Deja Vu

Delayed Gratification

Tags:

1980s,

El Salvador,

Latin America,

Nidia Diaz

“Left-winger Wins El Salvador Poll,” BBC News, Mar. 16, 2009.

Leftist Mauricio Funes of El Salvador's former Marxist rebel FMLN party has won the country's presidential election.

He defeated his conservative rival, the Arena party's Rodrigo Avila, who has admitted defeat.

Arena had won every presidential election since the end of El Salvador's civil war 18 years ago.

Addressing jubilant supporters, Mr Funes said it was the happiest day of his life and the beginning of a new chapter of peace for the country.

Branded by his opponents as a puppet of Venezuala's President Hugo Chavez, Mr Funes vowed to respect all Salvadorian democratic institutions.

The FMLN won 51.3% of the vote against Arena's 48.7%, Reuters news agency reported.

I Was Never Alone, by Nidia Díaz, 1992.
During the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992), María Marta Valladares, a k a Nidia Díaz, served as a leader of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In April 1985, she was captured by the Salvadoran military, interrogated for sixteen days, and jailed.

I could feel in my bones the dampness of the cell; the humidity of the dawn infused the entire cell, reaching into every corner. I had never felt so steamy. There were two windows on each side of the door, and a little vent above it; all of them had bars, thirty-two in total. On the far side of the cell was a little room with the latrine and a wash basin.

I needed to rest, to recover my strength. But I could not sleep. I wondered if all those days without sleep meant I would never sleep again. I desperately needed to get away from the sound of the interrogations taking place around me. I felt only through sleep could I escape.

All the political prisoners being held there were tortured physically and psychologically. Some of them went mad. Kidnapped in the city or the mountains, you were never told where you were going, and no one ever identified themselves. Depending on circumstances and on what they thought about you, you were then handed over to the political force for questioning, a process which took a minimum of two weeks. This procedure had been legalized by Decree 50, part of the permanent state of emergency and extended month to month since 1980. Paradoxically, this decree contradicted the regime’s own constitution, which limited the interrogation period to three days, and prohibited any long periods of sleeplessness and blindfolding of the detained.

Sometimes they allowed you to sit down, but most of the time they kept you standing until you fell. I remember that in1983 Commander Galia collapsed twice and she was beaten just like everyone else. First she was held in a secret jail, until they decided to send her to the National Police Headquarters. The most common method used in El Salvador has been to simply disappear people.

In prison you lost all notion of time: days and hours ran together. The interrogators were aggressive and abusive. They yelled at you. They hit the furniture, the doors, you body. They sent electric shocks through your body as you suffocated inside a strangling dark hood. The regime’s most recent policies, in fact, tended to institutionalize this terror, to legitimize it.

In such “legal” interrogations they applied many different kinds of torture. In order to extract the truth or corroborate their speculations they used lies or half-truths hoping you would fall for them. The ultimate objective was to break your spirit, to make you feel alone, guilty. They promised that they would pardon you, that your family would be unharmed, and that your sentence would be reduced. You had only to pay the price of betrayal.

I kept seeing the detective leaning on the door frame. I thought of the officer who had tears in his eyes when he told me Miguel Castellanos had been broken by talk alone. How could it be possible? This was one of the most painful blows I had to bear.

The prison was quiet. I could no longer hear the interrogations, but their echoes played in my head. I remembered the voice of the man who had said, “Look at me, Nidia. Never forget me. The FMLN is going to win. Remember me.” How absurd! What went through my head at the time? I thought it was a trap. And the words of a certain lieutenant, after I had been singing during interrogation: “Nidia, you are unique.” I began to understand more and more. Since their words had not broken me, I knew they were going to continue to harass me in one way or another.

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