Holy Wednesday

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Her voice cracked as she described being asked to share her story. Alexandra, now a grown woman in her early 30s, joined the board of directors of the Share Foundation, an organization based in California. This was her first board meeting and she was invited to talk about her story. “I thought it was going to be harder, Mami,” she said while describing the appreciation she felt from her listeners.

I stopped sharing my story some time ago, when my heart bled-dry, when I wanted to halt that constant whir in my chest that kept cracking every cell of my spirit. When every breath I took filled my chest with a lingering excruciating pain, like a sharp, slow stabbing.

But my story never went away. Nor the pain.

I walked a silent path for a while. Maybe to just mend, to repose from a thirty yearlong, soul-bleeding, race that saw no victors.

And, now my daughter was being asked to remember.

As I listened to her I thought: does she know the story? I don’t remember how much I have told her. She probably heard me speaking in conferences, at churches, in congressional testimonies. When she was a child, after we moved to the U.S., I would take her and her baby sister with me to many of these public speaking events. Or, perhaps she heard my story on television. Or, maybe she read it in some press articles about me and El Salvador.

She had just turned four years old when we left that country and arrived to San Francisco. That was the time when I needed to speak loud, to be a voice. But, at the same time, she was so young and I know I screened parts of the story to shield her from pain. And then I stopped sharing the story completely, when she turned twelve, perhaps. Almost completely, because she experienced an annual ritual David and I held every year to keep Mauricio alive within our family.

Mauricio Aquino

Mauricio could not say good-bye to his 18 month-old daughter. Although I know he did, from his heart, from his spirit world, in her dreams. He must have entered her dreams the same way, a few weeks later, he appeared in mine saying: “I’m fine, don’t worry. I love you.” His hand was waving good bye, to me.

It was April 15 of 1981. The white storming light moved up and down on the wall as Mauricio and I opened our eyes soon after midnight. I wasn’t dreaming. The light had awoken us. The roaring dark dragon-like convoy truck abruptly parking on the driveway beneath our bedroom window caused our bodies to jump up in our bed.

“You wait here,” he said as he turned the night table light on and fought to open his tired eyes to find his robe.
Heavy stomping boots and booming loud voices surrounded our two-story, chalet-type house.

“Open the door!” a loud command from a male voice penetrated through our walls.

My body shivered.

As Mauricio went down I hurried to find my white silk, floor length, bathrobe. As I stepped on the lower red tile floor that my mother had carefully chosen to bring the Spanish country-style design to the house she gifted us when Alexandra was born, my eyes were fixated on Mauricio.

He was speaking with the green, fatigue-style, uniformed man, flanked by at least eight other similarly dressed soldiers apparently ready to discharge their heavy war weapons on a desired prey. He appeared to be answering questions that I could not hear from twenty feet away. My leg moved forward to join my husband on the porch of our house but two black, polished, heavy, long machine guns crossed my waist.

“You have to stay here,” the soldier said as I watched my husband walk up our long open driveway. Mauricio’s honey-like eyes looked back at me. For the last time.

I rushed back upstairs and dialed the phone. From the window of my room I had an unobstructed view of the scene. There was a white truck on top of the hill parked on the right side of our Finca’s main road.

I saw the recently retired colonel, José Mario Rosales y Rosales, my dad’s brother, coming out of his big house. He approached the fence overlooking the military men and their vehicles and loudly declared his rank to the man clearly commanding the arrest.

“That young man you are arresting is my nephew,” he said.

“Well,” the defiant voice answered, “you couldn’t finish these communists in your time, Colonel. So, it is our turn now.” And, like a dog marking his territory, he pointed his machine gun up to the sky before shutting the door of the truck. I heard the frightening roar of the motorcade and saw each vehicle’s ghostly white plaque instead of license plate numbers. In the large truck where my husband had been loaded, I counted at least seven other heads as I desperately imprinted every detail in my memory.

It was Holy Week and even in the midst of a war, Salvadorans rushed to the beaches for the holiday season, including our families. Our finca was deserted except for my Tío Pepe, the Colonel, who was not feeling well and decided to skip the trip to the beach. Mauricio had been under the weather as well and was battling chest congestion and some fever to which he was prone from time to time. So we also decided to skip the beaches and stay home. “If I feel better we’ll go on Friday,” he told me.

When I rushed to my uncle’s house, my aunt and cousins embraced me with care and compassion. My uncle was on the phone speaking with the Minister of Defense, General José Guillermo Garcia, his longtime friend and comrade in arms. He came down to the dining room where we all were gathered and said Mauricio had been taken by one of the security forces, La Policia de Hacienda, under orders of Colonel Francisco Antonio Morán Recinos, for investigation and that he should be released tomorrow.

Something didn’t ring well in my heart. La Policía de Hacienda was responsible for many of the atrocities in San Salvador and some said people were being held incommunicado. But those victims were poor. They had no voice. Unlike us, they were not related to an important colonel or to the Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States, a post Mauricio’s uncle held at the time in Washington.

My family communicated with Mauricio’s family by telephone soon after the military convoy left our Finca. We could not leave our houses before the end of the Toque de Queda. The State of Siege, which begun every night at ten and would not end until six in the morning, had been declared by the government two years earlier and had recently been strengthened in response to the first FMLN’s general attack to key military posts in various parts of the country.(1) Anybody found on the streets or in public was subject to arrest, or killed if attempting to flee. San Salvador was ghost-like except for the heavily armed military vehicles and soldiers who roamed the streets like starving hunters craving for prey. The State of Siege barred any possible witness to the atrocities being carried away at dark.

On the following morning, my father Alfonso Rosales y Rosales Umaña, wearing his lawyer suit, arrived with two other lawyers, his brother Juan Ramón and neighbor Ciro Zepeda to the offices of the head of Policía de Hacienda.

“He is not anywhere in here, and he is not in any military garrison. We are sorry, but you are mistaken Dr. Rosales,” the man in fatigue uniform displaying multicolored medals pin to his chest asserted to my father with a straight face.

I had heard about a macabre new activity by the military: men or women in increasing numbers were being arrested in public or private places, before witnesses or not, and they were never to be seen again, ever. Not even their dead bodies.

The people began calling them Los Desaparecidos, the Disappeared.

At the end of the war, El Salvador had over 10,000 names on that list and their families were still looking for them. To this day.

My life crumbled. It happened on a Holy Wednesday.

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1. Thirteen months before Mauricio’s arrest, the Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador, Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero sent a public letter to President Jimmy Carter to stop all military aid to the government of El Salvador. The Archbishop was assassinated one month after the letter was made public. In January of 1981, three months before the military convoy left my house with my husband as prisoner, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front or FMLN launched the first general armed offensive and call for general insurrection. The civil war escalated, thousands of people from all walks of life joined the armed struggle, and the FMLN gradually took over control of almost half of the country. The Carter administration increased its military aid and U.S. Advisors took over the command of military and intelligence operations at the Salvadoran High Command. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War.