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Assembly of refugees in Mesa Grande to make the decision about returning to El Salvador, Sep 1987

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Antonio Dubón Ayala

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In this oral history, Antonio Dubón Ayala reflects on the importance of peasant and community organizing during and after the Salvadoran civil war. Antonio was a refugee of the war who was involved in community organizing during and after the war. He first discusses how the repressive Salvadoran military led to the formation o f a Salvadoran refugee population in Mesa Grande, Honduras, that grew to more than 11,000. He describes how refugees organized cooperative workshops and oversight committees to collectively share labor, resources, and decision-making. The refugees in Mesa Grande, he explains, chose to organize their collective return back to El Salvador in 1987, even as the war continued. As he describes, upon returning to El Salvador to resettle Guarjila and neighboring communities in Chalatenango, the former refugees maintained a strong sense of community organization and carried on cooperative practices, drawing from their experience in Mesa Grande. They worked together to build shared homes, form labor cooperatives, and distribute resources. This kind of organization, he concludes, has faded more recently but nonetheless was important in order to improve conditions in Guarjila.

Good afternoon, my name is Antonio Dubón Ayala. I want to tell you the story of the community. I’ll tell you that we were affected by the armed conflict, here in El Salvador. This was because the majority of us Salvadorans, who were poor, began to demand our rights from the government: the right to work and the right to live and all the rights we can have as human beings.
And that was the reason why the military and the government began to persecute and suppress us in the fields and the city alike.

So, then we fled towards the Honduran border. Thank God, and thanks to the Hondurans who helped us at the border, we had both moral and spiritual support, and all of us who fled to the border were fed. While at the border we lived in small ranches made of grass and bushes. That is where we were settled.
The persecution began with the combined work of the Honduran and Salvadoran militaries against the refugees. But we had the recognition of the Catholic Church and other international organizations like UNHCR who were giving us protection at the border. When the persecution started at the Honduran border, UNHCR and other humanitarian institutions planned to take us to a camp, and they put us together in a camp further into Honduras. They told us they wanted to take us there to keep us safer because we were going to be grouped together and it would be easier to protect us. We didn’t want to go to these camps because we felt we would be far from our country and our families.
There came a point when we couldn’t take the persecution or repression. We decided to go to the Mesa Grande camps. As for my case, and that of many families, we got to the camps in 1982. There were different phases in which people arrived in the camps. They were not all coming from where I was, at the border of Honduras, in the municipality of La Virtud. There were refugees throughout the whole length of the border and that’s how they gradually began picking us (refugees) up who were there and who were then gathered in the Mesa Grande Honduras camp.
In the camps, well, when we got there the first people there had already set up their tents for all that were coming. There were four families in one tent. And the majority of the population, of all the families who went to Mesa Grande, lived with four families in each tent. When it came to the food, we prepared it collectively. There were kitchens where all the women and men collaborated with one another to prepare the food for the whole population. That’s where the whole family would go to get the food prepared so we could eat it.
With the support of international entities and their solidarity, we received the main goods needed to make food, like corn, beans, sugar, rice, potatoes—all the ingredients needed for the basic basket, which every family received. There was a warehouse where they would unload all the food and divide it equally among each family according to the number of members the family had. They also brought meat, or they would bring a whole cow, and they would divide the meat to all the families in the tents.
As far as organizing, we formed a camp committee and that committee led the population of each camp. There were seven camps in total, and each one had a committee. The committee was in charge of all the organized work. I lived in camp number two. For every ten tents, there was one coordinator. That coordinator was in charge of guiding families in those tents to clean up the area, divide the food, assess who needed clothes, and to have meetings and orient and educate us within the campsites. That’s how the seven campsites were organized.
Work groups were also assigned to work in agriculture. The area in which we were located had very bad soil for cultivation. With the help of everyone who lived in the camps, we managed to prepare the soil with organic fertilizer and from there we were able to produce corn, beets, carrots, peppers—all types of vegetables were produced there for the whole population.
We also installed workshops for sheet metal, carpentry, tailoring, and other workshops. The workshops functioned as a mode of apprenticeship, giving people jobs so they could be trained and learn a skill.

We organized to promote adult literacy, for child education from kindergarten to sixth grade levels, and there were classrooms built and prepared for the children and adults alike. There was a center where the popular school teachers were trained. Even if one wasn’t a professional, one had to teach the little that they knew. We had to teach people who knew nothing. In my case when I got to the campsite, I didn’t even know the alphabet but with the program, I learned gradually. Soon they told me, “you already know something, so you have to begin to teach the little bit that you know to everyone else.” That is how I became a teacher in Mesa Grande. I then became, let’s say, the director of popular education.
Later, I was the member of the camp guidance committee for the camp. That is how we worked on the water project—installing water pumps in public quarries of the campsites. This is where the whole population would go get their water. That’s also where they would get firewood to cook the food. There was actually a warehouse where all the firewood was located and was distributed to each family. The whole thing was a learning experience. Although it felt like jail, we all learned a lot of things. For me it was like a university. We were like prisoners due to the wire fences surrounding the camps. And if anyone would go past the fences the military would take them away. That’s how we lived our lives inside the camps.
I would also like to say that there was repression by the Honduran military inside the camp. They would come in and raid the camps and they threatened and accused some of us of being guerrillas. The United Nations at some point said there was a need to relocate us. One possible option was for them to take us to Olancho, further inside of Honduras, and nationalize us as Hondurans. A second option they gave us was to go back to our countries. For us to voluntarily go back, that voluntary return meant that a family would have to go back to El Salvador with UNHCR. But UNHCR would only be with us up until we got to the border. So, from the border onward, each family would decide where to go on their own from there. Then what would happen? The country was in a war and families went missing. They were either murdered or they joined the belt around the city where they were truly suffering because of the armed conflict. They suffered from hunger and persecution. So, a third proposal was to take us to a third country. As refugees in the camps, we said that none of the three proposals were acceptable to us. And yes, we did want to go to our countries, but in an organized form. And so, we began developing that idea and mobilizing the population.
We also saw that we had international recognition as refugees. The organizations and institutions that fought for human rights began to gain recognition here in the country. That then gave us more strength, and we said, we want to go back to our countries and we want to go in an organized form. So, then we gathered together the whole population, and we began proposing that we should go back to our country in an organized form. Many people became excited and said, “yes, we’re going,” even though the country was at war.
When we began to organize, we made a list of about three thousand people. We began to form groups and taught and prepared them. We formed a committee to organize the return, where there was representation from communities of Chalatenango, Cuscatlán, and Cabañas. We became the “Return Committee”. We began to meet with UNHCR and churches, and we began to create documents to send to the government, at the time, under President Jose Napolean Duarte. We wanted to explain to them that we wanted to return to our countries and our places of origin. So, preparing this was a huge undertaking, and we even thought about sending letters to the international solidarity committees. International delegations would visit the camps and asked us about the reasons why we wanted to return. So, we began our proposals.
Those negotiations with the government took nine months and the government didn’t respond to us at all within those nine months. So, we made the decision to publish a letter both here and internationally to state that we would be back on October 10th, 1987. When we made that clear in the publication and got it to reach the president of El Salvador, he became worried and sent a high-level government delegate to negotiate with both the camp and the Return Committee. So, when the delegation got there it reunited us in the presence of UNHCR and pleaded us to not come back on October 10th. They told us they wanted to first make sure there were safer conditions for us to go into the country.
So, we told them we had spent nine months trying to work with the government. We told them we wanted to return, and we hadn’t received an answer yet. How is it that they want to have conditions ready for us to go in eight days, but they hadn’t given us an answer up until that point? We already had the conditions necessary, and we planned to return on October 10th. The delegation was not convinced. They thought it was an idea that only came from the Return Committee, and we had to convince them that it was a decision made by all of the people—not just the committee. We told them to stay another day so we could gather together more people from the general population so they could see for themselves. They agreed to stay.

So that night we gathered everyone together and about five thousand people showed up to the assembly. And the delegation tried to convince the people to wait because they were not ready to go back. The population then began to shout in unison that they were returning on October 10th and no one would hold us back. And if UNHCR or the government did not permit this or give us transportation from the camps, then we would just march out of the camps. They were then convinced that we had made a decision. So, they told us to excuse them while they went to talk to the government. The next day we got the response from UNHCR that they were ready to meet us at the border.
On October 10th, we all woke up, gathered our small possessions and got in the trucks. They didn’t take us out all at once and put us in the busses. We were split and taken out in blocks—it was a strategy. On October 10th, there was a block that left at night and we left around 9am that day. So, we got to the border, and there were around 20 to 25 tables with Salvadoran immigration agents ready to interrogate us. All of us refugees were in line. It was around three thousand of us, and they began to ask us if we were guerillas, when we got to Mesa Grande, and if we had siblings who were guerillas. They were a series of questions based on accusations of the refugees.
But that day, on October 10th, we had to sleep at the border and the next day we each walked in a caravan, each going to their place of origin. In this case, those who were going to Cabañas were going to Santa Marta, those going to Cuscatlán were going to Copapayo, those coming to Chalatenango were going to Las Vueltas and Guarjila. That is how we got to Guarjila on October 12th, where the military was waiting for us. The military was there standing next to the bus doors, with their guns, as we were getting off the buses. Thanks to the intervention of UNHCR, which spoke to the soldiers and told them to leave Guarjila, we settled there on the first night. We slept on the street and as we say Salvadorans say, “al sol y al sereno”.
When we got here on October 12th, 1987, at first, we were afraid. We were still gathered in one specific place, to be safer, since the surrounding area had been mined by the military. In the area of Guarjila, there was just a lot of tall grass…well, weeds. The first thing we did was organize work groups to clean up the area. When we cleaned the area, we began to look for the walls of any old houses, so we could have families live there. Then we began to make huts out of grass, and each family would make their own little grass hut and move into it. We then elected a board of directors. The board of directors began to organize groups of people into sectors within the community and began assigning a coordinator to each sector. This was so that coordinators could direct the community work. This was meant to offer guidance to the population because the country was at war.
The Lutheran Church, they were like “first responders” for the community. We had the camaraderie of the Lutheran Church, Catholic church, UNHCR and various other humanitarian institutions.
One or two days after we arrived we saw many military units coming into the community. Then they started shooting in the community.

We are civilians who want to build our lives here.
Since all we had were little huts made of grass, the Lutheran Church began to bring us construction materials. Those materials were so hard to bring in because they had to go through the Fourth Infantry Brigade and the city of Chalatenango’s DM1. They were the ones who didn’t let the construction materials through. So, we had to go along with the church to negotiate and get permission to let the construction materials through. Even with permits they would sometimes empty the trucks with materials in the city of Chalatenango. So, the whole population would go and carry something on their back like a wooden beam or metal sheet because that was the only way to get the material. That was how we were able to bring a lot of material to the community. With the pressure of the community and international solidarity of the churches we were able to get a good quantity brought to the community to build the provisional houses. The houses were made from metal sheets, wood, mud and rock.
We organized the work groups to cultivate the land. Families were unable to work alone because they would become victims of the military. That is how we began to produce and survive in the community. Ultimately, anything agricultural, we harvested ourselves.
First of all, had we not had this kind unity and organization, the community would have fallen victim to the armed conflict. Many families would have left Guarjila or many would have also died. So, having the unity and organization we had, we were able to remain here, we persevered, and we defended the place because we thought, “we have the right to live with dignity in our places of origin.” It was an organized struggle. And for that reason, we still have organization in the community and maintain a spirit of fighting. Things are different now. But we do maintain a degree of organization.
I believe if we maintain that degree of organization, the community will continue to have much development. Of course, if we hold onto this organization, we will continue fighting for our rights, right? For our liberty of expression, democratization, modes of communication, and for our spirit. Fighting to not fall into a conflict again because conflicts do not bring any good. What they bring is destruction, destruction of peoples, destruction of humanity.
We believe that in the next ten to twenty years, this community will have much better development. There will be many professionals. This way there will be many more students accessing universities. What I am saying is that in the future, the level of education and professionalism among youth will be much greater, and that means the community will have other perspectives.