Rosa describes how the “May Guinda” of 1982 was the hardest guinda of all, and how during those 27 days her brother and other relatives died.
- Chapter:
- Chapter 3: The Years of "Guindas"
- Interviewee:
- Rosa R.
Transcription
The “Guinda de Mayo” was the hardest guinda. It lasted 27 days. The girl who was reunited with her family yesterday disappeared during that guinda. Her parents—my brother died there, Marina’s dad, her mom, Élida’s son, and the daughters of my two sisters. We don’t even have a place to do an exhumation. We’ve counted about 20 massacres that took place during that operation, that guinda. But the only evidence we have is what you can see here in the display cabinet. When we perform the Stations of the Cross for the martyrs we go to the places we have identified as massacre sites. That’s the only thing we’ve found to do. Because the guinda, the operation went on for 27 days. Many people died of hunger, children died of malnutrition, and part of the people were taken by the river. There were a lot of people with lots of children and we couldn’t swim. When we saw that someone was getting across, a bunch of people would grab on to them, to the point that they would go under water. There were so many. We don’t have the exact number of how many people died, because there were people here from Cabañas, from Cinquera, from Suchitoto. This area became a route towards the refugee camps in Honduras, and people would set camp around here, so it’s hard for us to know the exact number of people who died in the guinda. What we do know is about our own families. Some people disappeared, because these children, their parents were killed while they were holding them in their arms. They snatched their children and took them away. For us, this guinda was one of the toughest and most difficult, because we had to drink water out of the river while dead bodies were decomposing there. But we drank water from there because we had nowhere else to get our water from. And we didn’t know the bodies were there either at first. When we came again, we saw that they were decomposing in the water. Very difficult.