'Why could I live through the war?' Jose Rodriguez, in his early 30s, mused. 'I think that was because I had nothing except survival instincts,’ after confessing that he was not used to talking about this kind of thing. But he continued, ‘Everybody has a task to be accomplished in life, and as long as it is incomplete, one has a good reason to exist.’ He preferred sitting on the same plastic chairs as we did to sitting on his mayor’s chair.
400 years ago, on the other side of the planet, samurais believed: ‘You live when it is right to live, and you die only when it is right to die. That’s true courage, 勇 (yū).’
* * *
An 11-year-old boy fled into the mountains of Chalatenango, a northern prefecture bordering Honduras, and one of the strongholds of the guerrillas. He had no other choices. ‘Otherwise I would have been massacred as an accomplice of guerrillas,’ he recollected.
El Salvador entered into civil war in 1980, after nationwide poverty became unendurable due to exploitation by landlords and other small numbers of the elite, including government officials. This ideological confrontation occurred in the midst of the Cold War made the war more devastating and lengthened it substantially.
People were ruthlessly suppressed; their basic human rights were disregarded. Unfortunately, since the turning point came just after the Nicaraguan Revolution, the US did not hesitate in backing the Salvadorean government to maintain capitalism in the country, aiding its military with a total of $3.3 billion, more than $1 million per day, to suppress the guerrillas. (This is a country with only six million people)
The boy and his mother were victims of the Massacre of Sumpu, the first tragic bloodshed of the war, on 14 May 1980, when more than 600 people were killed or drowned in the Rio Lempa. The military shot into groups of fleeting villagers, causing them to panic and jump into the river.
The army had already pulled down bridges so that the townspeople were unable to escape. Some were swept downstream, some drowned, and some, including the boy and his mother, survived. Those about 20 fortunate, but already exhausted, villagers got out of the water and hid behind a riverbank. ‘We held our breath as tight as possible, but in the early evening, a soldier found us. Just after that, I had to watch as they shot my mother dead. I also got injured but didn’t die.’
(To be continue to A Salvadoran Samurai II)
