The Beginning of the Civil War

During the final years of the 1970s, El Salvador was living immersed in a regime of military dictatorships, which had the country under a system of precarious economic conditions, of concentration of land in few hands, of electoral frauds, of inequality and of repression. This series of social, political, and economic factors produced different social movements that demanded that repression cease and better life conditions for the poorest people.

In the 1980s, repression by the government and the armed forces further increased, which compelled the consolidation of the FMLN (Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation) as well as the start of the Civil War of El Salvador. During this same year, the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was assassinated for denouncing the repression and social inequality that the Salvadoran population suffered.

During the first years of the 1980s, El Salvador experienced the most intense violence of the civil war. In Chalatenango and other parts of the northern region of the country, small hamlets were bombed and invaded by the armed forces. Houses were burned, and peasants who lived in these conflict zones were tortured and killed.

This forced the exodus of a lot of people in need of survival, from the northern zone to other parts of El Salvador and towards Honduras and other places. The fleeing of the people in groups, sometimes in small groups and sometimes in large groups, were called guindas. With time, the guindas came to be characterized by more social organization and more preparation. On the way, to protect themselves from the soldiers and the raided areas, they hid in tatus, or secret shelters made underground, in holes and caves.

In this same context, the government and its armed forces executed a series of massacres against the peasant people. Among the most known massacres are the Massacre of El Mozote in Morazan and the Massacre of Las Aradas in Chalatenango.
In Chalatenango, many peasants of San Jose Las Flores, Las Vueltas, and Ojos de Agua decided to flee from the persecution of the army to border zones such as the hamlet of Las Aradas. That is where the Salvadoran military, with the complicity of the Honduran military, vilely assassinated around 600 people. Among those were entire families, women, children and elders. Many people tried to cross the Sumpul River, but its strong current and the Honduran military impeded the possibility of the peasants to find refuge in their neighboring country.
 
Violence in Salvadoran society kept increasing, which is why, day after day, many peasants left their homes and went looking for refuge in Honduras. The guinda of May 1982 is well known in the hamlet of Los Amates, Santa Anita, and in other places of the northeastern zone of Chalatenango. That was when the Salvadoran military carried out different massacres, forced disappearances of children, and committed innumerable violations of human rights.