A Grim Discovery in El Mozote

Many assumed I died in the massacre of December 1981, when government soldiers killed hundreds of people in El Mozote, my village in El Salvador. The victims were accused of collaborating with left-wing guerrillas, but most of them were women, children and old people. Soldiers tortured my family, poured gasoline on them and set my childhood home on fire. But I survived, because I was in San Salvador, working and studying for my accounting degree. It was only years later that I had thoughts of moving back.

The civil war lasted more than a decade, and I returned for the first time around 1994, a couple of years after the government and guerrillas signed a peace agreement. I spent hours walking around. I saw skulls on one side of me, skulls on the other, dug-out trenches and burned-up motorcycles. There were animal skeletons all over. There were scattered bullet casings from M16s and German G3s. There wasn’t a single house intact. It was hard to come back to the place I was raised to find no one from my family left — to think of how they died. I remembered where I’d played with my sisters and brothers, where I went to work with my father, where I fetched water from the well to bring my mother for her housework.

I vowed never to go back, but several years later I heard that people were usurping the land that had been abandoned, fencing off parcels and selling them, and that they were planning to take my property. “The owners aren’t here anymore,” they were saying. “When they left, they lost their land rights.” Thankfully, someone said, “No, Orlando’s not dead, he’s alive and he lives in La Libertad.” At the time, gangs were beginning to come to San Salvador, and I had a teenage daughter and a teenage son. And so in 2000 I decided to live in El Mozote again.

I began on my own. I built a tiny shack to stake my claim on the land. I traveled back and forth every 15 days to visit my family in the city. Finally I persuaded my wife, Míriam, to move there with the kids. I told her I’d already planted corn, beans, yucca and bananas. “Are you coming or not?” I said. She agreed.

Míriam was born in the city, so she came mostly out of love. I bought her some chickens to entertain her, and I showed her the spot where we were starting to plot our home. “This is where I’m going to build our house,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t like it here.” Well, that was that. She pointed at an open area under a bamboo patch, the exact place I’d grown up.

First we built a wood-and-sheet-metal shack, where we lived for six years. But in 2010, I received a grant to buy materials for a cement-block structure. Now we could build a more respectable house.

As soon as we started digging the foundation, we started to find things: adobe, roof tiles, burned wood. Then we found personal belongings. Then we found human remains. At one point my son jumped back and dropped his shovel; a skull came out in a chunk of dirt. It looked as if it were making a face at him. It was my mother’s skull. How did I know? I recognized her dentures.

I had a premonition that we might find something, but we thought my family died in the center of town. If we had constructed the house just a few meters away, we wouldn’t have found them.

I didn’t want to tell anyone. But the workers couldn’t keep a secret. They told everyone in town: “We found the bones of Don Orlando Márquez’s family!”

So I confessed to the coordinator of the housing project. “We found the bones of my family,” I said. “Should I dig them up, or what? Should we stop construction?”

“We can’t stop,” he said. “If we stop, you won’t have a house.” The project had a time limit. So we decided to dig up some of the bones, the ones that were in the way.

The forensic anthropologists came, and the human rights people from the Catholic Church, and judges and prosecutors. But the investigation ended up taking three years. It hasn’t been easy. The bones sat in a plastic bag in our living room for the first year and a half until the government took them to be analyzed. They returned them a year later.

We thought we had found five people: my parents and three of my siblings, José, Edith and Yesenia, who was only 18 months old. But the analysis said there were at least 15 individuals. That’s when we realized the Guevara family — our neighbors growing up — must have died there, too. When the investigation was finally done, we put all the bones in a coffin and buried them under the monument in the center of town.

We still find teeth in the ground sometimes, in the dirt around the edges of our house. We’ve gotten used to it. As I tell my children, sooner or later we’re all headed underground.