The CCR goes to Mesa Grande, Honduras
By Diana Hammer
January 14, 2003
This past Saturday night, Jan, an American volunteer with US-El Salvador Sister Cities, spent the night at our house, and at 5 AM we were all up and getting ready for a trip to Honduras .
Toño, his younger brother Osmín, Juventina, Reina, Jan, Manuel (godfather of Reina), and I got on the bus and met Felipe, Rosita, Nelson, Santiago , and Miguelito all from the CCR staff at the office. Juventina threw a mattress in the back of the CCR pick-up truck for padding, and we were off. It was just barely light and the air was cold as Miguelito sped down the highway. Those of us in the back huddled down to avoid the wind. Soon we turned north and began to go slower up through the cool mountains where cafetales or coffee plants were growing.
After a breakfast stop in La Palma and a little bit more of a drive, we crossed the border at El Poy. The land was flat at the border but quickly got mountainous and cold as we continued up. I began to see pine trees, and then entire forests in between the houses, and then clouds, and then only the other people in the truck as the fog and the clouds surrounded us. We began to sing and tell jokes in the back of the truck – anything to forget how cold it was. Then the clouds gradually dispersed, and we wound down the other side of the mountains where the sky was getting blue again in the distance.
“That is Mesa Grande!” Suddenly Nelson pointed to a flat place a little above a town in the distance. The town was San Marcos Ocotepeque, and we arrived there about 20 minutes later and found the road to Mesa Grande.
After a morning of decently paved highways, it was time for gravel roads. We bumped along slowly and began to feel hot again. People in the car had quieted down since our first glimpse of the area that had been the refugee camp for at least 11,000 Salvadorans during about seven yearsof the civil war. Both of Toño's younger sisters and Manuel’s two oldest children were born in Mesa Grande. Juventina was 10 when her family left their house and went to be registered by the United Nations as refugees. She met Toño there when she was 16, shortly before the repopulation of Las Vueltas in 1987.
Toño’s family arrived in Mesa Grande after living in the mountains for a few months. His mother, Chinda, told Reina and I the next day said that their family initially moved to an area called Las Aradas, a make-shift refugee camp on the Salvadoran side of the Sumpul River , which forms part of the border with Honduras . The people of Las Aradas had already fled and left their houses empty. People like Chinda, her husband, and their five small boys moved in. “We lived with the other families, 10 people in a small house, but we were only there about one month.”
One day they saw Honduran solders getting closer on the other side of the river, and at 6 AM on May 14 th, 1980 , the civilians in Las Aradas were awakened by the Salvadoran Army at their borrowed doorsteps. The Massacre of Las Aradas or La Masacre del Sumpul (Sumpul Massacre) was beginning.
Chinda told us, “We didn’t have any weapons. Not even a machete to cut firewood. We used our hands. There was no way to defend ourselves. Some went to the river, but it was very deep and many drowned. There were helicopters dropping bombs. We left through the mountains and went below, below, below to where there was a rope bridge and crossed there. We were still in El Salvador , but then we went to Honduras and there the United Nations gave us beans, rice, cooking oil, everything.” At least 600 civilians in Las Aradas were killed by the end of that day. The people who had escaped, like Toño’s family, were hunted for the next few weeks by Honduran and Salvadoran troops on both sides of the border who wanted no witnesses. During the late seventies and until 1992 when the Peace Accords were signed, similar events were repeated all over El Salvador , especially in the other rural departments of Morazán and Cabañas. People from these areas also fled to Mesa Grande, Honduras to escape the fighting.
In the truck, Jan and I began to hear various pieces of these stories as our friends reminisced about how old they had been and how they had come. As we drove across the pasture-like prairie land, Santiago said that he was 8 when his family left for Mesa Grande. “All of this used to be like a huge corral. We were in camp number 3. You could go anywhere in any of the camps, but there were Honduran soldiers making sure no one left without permission.”
When we reached the end of the gravel path, we got out of the truck and stood to look across the broad plateau. Cattle and horses were grazing in the long grass, and the town of San Marcos was in the distance. In front of us, all we could see were a few cement sinks called pilas, and crumbling latrines out in the open. I tried to imagine the camp as Juventina described it. Each family had one or maybe two small rooms in a house with a shared kitchen and pila outside. The houses were in long rows, wall to wall with the neighbors on both sides. She said that the last people to leave had taken everything with them, even the canvas and wood for the make-shift houses. All that was left now was the brick foundations of a few buildings not yet covered with grass.
Osmín recognized where their family had stayed from the marañón (cashew fruit) tree that is still growing in the same place. We walked around and even climbed some of the trees for fun, but it was impossible to shake off the deep silence and the memories of this empty place. After a bit, we drove to another area of the camp where most of the people from Chalatenango had stayed (Camps numbers 1, 2, and 3). Beyond a wide flat area that everyone remembered as the soccer field, we found the cemetery outside a fence and down a hill. Juventina waved a hand toward the fence that had divided the camp from the outside world and said, “They were brutal, the soldiers. They killed some people right over there. No one could leave.” Memories of the safety and uncertainty Mesa Grande offered are still fresh for those Salvadorans who were here.
For Felipe, who is now the President of the CCR, this was his first time in Mesa Grande. His parents came, but Felipe and his wife and children stayed in Chalatenango. He found and built hiding places for the civilians living in the mountains as they fled the national troops during the war. At one point someone brought word that his father had died in Mesa Grande, but Felipe had never seen the place. It was only when I saw other visitors decorating the graves with flowers that I understood why Juventina had picked this day for us to make the trip. This was November 2nd. All Saint’s Day. What a perfect way for Felipe and all of us to celebrate and remember Saints.
Meaningfulness washed over me as we began to walk through the curvy rows of graves. Many are unmarked, or possibly never were marked. None of us found the name of Felipe’s father, but we took a picture so that he could ask his mom. We sat for awhile on the side of the cemetery, talking, resting, and just looking around. Nelson and Santiago saw some little boys playing and said, “That’s who we were, 15 years ago.”
After a late lunch in San Marcos , we began the trip back. We went through the mist, across the border, past the muted green of the cafetales, the orange and pink sunset, and then a moonrise over the Salvadoran mountains. We were going to a safe home.
***Information about what happened at the Sumpul Massacre and details about Mesa Grande can be found in the book Tiempo de Guerra y Tiempo de Paz: Organización y lucha de las comunidades del nor-oriente de Chalatenango (1974-1994), published by Equipo Maíz, El Salvador.
Our group looking at Mesa Grande , Honduras .
Former Salvadoran refugee camp. 11-2-03
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