PVC 1990 Delegation – Part Eighteen: Final Evening in the Guest House

The following notes have been edited to correct errors and to add explanations and updates. Parenthetical notes and remarks from the original are enclosed in parentheses. Present day [2022] updates are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.

8 October 1990, 7:00 PM - The Guest House

It is our final evening in El Salvador and many guests have been invited to the Guest House for a meal and discussion. Bishop Medardo Gomez arrives about 6:30 PM, accompanied by J. and J. This is a great honor for us; he rarely goes out after dark because of the threats against his life. He is immediately the center of attention, a quietly intense and imposing presence seated on one of the couches in the common room. After a few minutes the word goes out that we should gather around him. He wants to talk with us before the meal so that he can go home early and be ready for an early-morning departure for meetings in the U.S.

"For better or for worse, we have a process of peace going on in our country. It is not complete, but we are moving. Delegations like yours help to open this space. You are like a great choir, carrying the stories. I want to assure you that, even though you might not think so, your presence helps in the process for peace. Extend my thankfulness to the brothers and sisters in the United States for their solidarity and prayers. This is a great contribution for the building of peace here."

At this point he introduces Pastor W., from San Miguel, who is president of the eastern region of the Lutheran Church in El Salvador. Later I hear the opinion from several of the delegates who have been here before that Pastor W. is the apparent next Lutheran Bishop of El Salvador. He has the faith and commitment to working with the poor, plus the education needed to move comfortably in international circles.

PVC 1990 Delegation – Part Seventeen: Aguilares area

The following notes have been edited to correct errors and to add explanations and updates. Parenthetical notes and remarks from the original are enclosed in parentheses. Present day [2022] updates are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.

8 October 1990 - Aguilares area

We are visiting a community which was one of the stops made by the 1989 delegation. Returning delegates are amazed to see how much building and planting has taken place in just one year. We are told that they have about fifty acres in the community. About 7.5 acres are planted in vegetables, and about ten are set aside for grazing. They have four cows. The main crop is corn, with sesame interspersed. They also have a chicken house and bee hives.

Question: How did you get this land?

"We have the help of U.S. sister parishes, and also of a Norwegian group. SHARE was a big help to us. We have put in electricity and an irrigation system."

Question: Do you experience much harassment?

"Not right now. In other areas there is repression, but for us here, right now, there is nothing repressive. Of course, they are watching us. We had plenty of problems in the first location where we settled as a repopulated community. The most serious of our problems was land, which is why we moved here. We heard about this land and had an opportunity to buy it."

PVC 1990 Delegation – Part Sixteen: Resurrection Lutheran Church

The following notes have been edited to correct errors and to add explanations and updates. Parenthetical notes and remarks from the original are enclosed in parentheses. Present day [2022] updates are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.

8 October 1990 - 8:00 AM - Resurrection Lutheran Church

Chris had the time of the service wrong, so we are sitting in an office of the Lutheran Church waiting for the students to end their 7:30 worship. The one that we will attend doesn't begin until 8:30. This church is an amazing shade of green - green for the Resurrection. We entered through a lovely enclosed and shaded courtyard. The room in which we are waiting has a beautifully painted Salvadoran cross, about 21" high, hanging on a wall against an excruciatingly tacky floral-patterned wall paper. Two-thirds of the adjoining wall, which is the first thing one sees upon entering, features a floor to ceiling photo mural of a fall scene in the U.S. or Canadian northwest. Cyril opines that it depicts the Cascades rather than the Rockies. The incongruity of such a scene here in tropical El Salvador is startling.

I learned this morning that most of the group was awake a good bit of last night. Helicopters were flying low overhead, and there were explosions in the distance and brilliant flashes lighting the sky. We heard several explanations of what was going on, but finally learned that a cadre of FMLN had attacked Mariona prison in an unsuccessful attempt to liberate some of the political prisoners.

PVC 1990 Delegation – Part Fifteen: Suchitoto

The following notes have been edited to correct errors and to add explanations and updates. Parenthetical notes and remarks from the original are enclosed in parentheses. Present day [2022] updates are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.

7 October 1990 - Suchitoto

[Our intention for today had been to visit Panchimilama, a village which previous delegations had visited and which had received material support from PVC fund-raising efforts. On the previous evening, however, word had come to the Guest House that a fiesta was planned for the next day by the people of Suchitoto, who had requested that any internationals who were able to do so should come to the city as witnesses, thus providing some protection for the inhabitants as they gathered. After a brief discussion our delegation decided that this was where we were needed most and changed our plans accordingly.]

We leave at 7:30 AM for a 9:00 AM mass celebrating the 25th anniversary of a Sister who works for the church in Suchitoto. We are stopped at two military checkpoints along the way. Both times we are all ordered out of the bus, to line up along the side of the road and have our passports checked and our knapsacks searched. At the first stop we pick up J. and J. and two Salvadorans. They had been on a public bus on their way to Suchitoto, and had been taken off and detained. The bus did not want to wait for them while their documents were cleared, so they had been waiting for another ride to come along.

PVC 1990 Delegation – Part Fourteen: Santa Ana Department

The following notes have been edited to correct errors and to add explanations and updates. Parenthetical notes and remarks from the original are enclosed in parentheses. Present day [2022] updates are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.

6 October 1990 - Santa Ana Department

It is Saturday morning and the bus has brought us to a public park in the department of Santa Ana in the western part of the country. This is not a conflictive area, and despite the war in the country, life goes on here more or less as usual. The park is crowded with families on holiday, and we look like just one more group of tourists, with our cameras and backpacks. The contrast between this and what we have been experiencing for the past week is more than a little jarring.

We are met by Pastor C., a Lutheran pastor whose main parish is in the city of Santa Ana, but who also supervises the work in four outlying communities. His manner is hearty and outspoken; he even has business cards which he hands to us as we gather around him for a background briefing before we begin our hike into the communities. He leads us along several of the planned trails through the park, allowing us to linger at a scenic overlook for photographs of the Santa Ana Volcano. Then single file we descend the mountain on a steep and rugged trail which takes us at last into the community of indigenous which we are to visit. Pastor C. gives us some background on the area.

PVC 1990 Delegation – Part Thirteen: University of Central America

The following notes have been edited to correct errors and to add explanations and updates. Parenthetical notes and remarks from the original are enclosed in parentheses. Present day [2022] updates are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.

5 October 1990, 3:00 PM - University of Central America

We are welcomed to the university and led back a hallway to a conference room/library where some of the items which were attacked during the massacre are on display. [On the night of 16 November 1989 members of the elite Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran military invaded the UCA and massacred six Jesuit priests/scholars, their housekeeper, and her daughter.] There are text books and a Bible which were machine-gunned into tatters. A scorched and blistered portrait of Archbishop Romero hangs in a charred wooden frame. The glass which had once covered it drips in icicles from the lower edge of the frame, melted by flame throwers and solidified again into tortured columns. The wooden panel above the door frame is pierced repeatedly with bullet holes, mementos of that terrible night nearly a year ago.

A slightly-built, middle-aged Spanish priest enters the room and takes his seat at the head of the conference table. He is introduced to us as Rafael Sivatte, an assistant to Fr. Jon Sobrino.

"I have been here since 1985, more or less - teaching at the university three months of each year. The last time that I was here was just before the massacre. But now I am settled in to stay as the Old Testament professor and assistant to Jon Sobrino.

PVC 1990 Delegation – Part Twelve: CODEFAM

The following notes have been edited to correct errors and to add explanations and updates. Parenthetical notes and remarks from the original are enclosed in parentheses. Present day [2022] updates are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.

5 October 1990, 11:50 AM - CODEFAM

This group was formed on 9 September 1981 out of the roots of the war in El Salvador by families of captured, disappeared, and assassinated persons. It was originally called Comite. Later, on 14 March 1983 Marianella Garcia Villas was assassinated in Las Bermudas. She was a worker who fought for human rights, and at the time of her death she was investigating the use of chemicals in bombing by the military. She was accompanying ninety families who were escaping from a strong military operation when she was wounded and captured. First she was taken to a military school, then to a military hospital, where she was tortured – burned on the legs and arms, raped, and forced to swallow a grenade which then was exploded. She was a founder of the Human Rights office which PVC just visited, and CODEFAM works in her name today.

(Later we were to meet a young girl named Marianella. Her mother, whose first husband was disappeared, tells us that the child was born just a few months after Marianella Garcia Villas' assassination, and that when she went to register the birth, the authorities questioned her sharply as to whether she was sure that she wanted to give her daughter such a controversial name. She answered them proudly that yes, that was her deliberate intention.)

"The work of the committee is three-fold: 1. to struggle for the defense of human rights, with priority on freeing political prisoners; 2. to struggle to clarify the whereabouts of the disappeared and to enforce existing laws in El Salvador to discontinue this practice; and 3. to bring those persons who are responsible for the violations of human rights to trial and punishment.