So Rosa remained with her father. On Sept. 14 a group of soldiers came to their house and demanded a chicken, sat down and cooked it near the house. They remained for several hours, harassing the family, telling them that they knew the house was a center for subversives who came there to eat. When they finally left, the family held a discussion. The brothers were going off to perform that night in a nearby town, but they all decided to leave town and look for a safer place to live the next day. Before going to bed that night, Rosa, eight months pregnant, packed her bags.
About 2 a.m., her father, Isidro, 62, shook her awake. He was in his underwear, surrounded by soldiers.
”Get up,” she said he told her, ”they`ve come to kill us now.”
The soldiers took Rosa`s oldest daughter, Aminta, 14, off toward their headquarters. They took Rosa and her father to a field just outside of town. Still dressed in a nightgown, Rosa stood with her father as the soldiers began to shout at her, demanding to know if she was helping the ”subversives.”
”I tried to scream out,” she said, ”so people would know what was happening. They grabbed me and taped my mouth shut. Their leader told the men to kill me, and they threw me face down and cut me with a machete across the shoulder. They turned me over and two soldiers raped me. After it was over, two soldiers tried to find my pulse to see if I was still alive. I was in shock, and I don`t think I was breathing. One of the soldiers put a machete point to my throat and stabbed, while the others got scrap wood from the ground and began to cover me up.”
As Rosa lay under the wood, she said she heard her father crying before the soldiers cut his throat. Then she heard her daughter Aminta`s voice. She learned later that Aminta had been gang-raped before being brought to the same field. The girl was hysterical, Rosa said, asking for her and her father.
”I wanted to call out to her, but I was so frightened myself,” Rosa said. ”What can I do? I kept thinking, `I don`t have a weapon! If only I could do something!` I thought that if I could only continue to live, I would denounce the military for what they had done to us. Aminta started screaming: `They`re killing me! They`re killing me!` They were slitting her throat.”
Rosa remained motionless under the pile of wood until after the soldiers left. Finally, she dug herself out and found Aminta`s body. Panic-stricken about her two youngest children, Elena, 9, and Alvardo, 2, she sneaked back to her father`s house and found them unharmed.
She gathered them up and left immediately, walking 10 miles until a passing bus picked them up and took them to a convent. The nuns treated her wounds for eight days, then began hiding her in houses for three weeks while she awaited the birth of her child. On Oct. 16, 1980, the nuns spirited her into a hospital, where Brigida was born.
When the soldiers in Osicala discovered that Rosa was not dead, she was hunted, as were her musician brothers, supposedly the main targets of the September raid on her father`s house. Eventually Rosa was reunited with her brothers in a town near San Salvador, and one by one they were spirited out of the country to resettle in Costa Rica.
Now, seven years later, Rosa lives with her three children in a shabby little house in a beautiful mountain town an hour`s drive outside San Jose, Costa Rica`s capital. Her brothers live in the same town, and they have kept their group intact, changing its name to Evolution. She was given immediate refugee status on her arrival in Costa Rica in April, 1981, and lived for several years with help from a UN emergency fund administered by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. She is now off the dole and in a program that is trying to integrate her fully into Costa Rican society. She has found a modicum of peace, but it has not been easy.
”Now I work as a cook in a day-care center,” she said. ”Elena (now 17 years old) is in high school, and Alvardo and Brigida (now 9 and 7) are in primary school. When we first got here, Elena couldn`t go to school. She couldn`t even leave the house because for the first year all she did was cry. I finally had to get her psychological help. She is much better now.”
Rosa receives $120 a month as a cook. Her rent for her house is $47 a month, so there isn`t much left for life`s frills.
”The kids see other kids at school with nice clothes and other things. I can`t afford anything but rent, electricity, water and food, and that makes them feel bad. My brothers try to help out, but they have families, too.
”I don`t know if I can ever go back now to El Salvador. I would never want to go back to our town, and I don`t know how I`d make a living there anymore. Right now I just want to see my children in school. I want Elena to learn some sort of skill so she can take care of herself, and then I`ll worry about the younger ones.”
To date, an estimated 65,000 people have been killed in El Salvador, most of them civilians. Most of the fatalities are the handiwork of paramilitary death squads or the army in massive military sweeps of contested countryside. Their strategy, not always artfully executed, is taken right out of U.S. counterinsurgency textbooks: Deny the enemy the comfort and assistance of possibly sympathetic civilians.
That means forcing civilians into larger cities and towns, where they become displaced people. Or settling them in government-run camps, where they can be monitored. Or chasing people such as Rosa out of the country.
Since the fall of Nicaragua to the Sandinistas, El Salvador has become the keystone of U.S. policy in Central America. President Reagan has wanted not only to neutralize communist advances in the Third World but to reverse communist influence where it already had taken root.
El Salvador became the model for the Reagan administration`s battle against communism in Central America. First, it wanted to reconstruct the Salvadoran army into a highly professional force of 54,000 to take on the 6,000-man guerrilla forces. Then it sought to retire the military from a direct role in politics and replace it with more credible, reform-minded democratic leaders to enhance the country`s national and international image. Finally it tried to upgrade the Salvadoran economy to win the hearts, minds and allegiance of the general population.
To achieve those ends, the United States has poured enormous resources into El Salvador since 1980, making it the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world. According to one study, the U.S. spent $3.2 billion in overall aid to El Salvador between 1980 and 1987, a stunning figure that averages out to $6,700 per capita for El Salvador`s population. That is more than six times the per-capita income of the country.
But this has bought little peace or prosperity for El Salvador. Unemployment has risen to 33 percent from 21 percent, illiteracy to 51 percent from 43 percent, houses without drinking water to 81 percent from 56 percent. The U.S.-equipped, -trained and -advised Salvadoran military, despite its 9-to-1 numerical advantage over guerrilla forces and $1 billion in direct U.S. aid for state-of-the-art weaponry, has not fared well. National Liberation Front guerrillas remain strong, operating in all 14 provinces of El Salvador. The U.S. effort to shape a moderate, reform-minded government through the election of Jose Napoleon Duarte in 1984 has proved equally disastrous. Under a cloud of scandal, Duarte`s Christian Democrats lost their majority in the Salvadoran National Assembly this year. The party is accused of
misappropriating and misspending hundreds of millions of dollars of development aid.
Death-squad assassinations, which had been waning after threats of withdrawal of U.S. military aid in 1983, are on the rise again. Guerrilla terrorism is on the rise, too, especially in San Salvador. Car bombs have emptied the city`s most fashionable night-life districts.
Whatever feelings of hope that might have existed four years ago when Duarte won the presidency now seem crushed. A recent local university poll indicates that most Salvadoran voters believe that none of the existing political parties in the country speaks for them.
The collapse of the Salvadoran economy and the general political malaise of the country have had a direct impact on the United States. An estimated 1 million Salvadorans, 20 percent of the population, now live in the United States. The U.S. State Department estimates that 550,000 to 600,000 of them do so illegally. They are not classified as refugees but as illegal economic migrants.
In April, 1987, Duarte personally appealed to Reagan not to round up the illegal Salvadoran immigrants and send them home. The money the illegals send home annually to support their families, $350 million to $600 million, is a major source of foreign exchange for El Salvador. More serious, in Duarte`s view, was that the sudden influx of returned citizens searching for jobs would overwhelm the already war-crushed economy.
