Ramón tells how he and his sisters were attacked by the National Guard and paramilitaries while returning home from school.
- Interviewee:
- Ramón
Transcription
So, we were on our way home the next day, I was carrying the saw and walking in the back, my three sisters and my cousins were in front, there were 15 of us in total. Whoever was in front had to cut through the brush, so they hid in a ravine when it was my turn to cut the brush for a while. As we were passing the ravine that we called La Josefina, climbing towards the bridge, about a kilometer away, I heard two gunshots that seemed like they were aimed at us. I looked behind and didn’t see anything; the brush was about this high. You couldn’t hide on the slopes. I turned and looked across the Sumpul River, and on the other side there were guardsmen and civil defense members taking up position and aiming at us, there were, I don’t know, maybe 30-armed men. So my sister came running up to me with the others following her, and I looked ahead, there were no rocks or cliffs where we would be safe.
During that moment while I was thinking what to do, during those few seconds, my sister pushed me and said, “Go!” and I said, “No, they will kill us.”
“What?” she said.
“You go then!” I said.
But I went back to another ravine that was nearby. At that moment, in a matter of seconds, you can imagine how fast we ran afraid for our lives. I was near the edge and a tree branch fell on me, cut by a burst of gunfire. But for me the most incredible thing was that once I got there, we had all made it, all of us who were on our way to school. And I asked myself, “Why?” So because I was carrying the saw like this, I started to suspect it was because of the saw. Did they see the saw and think it was a rifle? I asked, “Why?” We were all wearing our uniforms, dark blue pants a shade darker than this, and white shirts. I wondered, “Why? Why us?”
When I got to the ravine I saw that my sister was bloody, she was washing herself, and I said,
“Did they hit you?”
“No,” she said, “I fell and I bit myself.”
I was following my two sisters, and the one who said nothing would happen was a bit below when we felt the machine-gun fire. It was like a rain of bullets was unleashed, like if you were shaking an olive tree. You could hear them hitting and whistling in the branches. Incredible. It was, I think it was about 6:30 am. Instinctively, we split up. I wanted to follow my two sisters and a cousin who were heading towards the road, without stopping. But I also wanted to help and see what happened to my sister who was in the ravine. So, some of the others went into the brush, and I was trying to catch up with the girls who were climbing, and a rain of bullets flew overhead, I think they must have been less than a foot above my head, because they fell in a stream, and they made holes in the hard clay. But there were so many holes you couldn’t count them. I saw that my sister was hiding down below, and the last bullet fell. I couldn’t keep going. I climbed down to the ravine, trembling, and I said to my sister who was still in the ravine, she was going like this in the water, I said,
“What are you doing? For the love of God, they’re going to kill us!”
Then, “But I’ve lost my shoe!”
Then, “For the love of God, leave it and go into the brush,”
“I’m going to climb down the ravine to see if there’s a way out by the shore of the river.”
But first I wanted to hide the saw, was it all because of the dang saw? So I hid it in a stream in the ravine that had been high the night before. So, I climbed down, because I said,
“Don’t go on the road, go through the brush.”
I climbed down and when I was almost at the bank of the Sumpul I saw the individuals were only about a block and a half away. When they saw me they stopped me with gunfire. The advantage we had, though at that time we didn’t feel like we had the advantage, was that they were on the other side of the river, but we didn’t know how many there were or when they would cross. So then a firefight started, and I was able to climb up using some roots, with two of my cousins, and we threw ourselves down behind a medium sized rock, like this, behind it. The bullets were stopped by the rock and you could hear them going by, and listening carefully you could tell that there was fire being returned from on top of the hills. Pow, pow, you could tell the difference between the G- 13 rifle and the other smaller weapons. We prayed every prayer we could think of, crying, like you cry when you know you’re about to die…