Víctor describes being detained along with 18 other people and explains how they were tortured.
- Interviewee:
- Víctor
Transcription
They captured us on the road. I mean on the way out of Arcatao, about a kilometer down the road, on the way to La Crucita, Las Vegas, and Nueva Trinidad. But they would grab people anywhere on the road, they would pull them off the busses and take them away. Like when they got eighteen comrades, some from Arcatao and others from the village of El Sitio, others from the village of Los Filos, but we were eighteen in total.
[Do you remember which house you were detained in, where were you before they took the eighteen of you away?]
They took all eighteen to the command post of the Guard, it was right here. Today it’s the two-story house across from the convent. It used to be the command post of the Guard, that’s where they held them. They were tortured every day. They hung me… I was always tied up with my hands behind my back, by my fingers, right? With my hands behind my back and they tied the rope to my fingers and strung me up. I mean you’re hanging like an airplane, right, like an airplane. And then a guard would hang you upside down by the feet and stretch you out, and you would feel like your whole body was coming apart, we barely… And afterwards a guard would come while you were being held in the “airplane,” they would put rifles between your arms and back. Then another guard would come and say, “I don’t like to torture, I don’t torture,” he said. What he did was use two electric cords and he would shock them like this, right, and he put those on my arms and chest, while I was hanging. But what I wanted to say is that I wasn’t, maybe I wasn’t alive anymore, because I was hanging mouth down, the floor was wet, sweat was dripping from my nose, like I was becoming dehydrated, the floor was all wet. Later when they took me down I was like a handful of bones on the floor, covered in wounds. It’s not like they took pity and said “Let him down easy,” ugh, they dropped me. And then a guard said to me, because there were some among them who were better than others, he said, “Sit here.” He said, “There’s a cot here, sit down.” Then another guard came and said, “Who told you to sit here?” He slapped me, a few kicks, “Sit here,” he said, on the floor. We suffered all kinds of torture: slaps, pistol-whippings, kicks, insults. Well, after they tortured us they took us to the jail in the Mayor’s office. That’s where the jail was. I was there all day, we slept there, and well I slept there. We all slept there that night. All of us were beaten up, others, well… The ones who were in better shape gave food to the ones who couldn’t eat, because we were all in it together. I couldn’t eat; my hands couldn’t pick up a tortilla. The others fed us. The next day in the morning they took all the comrades out to work on a road that they were building up to La Cañada. They were always guarded by soldiers, because there was a contingent of soldiers here at that time, because there had been a war with Honduras and there was a contingent of soldiers here. There was a Captain ******, this Captain was the one who had us arrested. So two of us comrades were left in the jail, it was me and a comrade of Castro’s. Then they came and took Felix away and left me alone. They let me out four days later. When they let me out, a pair of guards came and they released me and said, they got an axe for me from a house and they told me, “Take this axe and sell all this wood,” they told me to split all the wood they had there, big branches, and sell it. I couldn’t even lift the axe, with my arms like this and my fingers swollen. My fingers were this big, purple and peeling. At that moment I felt that I couldn’t say to them, “Look, I can’t do a chore like that, how am I supposed to do that?” Because that is what they had ordered me to do.