They stripped me and four held me down while another grabbed my hair because I was shouting and trying to resist. They tied my wrists behind me and tied my ankles and then tied both together behind, trussed like a chicken. The pain was terrible. After about 20 minutes I was picked up—by the knot—and carried, suspended in the air, to another room. I heard the groans of someone else there who, like me, was also trussed up. I shuffled closer to him and we managed to work loose our blindfolds. The man was a peasant, about forty-eight or fifty. He had white hair and a bushy beard, and worked at the Suchitoto hospital. He was still wearing his pale green hospital uniform. “I am here,” he said, “because I threw a stone to get some mangoes from a tree and broke a street lamp which blacked out the whole block.” Leonidas had been there since eleven o'clock in the morning and they were trying to make him say that the hospital staff was made up of communists. But they weren't—they were good people—and even if they were, Leonidas knew nothing about it.
Some torturers entered. “Leonidas,” one of them said, “you're a good man. You don't want to spend your last days like this, but you must cooperate.” Leonidas’ reply filled me with courage: “Don't talk to me. I don't even know who you are. You say you want me to cooperate, but you've done nothing but beat me since I got here.” I was so pleased I laughed out loud and the torturer kicked me in the ribcage. “I have nothing to say,” Leonidas said. “I don't know anything. My only comrades are Christ and his Apostles.” But then Leonidas added: “But I know you're a good person at heart. Can't you untie me for a while? I can't take any more.”
The police agent replied: “Here, we only treat kindly those people who cooperate. We'll untie you if you'll cooperate.”
“Yes,” Leonidas said at last. “I will cooperate.” He was then untied, but he was unable to walk and someone had to lift him and help him.
They left me trussed from about midnight to five o'clock on April 13, but constantly agents came in and touched my body in debasing ways and did things so disgusting that I vomited. I was in such despair that I told them to kill me but they only rubbed my face in the vomit. Then they made me get up and walk to the bath, gave me back my underpants and took me to a room, blindfolded. About eight o'clock, men came in violently shouting, “Who told the Red Cross about you?” This proves you're a leader! If it was one of our agents you will tell us!” They put something like a bulletproof vest on me and hung me up by my wrists and beat me with rubber truncheons on every part of my body for about two hours, until I vomited blood. They kept asking who told the Red Cross and one of them said, “Get him out of here, the bastards are coming at eleven.”
They took me to the Officers’ Club; I could see beneath the blindfold a billiard table, red plastic sofas, a television set and the machine for electric shocks. They played loud music and laughed and clapped, pretending to have a party where no one from the Red Cross would want, or be allowed, to enter. They gave me innumerable electric shocks, I kept losing consciousness, and the party went on.
At about four o'clock, as best I can calculate, a male nurse came and injected something intravenously into my left arm and gave me a pill. Within fifteen minutes, I felt no pain from the beatings or the electric shocks, I felt euphoric, without fear. They left me in the Officers’ Club until night when they took me to the stinking room where I was the first day. Two men put on rubber gloves, another grabbed my hair, and against my violent resistance, they forced me to kneel and pushed my face into the latrine filled with excrement. Each time they took me out they asked about safe houses and guns and how many I'd killed and where I got dynamite and who were the doctors who helped and what diplomats or journalists talked to us. I answered always, “Don't know.” When they let my head up, I tried to get the excrement out of my mouth by rubbing against my shoulders. This lasted all night, until dawn on April 14.
They took me to the bathroom and gave me soap to wash myself and my clothes and the effect of the injection had not worn off, I felt no fatigue. Then they left me alone, blindfolded on the floor of a cell for two days, giving me tortillas and water three times.
On the night of April 16, naked and blindfolded, they put me on my back on the floor of a Toyota panel truck, seen under the blindfold. There were five of them. We drove around the city. One said, ‘This is your last chance, because we'd like to take revenge on the Red Cross.” I said, “If you're going to kill me, shoot me in the chest not the face so at least I'll be recognized.” One of the soldiers put the barrel of his gun in my mouth. “Such a pity,” he said, “to die so young for nothing.” And then he pulled the trigger. He took the gun out of my mouth, and I heard him loading it. Again, he put the barrel in my mouth, and there was a click of the trigger: but nothing happened. He did this several times. I began to cry. I was returned to the barracks.
Back inside I was given another injection. There was someone else in the room with me, another prisoner. We talked for a short while. The prisoner was Mexican. I had asked him why he had been arrested. “Because I'm Mexican.” I suggested we sleep. We tried.
But I was not allowed to. Twenty minutes later, I was given something to drink—a thick viscous liquid that tasted of vanilla. I was taken to another cell. My blindfold was removed and there were four men, each wearing a mask, a black balaclava, with openings only for the eyes, nose and mouth. One was wearing nail varnish, and had a case full of magazines with pictures of naked men. I said I wasn't interested, and he produced a copy of Playboy. He took off his clothes, as did his friend; the one with nail varnish seemed to be wearing women's knickers. I was told to masturbate, but I couldn't. My blindfold was put back on, and, shortly after, I heard someone masturbating and felt semen ejaculated into my face. I spat and was then hit ten or fifteen times on the side of my head.
My blindfold was removed. One of the men took out a small, thin, coffee-colored tube about eight centimeters long. He squeezed out some Johnson's lubricant jelly and rubbed it across its length. Someone else was touching and massaging my testicles and, to my alarm, an erection appeared. The small thin tube was then inserted into my urethra—a small bit was left to stick out—while someone else pushed a gun, with an extremely large barrel, up into my anus, rupturing the walls of my rectum and making it bleed.
I was crying with rage. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to die.
There was something that looked much like a small tub. It rested on thick rubber wheels, and was about a meter deep and half a meter wide. Attached to the lower part was a hose with a nozzle at the end. They started filling the tub with water, adding a large quantity of soap powder.
A sergeant entered. I recognized him from the National Police in San Miguel. He was angry that I was without my blindfold because I could identify him. He checked the tub: he wanted to be certain there was enough foam. “It's the foam that does it,” he said.
They wheeled in the machine for electrical shock. This time they put the metal objects and the sticky ointment on the soles of my feet, the palms of my hands, the forehead, behind the ears, on the chin and on the back of my head. They gave me electric shocks with about five-minute intervals, pain everywhere, but on the fifth, the shocks from the chin and forehead made my whole body shake uncontrollably and my heart beat so wildly that I was sure I would have an attack. The sergeant said, “If this shit wants to be like this,” and after about ten minutes they slipped the nozzle from the tub into my mouth and opened the valve. I was forced to swallow the soapy water. My stomach heaved and contracted but still they forced the liquid down until the tub was empty. Then they sealed my mouth with thick adhesive tape. I started to vomit but had to swallow it.
The pain was in my eyes and head, it spread to my nails, I felt as if there were stones in my stomach. The sergeant said, “Take off the blindfold, look at his eyes, he may be dying. Take the stuff off his mouth, quick!” Also they took out the tube they had put in my penis. I tried to vomit and couldn't. They carried me to the bathroom and called a doctor who said, “No, there's no dang
er” and opened my mouth and tried to put a little funnel in it but I closed my teeth. The doctor said, “This is for your good, this is a vomitorium so you can get rid of everything.” I drank it and in a few minutes began to vomit and defecate, foamy water came out of my nose and ears; this went on for about twenty minutes, and something the doctor did to my penis made a thick burning liquid come out of the urethra. I could not move. I was like paper, completely destroyed.
They carried me to a room with a wooden bed and treated me with injections and a serum drip and sedatives and gave me good food for two days. Then two of them came and held me by the arms so that I could walk with difficulty. When we stopped, one of them said, “Don't take off his blindfold till we go.” Afterwards, a prison turnkey led me up many stairs to a floor with numbered cells and shut me in cell number 16 with another prisoner. Though I was demolished, this man gave me a feeling of liberty and strength. He helped me to wash and gave me the lower bunk and lit cigarettes and we talked. He had been here 86 days. He said, “They can't do anything to you now you're here, because the International Red Cross comes every Tuesday, they are Swiss. Forget everything they did to you in CAIN. Don't give it importance for yourself. If I told you all they'd done to me it would make you sick.” I asked what CAIN meant and he said, “Centro de Analisis e Informacion Nacional,” that is the real shit, the big aid the gringos started here a year ago, after they sent groups to the United States to study ‘psychology.’ When CAIN come to get you to sign papers, just do it.” “What papers?” I asked. “Your confession, don't try to read it, they won't let you, just sign and when you get out, tell everything about what happens here.”
On Tuesday April 20, the International Red Cross representative came and talked and gave me soap and cigarettes and the Red Cross telephone number, to call as soon as I got out. He asked Luis, my fellow prisoner, if he was getting his food parcels all right. On April 21, two CAIN agents came with nine pieces of paper to sign, then they took me to another cell in the basement, without beds, stinking, but with no excrement on the floor, and shut me in with a teenage boy, Tomas, for two days. On April 21, they took Tomas away; he came back after four hours, hysterical, saying, “They're going to kill us, they told me, on the way to court they're going to kill us.” At six that evening two agents of CAIN took away our clothes and brought no food and I was alarmed too. At one in the morning they came and made us stand against the wall, with our hands up, pointing a revolver at us. Tomas looked crazy, lost, he tore off a tile and threw it at the agent who fired, and hit the wall. Another agent came and ordered me to beat Tomas. I said, “I am not an assassin, nor a terrorist, nor a torturer, do your own dirty work.”
On April 22, at six in the morning they took us both, handcuffed, two agents in front, one beside us, and two behind with shotguns, from the main barracks of the National Police to court. They told us that if we didn't agree in court that everything they said was true, they would get us afterwards, they would kill us later.
The prisoner, because of the intercession of the International Red Cross, was taken to a court of law where he was accused of being “a leader of the Communist Party with daily contact among subversive associations.” He denied these charges and demanded that the CAIN agent leave the court. He informed the Red Cross that he had been released, and then gave the court a complete account of his capture and imprisonment. The judge presiding over the case granted official recognition of the beatings and punishment which the prisoner suffered. The statement was made on 22 April 1982, and a copy of it can be found in the Court of El Salvador, San Salvador. The statement offered to the Commission of Human Rights in El Salvador (from which the above testimony has for reasons of space been extracted and edited) was made on 18 May 1982.
Translated for Granta from the Spanish by Margaret Whitehead and Margaret Jull Costa, 1984.
Revised and expanded by Martha Gellhorn, 1987.
The Enemy Within
THE GUARDIAN, December 1984
The Valleys was a name, a part of Wales full of coal mines, imagined as grimy black, barren and sad. Instead here is the valley of the Ebbw, a mountain stream racing beside the road, and the land is breathtakingly beautiful. Towering hillsides are covered with forest, swathes of gold against green, in a silver light. The land makes a point at once. This is the Welsh miners’ own ancestral country. People fight to save their country.
No guide book would recommend the stony village of Newbridge for charm; that, however, is beside the point. The Memorial Hall is the miners’ clubhouse, freely open to all. It is huge, eyesore redbrick, built in 1914 when a quarter of a million miners worked in the Valleys and the nation needed coal to win a war. Inside, the Memorial Hall is clean, warm, shabbily comfortable and friendly. TV pontificators of every ilk should come here and listen to miners, three generations of them, and their wives, fine people, good people. They might understand what a “mining community” means.
I cannot think of any other like it in a society that is upwardly and downwardly mobile and there are barriers of class and money, and loneliness. Much more than jobs is at stake for these miners and their families: the rock they stand on, their old communal way of life.
Bad trouble is not new here but this time the women are sharing in the action. Upstairs, the wives have taken over a room, set up tables with bright plastic cloths, and daily provide a hot mid-day meal for strikers: “We run raffles, coffee mornings, collections at churches, beg, you know, anything to get money for food.” This was the stick-thin woman with glasses. ‘Today we have shepherd's pie, carrots and potatoes. We asked the wives and children to come but I don't think they will.”
They didn't. Men drift in, greet the women by name, and are served one plate, lots of gravy. They ate very quickly and left, clearly needing but embarrassed by this unusual charity. Behind the counter, five women gathered to talk, small middle-aged women, fierce in their anger. “If the mines go, the village dies. You ought to see [a Welsh name that escapes me], where the mine closed, nobody on the street, not a shop open, it's a ghost town.”
“This is where we live. We were born here and our parents before us. We're not going to lose our village.”
"She says we're the best paid workers. My husband is 46 and he's been in the mines all his life and he's the top grade and his take-home pay is £80. As if we're millionaires! Everybody's sold everything they could here. Everything. We have £19 a week supplementary benefit for my husband and me. It's worse for the young families.”
“And if my husband was half an hour late home from work I stand at the door thinking accident, accident; we all do. What does she know about us?”
Some men are sitting at a table with mugs of tea, quietly thinking aloud. A man in his sixties, I'd guess, also stick-thin, cap and suit; the others younger, bulkier, in old sweaters. ‘The way I see it, we got manipulated into this strike. First she chose Mac-Gregor. Well, we know him. Then out of the blue in March he comes up with closing mines so the lads in Yorkshire struck on their own and then it spread. But the timing was the worst for us, all wrong, wasn't it? The way I see it, she means to break this union because we're the strongest.
“After us, any union will be easy. She wants to do with coal what she did with steel—cut it in half—and privatize what's left. There's nothing in the Valleys but coal, no other work at all. My father, me, my sons, all miners. There'd be no future in the Valleys.”
Which brings to mind the dubious promise that any miner who wants work is guaranteed work somewhere; anyway it is already being rescinded. Who would buy their little quarry stone houses here? What homes would they go to?
“The fines,” says a younger man. “that's another way of getting at us. If there was a bash at a pub on Saturday and you actually hit a man you'd get £16. But the lads on the picket lines get £100, £120, £150. The Union pays—we haven't any money at all. I don't know how many they've arrested, maybe 8,000, big money—our dues. Robbery.”
“The miners get blamed for everyth
ing. It's the pickets are violent. But can't they see? All summer the lads were out in shirt sleeves and soft shoes and look at the police, that riot gear. Just look at them and who do you think is getting hurt? Oh yes, we put in complaints about the police all the time. Not one of them was answered.
“The police can do what they want; it's the miners who're violent. We can't send middle-aged men to picket any more; it's too dangerous.”
(An interesting point—the casualty figures. Not the latest, but all I've seen; some miners have died on the picket line; 3,000 hurt badly enough to need medical treatment; 750 police injured, 75 hospitalized. If it was war, you'd know which side was better armed and winning.)
The View from the Ground Page 41