El Faro published this photo essayin Spanish in October 2016 and has now translated it as part one of “Disappeared in El Salvador”, a special photography curation on the evolution of violence from the civil war to gang control to the state of exception. View part two.
Between 1980 and 1989, 34 Salvadorans were murdered in three municipalities in the department of Santa Ana, in western El Salvador. This figure, at first glance, pales in comparison to the more than 75 thousand victims registered in the report of the U.N. Truth Commission. But those 34 deaths, for the victims’ families, were 34 too many. For their lawyers, they are proof that in the west of the country, as in the east and the paracentral zone, systematic human rights violations were also committed by the Salvadoran Army and security forces.
On Wednesday, Oct. 8, 1980, 23 people were murdered in the hamlet of Canoas, a community 15 kilometers from the city of Santa Ana and located in the heart of the canton of El Pinalito, Santa Ana. Canoas residents lived under the harassment of the National Guard, which was suspicious of them because they were organized in groups of catechists and cooperatives seeking access to credit to finance the crops on which they subsisted.
On the day of the massacre, about 80 people were about to share lunch at the house owned by Pedro Zamora, when they were ambushed by a combined group of 20 men from the government forces who surrounded the house, threw grenades, and fired with G3 rifles. The testimonies of the victims, a 2016 resolution of the Prosecutor’s Office for the Defense of Human Rights, and the Truth Commission report point to the participation of the National Guard, Treasury Police, and National Police as those responsible for these extrajudicial executions.
As happened in the east of the country in the massacres of El Mozote (1981), or in the northern zone of Chalatenango at the Sumpul River (1980), or in Cabañas, in the paracentral zone, with the massacre of Santa Cruz (1981), the survivors buried their dead in a common grave, separated 30 meters from the house where they were massacred.
Two years later, in the Costa Rica canton, in the municipality of Texistepeque, seven people were abducted in a house-to-house operation carried out by security forces, and subsequently murdered. This massacre occurred on Nov. 20, 1982. Seven years later, in 1989, another four people were murdered in similar circumstances in the Agua Zarca canton of Metapán.
In 2005, the relatives of the victims of these three episodes initiated a case, with the support of the Madeleine Lagadec Center for the Promotion of Human Rights, to seek justice and an exhumation and recognition of the victims in order to give them a proper burial. In July 2007, the Attorney General’s Office asked a court for the exhumations and mass graves to be opened at the three sites of the massacres.
After the exhumations, the justice process moved at a snail’s pace. The delivery of the skeletons scheduled for 2010 was halted by order of then-Attorney General Romeo Barahona, who ordered that the remains be subjected to DNA testing. Six years later, the Institute of Legal Medicine failed to obtain positive results in the analysis of the skeletons, and argued that this was due to the time elapsed and the state of the skeletal remains. In short, they were unable to obtain scientific evidence linking the skeletons of those massacred with their relatives. On August 25, 2016, the prosecutor of the case, Gabriela Vega, said in the morgue of the General Cemetery of Santa Ana: “We cannot issue the identification because for now they are not identified genetically or anthropologically. Everyone will be able to see the bones as a deposit.”
The survivors themselves explain in this photo essay that their search for justice has been truncated by the state’s inability to identify their murdered relatives.
A resolution issued on July 26, 2016 by the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (PDDH) states that the Attorney General’s Office committed serious violations of the rights to life with dignity, physical and moral integrity, as well as the rights to truth, justice and reparation. According to the PDDH, prosecutors did not respect the dignity of the victims' families because they did not provide “comprehensive attention” in the form of a plan and general strategy of intervention, including a policy of reparation to the survivors or family members victimized by the serious human rights violations committed during the Salvadoran civil war. On the contrary, state efforts have been carried out in an isolated, disorderly manner.
The resolution also demands that the state ask for forgiveness and cover funeral expenses as reparation measures. Both demands were ignored; funeral expenses were covered by private donations, Carolina Constanza, director of the Madeleine Lagadec Center, told El Faro. The state, at the request of the relatives, finally handed over the skeletons of 34 victims nine years after they were exhumed. According to the Attorney General’s Office, the skeletons were buried as “evidence”. Evidence of massacres that to date the State refuses to investigate. Prosecutors did not allow families to bury their dead. The 34 skeletons now share the same burial place in the Santa Isabel cemetery in Santa Ana.
Canoas is a tiny enclave of the canton of El Pinalito in Santa Ana. In this valley, tucked at the end of seven kilometers of dusty streets, its inhabitants today live off of dairy production. On Oct. 8, 1980, 20 agents of state security forces including members of the National Guard, Treasury Police, and National Police opened fire on some 80 people at lunchtime. The Canoas massacre is one of three in western El Salvador between 1980 and 1989 that relatives of the victims and survivors denounced in 2007 in order to seek justice for those murdered.
On Oct. 8, 1980, at the beginning of the war, 13 women and 10 men were murdered in Canoas. Ana and Isabel Monterola, 3 and 5 years old, respectively, also disappeared. In 2005, the Probúsqueda Association for Children Disappeared in the Armed Conflict began to investigate the whereabouts of these girls. Ten years later, it located them in the United States and organized a reunion with their families in El Salvador. The girls had been victims of a child trafficking ring during the war. “The horror we lived through here must not be forgotten,” reads a plaque on the monument to the victims of the massacres in Canoas (1980), Texistepeque (1982), and Metapán (1988-1989). The plaque, placed on July 25, 2007 on the road between Santa Ana and Metapán, deteriorated over the years.
Testimony of Canoas victim Lorenzo Medina Zamora, 63 years old in 2016, at the time of this picture: “I was in Ciudad Arce, but my mother, Ciriaca, 54 years old, was here; and my siblings, Mariano, 23, Francisco, 19, and Alicia Zamora, 17. My cousin Esteban died in that attack. They grabbed them all for no good reason: If they had actually been carrying weapons, another rooster would have crowed for them. Nobody here put up any resistance. And if the authorities haven’t been able to identify my dead, how can I demand justice for those guilty of this horror? The soldiers harassed the community since August [1980] and ended up cornering the people in that house. Our sin was having organized ourselves into a cooperative to get out of poverty.”
José Mariano Medina Zamora, 59, victim of Canoas: “It was 12 o’clock noon. We had been studying all morning, learning to read and write, and we had prepared rice and beans. I ordered two tortillas and ate them as I walked up the hill to watch the area. The soldiers had begun to harass us because we were a community organized in cooperatives. As I was climbing halfway up the hill, I heard the shooting. I came down at midnight and saw my wife machine-gunned, lying behind a pole. We got together with others from the community and began to carry the dead two by two, in a wheelbarrow, to the hole we opened. I don't have that idea of justice; I am content with whatever God does. I was 23 years old when this happened, and whoever killed her must be alive saying, ‘I was the one who killed those sons of bitches,’ because a guardsman does not change his mentality.”
On Aug. 25, 2016, a court and the Attorney General’s Office agreed to hand over skeletons of the victims. Forensic doctors and police investigators unpacked each of the 33 boxes that held bones, clothing, dental plates, and coins. “Does anyone identify these clothes?” asked a forensic doctor as he lifted up a dress. “It looks like the one my wife was wearing, but I don't think it's that one. That looks like a handkerchief I put on her face so she wouldn’t get dirt on it… I'm not sure,” said Mariano Zamora, 59, who buried his wife, Santos Landaverde Ortiz, on the day of the Canoas massacre.
Celso Vásquez carries the portrait of his father, José Francisco Vásquez, during the burial of the victims on Aug. 26, 2016. José Francisco died in the door-to-door operation carried out by the National Guard in the hamlet of Costa Rica, Texistepeque, in 1982. State forces killed seven men in that operation. The funeral procession in homage to the victims marched for an hour and a half from the place of the wake, from the communal house of the El Palmar neighborhood of Santa Ana to the Santa Isabel General Cemetery. On the way the families chanted religious songs. The Attorney General’s Office, Human Rights Ombudsman, the coroner’s office (Medicina Legal), and the Madeleine Lagadec Center for the Promotion of Human Rights organized the funeral. Prosecutors and police were present due to the custody of the skeletons, considered as “evidence” in a case that is not being investigated. The state was supposed to cover funeral expenses, but the wake and burial were paid for by private donors.
Reina Martínez Cisneros, 60 years old, victim of Canoas: “I was 24 years old. That day I was sick, inside the house, lying on a bed with my child, when I heard the bullets. There was a high window and I said: I’ll jump out here. I jumped out of the window with my child and saw my husband Emérito Sandoval hugging other children. I grabbed my three children to run away but I couldn't do it anymore. I stayed sitting in the corridor and I felt the bullet in my spine that also hit my son, but he survived. They took us out of the house and put us face down. They kicked me and hit me with the rifle. They took my husband out and shot him in front of me. The soldiers grabbed a girl by the hair and dragged her along the corridor until they killed her. They kept us until six in the evening. They made us step over all the dead and left us in the hospital in Santa Ana. I feel bad now that I have come to this place. I feel very bad. I will never forget that.”
After the Canoas massacre, survivors report that most of the houses were burned. Those who dodged the bullets ended up moving to nearby municipalities or fled to Guatemala. Three decades later, some have returned and repopulated the area. Life springs up in the stony aridity of this place.
Alicia Rosalina Medina, 53 años: “I was 17 and had just arrived from Santa Ana. It was 11:30 in the morning. I greeted the women who were in the room, neighbors, relatives, and my mom, Ciriaca Zamora. We were chatting when I heard the bullets. I ran to the living room and, realizing I was defenseless, escaped from the house. I passed alongside some crying children. I climbed a hill running and the guardsmen who saw us fired at us non-stop. I walked for a long time along the paths until I arrived in Santa Ana. When I returned they had already buried all the bodies. Now that I am back, everything looks small to me. Being here I feel emotion amid my sadness. After the massacre I was obliged to take up arms. I was on the front lines during the entire armed conflict, with the FPL, in the area of Agua Caliente, Dulce Nombre de María, and Arcatao, in Chalatenango. I had to drag injured people during combat. I can’t even believe I am telling this story.”
Reina Martínez Cisneros, a survivor of Canoas, stands in front of the grave where her husband, Emérito Nolasco Sandoval, was buried. According to Reina, he was shot in the head. In nine years, the two DNA tests that the authorities have performed on the skeletons have not given the results to determine the consanguinity between the remains and his relatives.
Teresa del Carmen Jordán, 40, victim of Canoas: “I was four years old. I remember when my mother Elsa Jordán fell because they killed her in front of me. My sister Marleni Jordán and I threw ourselves on top of my dead mother and the soldiers grabbed us by the arms and dragged us to get us to let her go. I remember the roads where they took us out. They hit me with their boots to make me walk fast. They took us to the San Juan de Dios hospital in Santa Ana and we spent 15 days there. Since no one claimed us, they transferred us to the Adalberto Guirola home in Santa Tecla. After three months, my grandmother Petrona Jaco found us. We recognized her immediately, and that’s how she got us back. This is the first time I have come here since the massacre. I think it is the only place where I might have had a mother. It feels ugly and beautiful at the same time.” Marleni, Teresa's younger sister, is a homemaker in Coatepeque, Santa Ana.
A coffin without police evidence ribbons shows the portrait of Miguel de Jesús Mata, a local farmer who was murdered at the age of 24 in the hamlet of Costa Rica, Texistepeque, on Nov. 20, 1982. Seven men died in that place at the hands of the military, who, with list in hand, took each of them out of their homes, tortured, and killed them. Mata was identified by his family, who kept the remains in their home until they decided to bury them with the other victims in solidarity with the other families.
The Attorney General’s Office decided at the end of August 2016 that the evidence of three massacres be buried in the same grave. Since 2007, the Attorney General’s Office had only searched, without success, for DNA identifications among the skeletons of the victims and their surviving relatives who are still alive and demanding justice. The 34 pieces of evidence from three massacres now lie buried in the Santa Isabel General Cemetery in Santa Ana.
The grave where the victims of the 1980 Canoas massacre were buried, 36 years later, is an orchard surrounded by pastureland where cattle are fed about 30 meters from where the attack occurred. “We have walked up and down, enduring sun and water, to be able to bury our relatives, and even though they are in disarray we know they are there. It is time to let them rest in peace,” said Lorenzo Medina Zamora, leader of the community, in a tribute held in September 2016, in the place where the victims were buried for 27 years. Zamora lost his brother, Francisco, and his cousin, Esteban.
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