The Long Shadow of El Mozote

It’s necessary for the people of North America to understand the reality that we live in El Salvador, because in some places it is known but not believed. When I hid as they were looking to kill me, I told God that if I escaped I would tell the story of our people. I took on this commitment before God for my whole life and I think it was accepted.

I feel very emotional because I’ve seen a change in the mentality of the United States toward helping El Salvador. During the years that so much military assistance came, many children also died of hunger. But now we expect help to reconstruct our country for the future of our children who are still alive. After such suffering it is necessary that we live in peace.

I give thanks that my words are heard—a campesina who has lived a life of such exploitation. Previously I didn’t even want to converse. I was a very sad woman and very afraid. Now I reflect about how God has transformed me. I couldn’t even tell you about it without the help of God.

In El Mozote, we were very simple, humble people who were into development. It was a beautiful place, populated on all sides with dwellings. It had coffee, sugar cane, and pineapples, and wood on the outskirts. We worked in the fields. It was quite lovely there, because if you wanted to eat a pineapple, you just ate one. There were days when one would have lunch eating a piece of sugarcane—I’d have all my children there eating cane too. We were very happy.

Now there is no sign of all that. They destroyed everything. This is the impossibility that the exiles feel. How can we ever go back to our place of origin if we don’t have anything there? We would have to plant again, and the energy to do that has been lost. The most difficult thing is that the people know the government does not protect or help us in difficult moments.

My father-in-law and my brother-in-law were evangelical pastors, but they died at El Mozote with 36 others who were in a house praying together. Their bodies were spread all over. It was truly a tremendous massacre. I don’t know how I was able to absorb so many things—to hear that they were killing my children, see that they were killing my husband, see that so many people were being killed, see that the children were dying in the fire.

My women friends who first found me took me to a cave and helped me. It’s there that I found my daughter who had been spared and was looking for me. I began to tell about it slowly, but I remember that if I said two or three words I’d start sobbing. At that time I didn’t feel anything. I was numb. The women took the thorns out of me. They washed me, they dressed me. I walked about in terrible tribulation.

The only thing I did was kneel down and ask God to give me strength. I asked God to give me the words. It was my faith that brought me back. Now I can tell about the hour when they did what they did. I remember everything.

UNTIL THAT TIME in El Mozote, I was ignorant of the political situation. I didn’t know anything because we were campesinos and we didn’t even have a radio.

One morning we awoke early to get ready for work. I noticed a beautiful light in the east, like a shield, so lovely in the darkness. It was like an angelic presence, a light from God. I was the only one who saw it. I was astonished and wondered what had happened.

At the time I was pregnant with the baby they later killed, and she leaped in my stomach because I was so excited over the light. It was eight or nine months before the massacre.

God enlightens all of us. God enlightened me, my children, and the child in my womb with that lovely sight. I thought about that afterward as a source of strength.

Each year we commemorate the massacre. There are people who are repopulating and want to be there with us, collaborating with the visitors and asserting that they lost their family members. It has been very beautiful.

There is a tree in El Salvador we named the Flor de Izote that flowers again after it is cut down. It is a tree that doesn’t die. We relate our lives to the Izote—a durable, strong tree that is just like all mothers. We come face to face with death and we go on living. They kill our children but history goes on, the struggle goes on, just like the tree goes on growing and flowering. You should see how the mothers reflect on this—it helps a person breathe.

Rufina Amaya is one of the few survivors of the 1981 massacre in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote, where at least 1,000 people were killed by Salvadoran army soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion. She offered these reflections during an interview with Joe Nangle, O.F.M., and Jeff Shriver of Sojourners and Scott Wright of the Ecumenical Program in Central America and the Caribbean (EPICA). The interview took place in Washington, D.C., in March 1994.