Day 3: El Mazote and the Revolution Museum
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Going to bed around 9:00 has its downside...I woke up at 5:20 this morning. But I like having a quiet house to myself before others get up so it suited me.
When the hot water was ready, I decided to forsake my usual tea and go Salvadoran; I would drink the instant Musun coffee that the house drinks. I put a small piece of the dulce de leche candy in it instead of raw sugar and powdered milk and it wasn't half bad.
Today, Alfredo came back with the bus to take us to Perkin (or Perquin...I've seen it both ways. Either way, it's pronounced Pear-keen with a slightly rolled r). It's about a two and a half hour ride toward the northeast part of the country and very close to the Honduras border. Elmer (a Pastoral Team member) is riding shotgun, Nancy and Tim are in the next row of seats, Mike and Kathy and I are behind them, and then there's an empty row before Blanca and Cecilia (both of the Pastoral Team) in the very back row.
We turned off of the Pan American Highway somewhere after San Miguel and headed almost straight north. Somewhere in there, we ran into a police stop. They were pulling over random vehicles, though mostly trucks and commercial vehicles like ours. They checked Alfredo's license (making sure he's licensed to transport people) and that he has the required safety and emergency equipment. Everything checked out and we were waved on our way. The officer never looked at or spoke to any of the passengers.
The road north was a lot slower than the PanAm. There was road construction that had it down to 1 lane in a couple spots, with each way having to take turns for a few miles. We had to stop again in the middle of one of them for big trucks to get in/out of the active work zone.
We had about 45 minutes to go when we made a rest stop at a gas station. Nancy and I headed for the restrooms. Just as we got there, a very elderly and infirm woman was being shepherded into the women's room by a much younger man and woman. It looked like it was going to take a while so I left Nancy waiting and I went into the store part to buy something. I try to do that any time I use a gas station bathroom, if we're not buying gas. I got a package of cookies and went back to the bathroom where Nancy was still waiting. About that time, the elderly woman came out and Nancy went in as Alfredo was coming out of the men's room. He said I should just use the men's. He watched the door for me and we were back on the road in no time.
We made it to El Mazote and met up with Oscar, our translator, who happens to live in the area. We also connected with Raquel, from the tourism committee, who was our guide for the visit. I'd been to El Mazote a number of times so it wasn't new to me.
El Mazote is the site where about a thousand men, women, and children were massacred by the military in 1981. It was a lot more than the number of people who actually lived in the village because they'd put out the word that the military only wanted the guerillas and if you came to El Mazote you would be safe. Instead, they rounded up everyone, separated them in groups of men, women, and children and then systematically and brutally killed them all.
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| The monument at El Mazote has tiles that list the names, by family, of the people who died in the massacre. |
There was only one survivor of the massacre, a woman named Rufina Amaya. She was at the tail end of the line of women being marched to the house where they were to be killed. Just ahead of her, women were arguing with the soldiers about being separated from their children and in the confusion, Rufina dropped to her hands and knees and crawled away in the dark. She hid for about a week before she managed to find help. She died in 2007 at 64 and is buried at the monument to the memory of those slaughtered there. It's always particularly poignant for me because on one of my first trips to El Salvador (early 2000s) I met her and heard her tell her story. It's chilling, what she saw and endured.
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| The grave site of Rufina Amaya |
The side yard of the church, where the children were were killed has been made into a garden dedicated to their memory. There is a band of names and ages of all the children (under 12) who died there running along the bottom edge of the church wall.
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| The Children's Garden (Jardin de Reflexion los Inocentes) |
The church is not the one that was standing during the massacre. That one was burned and destroyed, along with much of the original town by the soldiers. The only part from the original church is a patch of brick floor and the font that was inside, which are now both outside the current church.
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| Some floor and the font from the original church |
From there, we went to the Monument to Peace and Reconciliation (Monumento a La Paz y La Reconciliación). There are statues of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, and Martin Luther King under the soaring central structure. There is also a separate statue to St Francis of Assisi.
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| From the top of the hill you can see surrounding mountains and into Honduras |
After El Mazote, we had lunch at Perkin Lenca. The Lenca were an indigenous people that lived in this part of El Salvador and Honduras. We ate at a long table outside to enjoy the flowers, breeze, and view. One of those views was of storm clouds rolling in. It just started to sprinkle as we were loading back into the bus for our next stop.
The next stop was to the Museum of the Revolution (Museo de la Revolución). The museum commemorates events of and precursors to the Civil War. There are artifacts, photographs, and displays inside the main building and outside is an encampment of the sort the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) during the war. The FMLN became a legitimate political party after the war and the current president of El Salvador ran under the FMLN party.
Our guide to the museum was Carlos. We started in the first room of the museum, which was dedicated to the causes of the war. Carlos started to tell us about it but then the rain started. The rain became a monsoon and, under the metal roof of the museum, it was impossible to hear anything Carlos said. We waited a few minutes to see if it would let up. It didn't, and he suggested that maybe we should just look around on our own. So we all kind of wandered around, reading the captions and labels. Some had information in both English and Spanish; some in Spanish only. I'd been there before so I mostly stood at one of the doors and watched it rain.
The rain did eventually taper off. By then, the outdoors was a sea of puddles and mud so we didn't even try to see the encampment exhibits. We loaded back into the bus and headed for Berlín at 2:10. We basically replayed the trip north, only in the reverse order. The construction waits were longer, for whatever reason. Also, when we were heading up the mountain to Berlín, we drove into a cloud bank soon after we left Mercedes Umaña. It was the thickest fog bank I've ever seen, and rather eerie on twisty mountain roads...in the dark. Especially when there were no longer lines painted on the roads and it was really hard to tell anything about the road. Alfredo had to slow way down and the 20 minute drive up the mountain took at least twice that long. We were all so glad to be at the house safely! Shortly after we got there, the cloud bank fell as it started to rain.
All in all, we left Perkin about an hour sooner than expected but still got back at the usual time because of the construction and cloud bank.
I was reading an ebook in bed before going to sleep. The room was dark, except for the dim light from my phone when it felt like someone jostled my bed a few times. I looked up, startled, to see if there was someone else in the room, when Nancy said, "What was that?!?" That was my clue that it was, in fact, an earthquake. I said as much to her. There were a couple more jostles and we went to sleep.
