The 10-year civil war in El Salvador-a country of 5.5 million people-has claimed 65,000 lives. According to Amnesty International, tens of thousands of people from all sectors of Salvadoran society were killed (or ”disappeared”) at the hands of death squads or government forces in the early `80s. Earlier this year, death squads murdered six Jesuit priests and their household help. Gladis Sibrian, 28, is a quiet, simple country girl thrust into the middle of the brutal class struggle in her country by her association with the Roman Catholic church in El Salvador. Sibrian became aware of the death squads when two priests she worked with in her native Chalatenango were killed. She eventually had to flee the country to save her own life in 1981. She now works with Salvadoran refugees in the United States and speaks on behalf of the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation at churches around the United States. On a recent trip through the Midwest, she talked with Chicago writer Nina Burleigh about the harrowing experiences that led her to decide to join the Salvadoran rebel cause.
My parents were farmers. There were only three houses in the town where I was born. We had to move because the government was building a dam to produce energy. They paid people up to 1,000 colones (about $166) for their houses.
I was 8 or 9 then. We moved to government-constructed small houses in the city. The new houses were very close together and very tiny. We were used to trees and rivers, and this place was crowded with people.
My father left us in the middle of that situation. He left my mother with eight children. My oldest brother was 16. My mother made tortillas to sell on the street, and tamales. That was how we grew up, how we fed ourselves.
In the city we were able to go to school. I also got involved with the Catholic church and started teaching catechism when I was 13. I was thinking about becoming a nun then.
While I was working with my parish, we started doing work in the communities. A landslide had killed a lot of people, and we formed groups to find materials and help these people. In this way, we were creating a Christian-based community. It became large.
I was in charge of catechism and youth groups. Normally the catechism groups had between 60 and 100 people. We found out that over 60 percent of this community did not know how to read and write. So we created teams for teaching literacy within the parish.
Back then, I was aware of the socioeconomic injustices in my country. Then, 14 families controlled all the banks, the coffee and sugar plantations and factories. The peasants had a miserable life without education or health care. But I wasn`t clear about the government`s repression until we heard about the first of several massacres in the countryside. The first was in 1973, when peasants came fleeing into the city. Soldiers were killing peasants because the peasants were asking for better salaries on the coffee plantations.
The second massacre was in 1975, July 30. About 20 high school students were killed, hundreds were captured. My school was closed and I could hear the screaming and the shooting from a garage where we were hiding. I was 13 then, and not involved in any political movement. That was the second massacre I was aware of.
In 1977, I was still working in the church community and there was another fleeing of peasants from the countryside. People who had worked on the plantations had been protesting bad working conditions and the armed forces attacked.
In the church community, we would talk about why this was happening. Our priest started talking openly about the economic injustices that the peasants faced. He thought it was bad, and he spoke against the government.
In March 1977 a priest was killed. In May, a second was killed. There was great turmoil over this in our community. These priests were just advocating for social justice; they were not in any kind of political organization.
The government sees in every El Salvadoran a potential enemy. Anybody who opposes or criticizes the government can be a target, and it is still that way. It was normal then to see bodies in the streets of people who had been killed, and on their bodies signs saying, ”This person was killed because he was a communist.” Or you might see just a piece of a body, just a body from the waist down. Or you might see a line of bodies in the park, five in a row. In 1978, the priest I worked with was killed, too, along with students. The priest was on a retreat with young people. Soldiers came in the morning and started shooting. The priest came out and told them to stop. Then he was shot down. Tanks ran over his body and crushed it. Four other young men were killed. According to the witnesses who survived, the soldiers placed these young men on the roof and placed guns in their hands, so it would look like the soldiers were attacked. And that was the story they told.
Those killings. They changed my life. I was 15, 16 then. I had wanted to be a sister (nun). After these killings, I left home for three days to wait with my friends in the church for the bodies (to be returned for burial).
We waited a whole day and night for the bodies. My mother cried for me to come home and get some rest, but I stayed in the church until they were buried. I couldn`t think of anything else.
What I was thinking when I saw their destroyed bodies was: In this country, we can`t change things just by praying. We can`t throw flowers to the armed forces when they are killing us. We can`t just say a rosary, and say
”You are forgiven” when our brothers and sisters have been killed that way.
I thought, OK, in this country, we have tried, in the most peaceful ways, to get our rights. Many times, workers from the country went to the employers and asked for social security, for better salaries. But workers who went on strike when their demands were not met were killed. I know this because I visited factories that had been burned. Workers were going on strike and the armed forces came and burned them inside the building.
I believe in what the church has done, but I believe that our country needs other types of work, another type of struggle. Just going into the streets and going on strike demanding rights is not enough. That is what I understood as I sat there in front of those bodies.
It is not enough to go in a peaceful way.
Back then, even though I understood that, I was not ready. I was going through incredible internal turmoil because there I was, a girl who had been thinking about becoming a sister for all those years, and very seriously. But how can you be a sister and know that one of the commandments is not to kill, even when faced with violence, and at the same time realizing that in my country there is no other way? There is no other way for change to happen. Not necessarily to be violent, but to defend ourselves by taking up arms and answering them in the same language they have been using to talk to us.
I spoke at the funeral for our priest and the students. I took the microphone and, crying, I said we have to follow their example and advocate for justice in our country.
But there at the funeral, we knew there were people from the government and from the death squads watching us. My mother was so scared because I had spoken. She begged me not to. But I said, ”Mother, I feel I don`t belong to my family anymore; I belong to something bigger.”
After that, one of my close friends was killed and another, Tony, was captured and very badly tortured. They were after them for speaking at the funeral.
Tony, a member of the church community who taught catechism, was captured and tortured. While they interrogated him, they asked for me, and for my friends, Amanda and Cecilia, the leaders of the catechism groups. They had pictures of us, and they knew where my school was. They claimed I belonged to (the rebel organization, FMLN), which at that time, I would not even have dreamed of belonging to.
After Tony, it was Cecilia. She was captured, taken from her house by the death squads. She was missing for about 20 days. When they found her (dead) in the coffee plantation, she had acid on her face, they had cut off her breasts, she had bullets all over her. They had totally mutilated her, left a stick in her vagina. Her mother and father did not go to see her. They couldn`t bear to see her dead body, so we went to identify her. She was a little older than me, about 17.
My mother was terrified then. She said you have to leave now. I didn`t go out much right after that. She had a store by this time, and I didn`t go there because it was too public. In the store, my mother received a letter saying the church is a center of subversion and communism, and those who belong to it will pay with their lives. Actually, the letter was for me. Then my mother`s store was burned. After all her sacrifice to get it, it was gone.
I was still trying to go to school then. One day, on a bus, two men entered and one came up to me from the back, and made me feel that he had a gun. And he said in my ear, ”This is for you, bitch.” At the next bus stop, I got off. The two men got off after me. So I ran back to the front door. I knew it was kind of crazy, but I couldn`t think. Besides, if I ran, I knew they would shoot me.
A bus driver can be a friend or he can be one of them. He closed the front door, and he left without letting the two men back on. He didn`t stop at the next two stops, he kept going, even though people were calling to him to stop so they could get off. Then he stopped and said to me, ”Get off.”
From there, I jumped into a taxi. I was terrified. I got home and found my house had been painted in red paint with the word ”moridas,” which means ”you die.”
I left home that day. I went into hiding, staying with an aunt far away, but still in El Salvador. I wasn`t thinking of going anywhere; I wasn`t thinking of going to the United States. I then moved from house to house, until finally my poor mother told me she had found people to help me get to the U.S., where she had a relative in California.
She got me the money to leave the country. I went to Mexico then. When I was on the border, I met the coyotes, the people who bring people into the U.S. They tried to rape me inside a house, but fortunately, the neighbors heard the fight going on and came and got me. It took me days to get over that. I had been beaten badly.
Then I came to the United States, with the help of another group of people.
I have been here ever since, except for two trips back. I have lost a lot. I wanted to be a doctor back home and somebody was going to sponsor me to do that. But that is all lost. When I came here, I did not speak the language. And it was very hard. Every single day I had the faces of Cecilia and Tony before me. I couldn`t rest. I felt a lot of guilt about leaving everybody, leaving this struggle. And I got to a point where I didn`t see any door. Either I join the armed struggle or I am dead.
I was not ready to join the struggle then, but I went through a lot of thinking in this country. Also, I learned that different relatives of mine had been killed. My uncle, his head was never found. Then seven of my close relatives were killed among a group of peasants shot to death fleeing the bombing in the countryside.
In 1984 and 1985 there were massive demonstrations in El Salvador. The FMLN had become more established and the war was more defined. It was clear that there were two powers in the country. That made me feel like they have to kill us all, the entire country, in order to not leave anybody who would disagree, and that gave me trust and confidence. I realized then that I couldn`t avoid participating.
That was what made me finally seek out people in the FMLN.
I am still fearful when I go back. But it was the only way to change things in my country-not letting fear stop democratization. I have been working here now.
In 1988, I went back to El Salvador and I made my commitment to get involved in a deep way, and be a part of it, at any level. That`s how I started. Last year I went back again, and I was going to stay there, but the FMLN asked me to come back to the United States because I know the culture and language.
In this country, we have been portrayed as this bunch of Marxist-Leninist people who want to take over the land for communism, which is not true. I said if I can be used to portray our truth, I will be happy to do that.
