A Life Committed to Finding the Truth

Woman, Salvadoran group seek peace after horror 

DANIELLE MARIE MACKEY  

Originally published in the National Catholic Reporter print edition of August 3-16, 2012. Visit NCR at www.NCRonline.org. All photos original unless otherwise noted.

Patricia Garcia points out one scene of a mural of the history of the Salvadoran Civil War. It depicts the protesting mothers of the Disappeared, who hold an image of Archbishop Oscar Romero. The mural spans a portion of the "Memorial Wall," formally known as the Monument to Memory and Truth, and is located in San Salvador's downtown Cuscatlan Park. Interestingly, Salvadorans chose to start the mural of the history of the Civil War not in 1980, when the two armies began formal war, but instead in 1932, when the first peasant uprising demanding dignified living conditions was put down with violence by the military dictatorship of the time. The mural highlights moments throughout Salvadoran history of structural violence and inequality, which eventually boil over into the Civil War. June 2012.

SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR -- She remembers the day that a stern stranger in a white hat came to address the catechist meeting at her parish. It was November 1978, and 12-year-old Patricia García sat in a plastic chair swinging her legs. San Antonio Abad Catholic Church was based in liberation theology and known for being active in its urban San Salvador neighborhood. “I loved being there, and I loved being treated like one of the adults,” the 46-year-old Pati remembers. The visitor began to speak: “I am here because you are confusing the Gospel with violence. Rumor has it that you are storing weapons.” Silence paralyzed the room: Who would be the first to quarrel with an archbishop? Pati stood up. “ ‘Look here, Mr. Priest,’ I said to him. ‘I have something to say. You tell us not to combine weapons with the Gospel? Well,’ and I picked up my little bag, ‘I want you to look in here and tell me if there’s a weapon.” By the time that meeting was over, Pati knew two things: The archbishop had apologized to her community, and his name was Oscar Romero. “When he left, I remember that he touched me on my forehead and said, ‘I want you to prepare yourself well.’ ” Pati smiled. She promised him that she would. Her extemporaneous commissioning that day would soon be tested in ways that she could never imagine. 

Meanwhile, the shadows thrown by two warring giants were sparking violent anticommunist hysteria in many corners of the world. El Salvador would not be spared. Civil war was heating up across the country, pitting the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government against an armed peasant resistance movement in a battle that would last 12 years and claim 80,000 lives. The military was particularly suspicious of groups like university students, union members and progressive religious communities — and in January 1979, they invaded San Antonio Abad, taking 25 youth prisoners. Pati, who even at her young age was already serving as a youth catechist, was in danger. She fled into exile in Mexico with other parish leadership.

Ten months later, antsy to return to her family, Pati renounced her exile in Mexico and caught a bus to El Salvador. She found her home abandoned, her family disappeared. She ran to the archbishop’s office. “Monsignor Romero told me that if I wanted to stay, I could not continue to work within the church because it was too dangerous. ‘A terrible violence is coming,’ he said. He counseled me to work with the COMADRES instead.” 

The Committee of Mothers of Political  Prisoners and the Disappeared (COMADRES) were women all across the country who shared a common horror. Their loved ones were victims of the government’s tactic for silencing perceived or actual dissent — a tactic so widespread throughout Latin America in the 1980s that it became a noun: “the disappeared.” Citizens were abducted from public buses in the middle of the day or hauled from the family home at midnight. They were jailed, often without any paperwork so that their presence could not be proven, and held for interrogation and torture. Although thousands of the disappeared were never heard from again, some were freed after pressure on the government. For family members of the disappeared, the key was to find where the government was hiding their loved one before it was too late. 

A government soldier stands watch outside a home in San Salvador during the war. Photo courtesy of COMADRES.

Some women began methodically searching jails and army bases. Most times, they did not find their family members, but they did find thousands of others in need of care. The mothers begged the guards to be able to bring medicine to tend the prisoners’ tortured bodies. They decided to form a human rights defense organization that they called the Committee of Mothers of Political Prisoners and Disappeared (COMADRES.) 

The COMADRES photo albums tell the story of their time. Images depict the mothers in their signature black dresses and white bandanas, protesting in the streets. They show smiling faces in meetings with visiting solidarity groups from Europe and the U.S. And then there are the bodies: beheaded, dismembered, burned. Sons, sisters, husbands — and eventually, COMADRES members themselves, who had become enemies of the government for their courageous work. 

A COMADRES member in the group's signature dress, during a wartime protest in the streets of San Salvador. Photo courtesy of COMADRES.

Pati was disappeared for the first time when she was 16 years old. The soldiers let her go with a warning that her activities with COMADRES must stop, but she was too committed to finding the truth about her family and the thousands like hers. In 1990, 24-year-old Pati was stopped on the street, forced into an army vehicle, and for 22 days interrogated, tortured and raped by soldiers. The entire time, she was blindfolded and naked, with her hands tied. “I lost my notion of time. I only knew that in the early morning, the soldiers would be outside yelling; it was training time.” 

Her captivity came to an end one day in the torture chamber. “I was lying on a cement table, my arms and legs tied to the corners of the table, spread-eagle. A chain saw roared and came at me.” Suddenly, someone ordered the soldiers to stop. Another soldier entered the room, untied Pati and helped her off the table. “ ‘Look,’ he said to me. ‘You think that we’ve done something to you here, but we haven’t done anything. You’ve only had a nightmare.’ ” Even after nearly a month in captivity, the spirit of the little girl who quarreled with an archbishop leaped within her. Pati snapped at him, “What nightmares I’m going to have after the awful things you have done to me!” As the soldier’s temper rose, she heard a leathery smack of his fist against his palm. “Aye, only because I can’t even touch you right now …” he sneered. Pati did not know who was protecting her, but she was shocked at their influence.

Later that day, Pati arrived at the courthouse and her blindfold was removed for the first time in weeks. She learned that she owed her liberty to a man named Edward “Ted” Kennedy. The COMADRES’ struggle had caught the attention of the international community a few years earlier, and Sen. Kennedy had traveled to El Salvador with a delegation of leaders to meet them. In 1991, Pati traveled to Washington, D.C., at Kennedy’s invitation. “He received me with a great hug in the White House,” Pati remembers.

Pati maintained a low profile around San Salvador until after the war ended in 1992. Shortly thereafter, the Salvadoran congress passed an amnesty law preventing anyone from being prosecuted for war crimes in an attempt at “forgive and forget”-style healing for society. What this meant to the family members of the disappeared is that they would not have answers as long as the law stands. The nearly 300 women who are COMADRES members today are mostly elderly and impoverished, and they still await those answers.

A man kneels at the discovered body of a disappeared loved one during the war. Photo courtesy of COMADRES.

A final tragic piece links the madres to the legacy of war, despite their constant efforts to achieve closure: Hundreds of them are the survivors of rape by soldiers with a disease called human papillomavirus (HPV), which may develop into cervical cancer. The disease has already killed 177 among the madres. Many more, like Pati, currently live with the cancer. At her weakest, Pati weighed just 45 pounds — half of her slight figure. She has now survived 50 chemotherapy treatments and a surgery, and she has chosen yet again to use the injustice in her life as an opportunity to reach out to others. In the hospital’s oncology department, she facilitates workshops for people suffering from cancer and for their family members. “The doctor says that I talk too much,” she chuckles, “but I know that sometimes fear makes us reject knowing about something. … I tell them that it’s our responsibility to know about our disease and how to support each other through it.” 

Pati searches for family and friends among the names of the Disappeared of 1982 on the Memorial Wall in downtown San Salvador. The United Nations Truth Commission, which investigated the violations that occurred during the war, made a series of recommendations to restore justice after the signing of the peace accords ended active warfare, among which was the building of a monument in memory of the victims. The Memorial Wall, which holds 35,000 names, also serves as a physical place where the family members of the disappeared can go to remember their loved ones, in lieu of a grave. June 2012.

Despite their personal struggles, the madres continue to share their lived experiences to help guide society. They have submitted a petition for reparations to current President Mauricio Funes. They also seek trials for the intellectual authors of the disappearances. They believe these actions “will help not only in combating impunity, but also in healing society. When there is justice, and when we have our answers, we can say that now we’re starting to reconstruct the country with a just peace,” Pati says.

Pati in the COMADRES' San Salvador office. May 2012.

A new breed of violence stemming from drugs, gangs and corruption has gripped El Salvador in recent years, and the authorities’ answer has been to militarize. Thousands of soldiers patrol the streets alongside police officers, creating an environment that increasingly resembles the past. “We have the conditions for another war to happen,” Pati says. Since 2008, the madres have been giving violence prevention presentations in schools in an attempt to raise consciousness around nonviolent, integral solutions to conflict. They have already lived a time when authorities tried to solve problems with weapons, and they hope that today’s youth will not accept the same reality. “These young people must be ones to oppose violence, and to prepare themselves intellectually,” Pati explains. “A well-informed person can demand rights without the necessity of violence.”

(In the video below, Pati answers the question, For you, what are the most important things in life, after having experienced what you have? Why is it worth it for you to carry on? More available at www.yultaketzaelsalvador.blogspot.com. Thanks to Laura Hershberger for providing the subtitles!) 

[Danielle Marie Mackey is a freelance journalist and interpreter living in San Salvador, El Salvador.]