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

Woman cultivating produce in Mesa Grande

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Porfirio Dubón Carabantes

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In this oral history, Porfirio Dubón Carabantes recounts his experience during the Salvadoran civil war as a coordinator who organized cooperative farming and gardening among refugees in Mesa Grande, Honduras, and later, among the repatriated refugees resettled in Guarjila, El Salvador. Porfirio is a former refugee of the Salvadoran civil war and resident of the resettled community of Guarjila. He explains how organized farm labor cooperatives in the Mesa Grande refugee camp relied on specialized training, including training in organic farming, to provide food for the refugee population, and after resettlement, for the community in Guarjila. Even though Guarjila was resettled in 1987, the civil war continued until the 1992 Peace Accords, and the community was sometimes raided by the Salvadoran military. Fearing they would be accused by the military of supporting the FMLN, many of the farmers destroyed their farming training manuals during a raid, he recalls. To conclude, he shares the story of a time when a soldier found training manuals at his home, and in a surprising moment of sympathy, advised him to keep them, suggesting they would be valuable after the civil war ended.
My name is Porfirio Dubón Carabantes. Shortly after I got to Mesa Grande, we began working in the gardens. I learned a little there. I was the coordinator of a group of workers and we learned to plant cabbage, radish, carrots, beets, tomatoes, everything. When I got here, I went over to Nueva Concepcion, and I learned a little more because we were trained there for a month.

Well, we learned to work with organic fertilizer. And just like that, the fruit would come out. We planted cucumber and cabbage, and radish was our most abundant product. We would water (from the water source here and down there) the plants very well, so there would not be any holes and damage to the produce (groves). We would give them a light splash, so it wouldn’t move the seeds much, so the seeds wouldn’t get hit too much. Because, I used to say, if we spray a lot of water, they can damage the vine. A light splash but enough water. We planted green beans, too, we planted all sorts of produce.
The women here organized themselves to work in the gardens. I would tell them, “you all will do this there, and you all will do that, over there.” And when they would pull out the fruit, some would go sell it, and the rest would stay and keep working.

Angelito tells me, “I already bought this here.” “But you will sell it to me,” I told him, since I got paid from the garden work. He said yes, and I bought this parcel from Angelito. We stayed here, always in the old house. Afterwards, a project of three houses came along and they gave me this one.
We all worked collectively. Everyone, even during the war. The soldier would get us out from over there because they would not allow us to work. So, when the grain would grow, they would take them to the communal holdings that we had. There was a plant over there where the machines were that extracted the maize, and that is where they would split up the grains and take them home. After that, they did not want to keep working collectively, and everyone went their own way.
I was a farmer for some days. We went and made fences for the pastureland all the way to San Isidro. We went around fencing the pasturelands until the cattle were all sold out, and we finished.
Here is where the gardening started, we had already gone to war when they fenced this area. They fenced from here, to the footbridge, all that land down there, we worked on all that area. We grew plantations of yuca and gardens of irrigated vegetables, tomatoes, even papayas over there, and peppers too. There was a pond down there and we grew cabbage, all of that.
I can’t remember how long it lasted, but there was a man that would only plow the land with the ox. There, where Adan lives, we made a tomato garden of grafts of huixtomate and tomato. Since we came from already doing that kind of work, we planted the huixtomate and tomato seeds, and we made that graft. With a knife, we would peel the trunk by the tomato side, in half. When the tomato was like this, we would cut it in half and got rid of the huixtomate trunk to add the slice of the tomato peel. We would tie it with a string and the tomato would grow. It takes a long time for it to dry, because even in the summer the huixtomate would stay green. We did all of that.
I have all these papers saved, to prove that I had training, so I save them still until today.
These papers—I—when a brigade of soldiers came by checking our houses, some of my colleagues hid them in the bathroom, others burned them, since they believe that those papers could be used against them. But I did not want to burn them or throw them away. When they checked my place, a soldier told me to unlock the chest. So I did, and he saw the papers and asked what they were.

“They are work related, to learn how to do gardening, that’s all,” I told him. He glanced through them and said, “Save these papers very well, because they will be helpful to you once this war is finished.” That’s all.