a village there. Some of the people had been born there, in the canton of Los Filos. It was nearby, so we went there when we left our village, because in the village the guards and ORDEN had started to kill people. They pointed people out and took them out of their houses to kill them. That's why we left. When the Guinda de Mayo happened, we left our bunkers. We had coordinators who guided us, as we traveled around ravines and on the hills. The children were cold, hungry, their clothes were wet because of the rain at that time of year. That whole time we were fleeing, suffering. I don't even remember how long the Guinda de Mayo lasted. After that, we left towards the nearest place with houses, because we thought authorities wouldn't be able to reach us there. We were going to take refuge for two or three days and then get back on the run, without any shoes, with wet clothes. We ran out of tortillas and food. We endured hunger and thirst, while the airplanes flew overhead and the soldiers followed us from behind. One day we were in one place and the next somewhere else. We would get to another hamlet, stay there for fifteen days—that was the most we stayed somewhere—maybe eight days, and then we had to flee again. "Let's go, the soldiers are coming from over there". We heard gunshots, and we always had someone on the lookout, to see when the soldiers came. Then the gunshots burst out, and that was a signal for us that the perimeter had been broken. They would say, "The perimeter is broken!" When they said that it meant we all had to run. Whatever we had been able to build up in fifteen days would just be left behind. We left without anything, maybe only a change of clothes. Sometimes we'd sleep with one change of clothes on top of the other, under the rain. We would take off towards another hamlet, even farther away. One could say we went around the entire department while fleeing. We would come back, return to the same post, sometimes we would sleep by the rivers. We cooked and made a fire when the day was foggy like today. We'd make some fire to cook up a bit of coffee. Sometimes we had cold tortillas. The older people would try to beg tortillas in the other hamlets, from people who hadn't left their homes. They would bring us tortillas and beans. We would make some coffee, making sure the smoke couldn't be seen. Otherwise, they would see us and follow us.