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Refuge and Return : Stories of a Resettled Community in El Salvador

Child refugee in Mesa Grande

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Ramona Cruz

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In this oral history, Ramona Cruz describes having to flee El Salvador as the Salvadoran civil war took hold in 1980. Ramona is a former refugee of the civil war and a resident of the resettled community of Guarjila, El Salvador. She describes the brutal violence surrounding a Salvadoran military operation popularly known as the Guinda de Mayo of 1980. During this time, the Salvadoran military perpetrated a series of massacres against Salvadoran civilians, many of whom were women and children. She recalls a massacre that took place at Las Aradas of civilians who were attempting to cross the Sumpul River to seek refuge in Honduras. She explains how she and her relatives had to flee the violence during this time until they eventually reached Honduras where they took shelter in the Mesa Grande refugee camp. Finally, she shares memories of returning to El Salvador, along with thousands of other refugees from Mesa Grande, and the resettlement of the community of Guarjila.
In 1999 [actually 1979], my sister Paula took in Martin an orphan boy whose mother had very recently died. They couldn’t live in their own houses, so they were staying here. His mother had been killed. My sister took care of him and brought him to El Portillo del Guardado because they were from Guanacaste. After January of 1980, we would go to sleep in the hills. It was not possible to sleep in the houses. We were fearful. The situation was not easy.
On February 20th, we were home when the army arrived. We quickly fled towards the hills, and from the hills we headed over towards Honduras. From there, as soon as we arrived in Pascasio, they killed four people: three sons and a godfather of mine, right on Ash Wednesday. We left, and we headed towards the Honduran border. From there, about fifteen days later, the Honduran army arrived. They wanted to kick us out. In March, the soldiers said to us: “Go and throw the fleas back to El Salvador!” And there were so many children; they were the majority of the group—children, pregnant women, and the elderly. “Go throw the fleas back to El Salvador!” That’s how we ended up at El Portillo del Guardado. But not even four days had gone by when they came back again, and we said, “We must flee, again.” That was sad. That’s when we went back to the border.

We were in Copalchillo when they told us, “Get out of here.” Then we had to go back to El Salvador. We did not want to travel that far anymore, so we stayed at Las Aradas. And we told the men to allow us to let a little boy, my brother, across. The little boy was already swimming and made it to the other side [of the border].” But then they did not want to let him cross. We didn’t want to leave the little one behind, and as little as he was, he could more or less swim, and he swam and swam, and he made it to the other side.

“It will be awful in El Salvador,” the man said. He did not mention that it was going to be awful there as well. “In El Salvador, it is going to be harsh,” the soldier said.

“Then let the little one pass through,” [we responded]. “No, you can’t go across,” he said.

And for the love that we felt for the little one, we decided to go there [where the little boy was]. It rained the whole night. It rained tons of water! Around 2 a.m., we wanted to get out of there, but it was flooded. There we had three obstacles: Sumpul river was flooded from bank to bank. There were the Honduran [soldiers] who were waiting for us, and then, we had the [soldiers] from El Salvador that were closing in by our side.

After that, around 8 a.m., we were washing corn by the river when I said to one of my compadres: “Compadre, I think that I just heard a shot!”

“Who knows!” I said.

And when we got to the house, there was another shot. He handed me a four-year-old girl so that I would carry her. He said: “Carry her!”

“No,” I said, “you carry her, I can’t.”

She was big. We fled the house. Then we heard a loud boom right next to us. “Wow,” I said, “it fell on them.” Just like that, we headed down the river towards the huge shootout. We crouched down. When we got there, the two children that my mom was carrying drowned since the river was flooded from bank to bank. It took the two children from her. One of them was ten years old and the other one was 20 months old.

When we finally stopped by the side of the river, I asked: “What’s wrong?”

“The children drowned,” she responded.

“Let’s go, Mom, not even we are safe here,” I said to her as I kept pulling her down the river. Every time that we stopped at the dangerous downhills, I kept on pressing on her stomach, so that she would empty out all the water that she had swallowed.

Paula was carrying the little boy [Martin]. We were all over the place. I was looking over my mom. He [pointing at someone behind the camera] was looking after the girl. Other friends from the same town and Paula were looking after the boy and my dad. There was so much chaos that no one knew if anyone was dead or alive. Around 6 p.m., we went up a hill. We had barely passed all that fatality in Yurique, when all of the sudden, while we were crossing the bridge, sixty more people were killed all at once. We ran and hid, forming a little single file line, ducking while the airplanes flew above us, hiding. We kept moving. There were only women and children. And I was only with my mom because the other children had been left in Sumpul. She just cried and cried. I said to my mom: “Mom, pull it together. Right now, we don’t know if even God is watching over us.”

We kept walking and walking and at around 8 p.m., we arrived at the cup of the Chilchilco hill. During the early morning hours, there were a lot of roosters singing and crowing near the Honduran border. The landscape was so dark. There was a heavy fog all around. It looked very eerie, and when it started to clear up, you could see the dead people, some of them facing up, others facing down, others like this [on their side]. That was disturbing. It hurts remembering all of that tragedy. One even forgets words because it hurts so much thinking back about all of the bitter suffering that we had to endure.

The little boy [Martin] (who recently died), he and Paula had to sleep inside a pool of water in a creek, with half of their bodies inside and the other half outside of the water, because if they moved, the soldiers would spot them. When we took the path down the river, we would duck down and they [the bullets] fell down on us as if they were irrigating corn crops. We only had God’s company, no one else.

When we arrived at the hill, we encountered some men. They had some ropes. That is when I felt like I was no longer the same person I used to be. The last thing we needed was for those men to catch us there. But they just waved at us and then left. They didn’t say anything. We kept climbing the hill, and we slept there the whole night. It was very dark, and we did not even think about the snakes or any other danger. Only God was there keeping an eye on us.

The next day, around 10 a.m., on the 15th, we started walking downhill little by little, and we arrived at a house. We said, “let’s see who we know of the dead in the family.” We were not even close to the edge of the river, when the soldiers found us. There was no hope for us to see any of the dead relatives there. There was no hope. From then on, there are things that one wants to be able to remember clearly, but the pain is too intense, and so many thoughts get lost, and you can’t remember well.

As we slept that night in those little houses, with the water pouring down on us, we all got wet. The roof tiles of the houses looked like they were sealed, but they were really broken, and the water came through.

That was the night of the massacre at Las Aradas, where many people slept in the water in the creek. We were sleeping on the hill. We had already passed to the other side. If we would have crossed through the river that night, we would have drowned because none of us knew how to swim. But we headed down the river, through Yurica, and then there was the bridge where over sixty people died all at once. That was hard. From then on... I remember that Estela, Armando’s wife, was in our group, Estela was carrying a little hen that used to scream a lot! We used to tell her, “Estela, leave that little hen behind. Who knows what can happen to us because of that little hen.” Finally, she left it behind somewhere.

We lost contact with them, and so it ended up being just us. We crossed the grasslands slowly, dragging ourselves along the ground. We did whatever we could to avoid the soldiers, on that May 14th. When we arrived up there in February, we drank fresh water from a lady who had just prepared it. We drank the fresh mango fruit water. Who knows how the water really was, but we drank it anyway. And then they asked us if we wanted a little piece of tortilla. They gave us a handful of rotten corn. The tortilla was black. I wish that they would have given us each half of a tortilla! They broke the tiny tortilla in four pieces and gave one piece to each of us. We did not eat anything during those days. There was nothing to eat. There were no mangos—maybe in other areas—but there where we were, there was nothing to eat. Those who were older could manage, but it was sad to see the kids. They were hungry and would ask for something to eat, and there was nothing to feed them.

We headed over to the valleys near the border. We stayed there because we were afraid to go back. We had been going to get corn so that we could eat back home. We all did the same thing. But after the 14th of May, we did not have the courage to return. We then headed to the zone where UNHCR arrived. From there, we headed to Estapas. We stayed a few days in Copalchillo. Then we arrived at a place called Telquilte and then moved to a zone called San Pablo. From there, UNHCR took all of us to Mesa Grande. We were the first ones that they dropped off there, as though we were animals, to the grasslands. It was raining. They went to cover us with blankets when we were asleep.

We were the first ones to arrive, and so we stayed there in those grasslands for a long time, but we went back to El Salvador in 1987. We always knew that, one day, we would return to our country. I thought to myself that if God ever gave me the chance, I would be among the first people to go back to El Salvador. We were among the first people to start the voyage and sleep in the grasslands here. The people who arrived later on had a better environment, but when we arrived, Mesa Grande was nothing but a huge grassland.

We had to endure a lot of suffering because we weren’t from there [Honduras], and we felt like prisoners. We had to sign out every time that we had to go out. But we always kept the hope alive that one day we would come back to our country. We spent all that time there. We took on the challenge of coming back to El Salvador. We were the first ones to arrive here, in another grassland. We didn’t arrive until 1987. All of that suffering and adversity that we have endured, from 1980 until we arrived here, was very harsh. As I have said before, I feel a pain here in my heart, and so you forget some things. Yes, witnessing the deaths of so many people—family, friends, aunts and uncles, close relatives—that never goes away.