Growing up In El Salvador

Sandra was born in El Salvador, a small Central American country deeply divided between haves and have-nots, between a small ruling elite and a poor working class majority. She grew up in the city of San Vicente, an hour’s drive east of the capital of San Salvador, and an area that would become a prime battleground between the government and the guerillas once the war broke out. Growing up lower class, Sandra was raised by her mother and went to a public school in San Vicente. For Sandra, the conflict became real for her when she turned seventeen in 1977 and moved to the capital to attend college.

The Start of a War

The El Salvador Civil War stretched across twelve violent years, from 1979 to 1992, leaving 75,000 dead and many more displaced. The roots of the war ran deep, the culmination of decades of economic disparity, social inequality, and over fifty years of political repression. When Sandra was born in 1960, the elite-run government had already becoming increasingly repressive in its attempts to keep control over the restive poor majority. By the time Sandra entered a private college in San Salvador, paid for by her wealthy stepbrother, protests and demonstrations against the government were filling the capital.

Three events ultimately tipped the country into civil war. First there was the military coup in 1979 lead by the Revolutionary Government Junta (JRG) that overthrew the sitting president. Then in March of 1980, Archbishop Romero, an outspoken advocate of the oppressed and critic of the government, was assassinated while in the midst of conducting Mass. Finally, the Archbishop’s funeral, which was transformed into a site of carnage as the hundreds of thousands of mourners were violently attacked by unidentified combatants.

Fully-fledged civil war was declared in 1980, the year Sandra graduated from college in San Salvador. On one side was the military-controlled, JRG government and on the other a coalition of socialist, guerilla groups calling themselves the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The following twelve years were marred by massacres, death squads, bombings, disappearances, and the targeted execution of religious leaders. A new graduate and, a year later, a new mother of a baby boy, Sandra spent the first three years of the war working in the capital and commuting home to her mother’s house in San Vicente each day. As the violence grew, particularly in and around her home city, her commute grew more and more treacherous. Her bus was often stopped for hours at a time by military clashes up and down the roads.

In 1983, Sandra decided she needed to make a hard decision….