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“With Monsignor Romero my faith returned because I started seeing a different kind of church; a practice of the faith that identified itself with the majority of the people; a church that was in communion with the people.” |
I am from the eastern part of El Salvador, from Usulután, near Morazán. I am from a mixed family that comes from both farmland and from the city. It is a very large family and a very religious one. Many members of my family died at a very young age because of parasitic infections. My grandparents died from heart attacks. They never had the opportunity to see a physician.
This made me want to do something. I thought being a priest would allow me to heal and give me the opportunity to study, so I entered the seminary. But after two years I left and had a chance to follow my heart.
Through lots of effort, I got a scholarship to study medicine. As soon as I started medical school, I volunteered in clinics in the most impoverished areas of the city. Through student associations I also organized campaigns in the countryside, promoting the concepts of public health.
At that time (we're talking about 1978-1979), the idea of war was just starting in El Salvador. There was fierce repression by the government against anybody who was in solidarity with the people; anyone who wanted to express their thoughts; anybody who wanted to elicit change in the society. The groups that were the most repressed were those doing community work and certain sectors of the church that were receiving refugees from northern El Salvador where the bombing already had started. During this period I worked with Monsignor Romero, who had asked medical students to help him. I was in the last years of my medical training and I was coordinating the Clinica de Ajaus in San Salvador, where most of the people who were victims of repression would go because they were afraid to go to the other hospitals.
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| Dr. Juan Romagoza (right) speaking with DGH Board Member Wendy Johnson, at the 2002 DGH General Assembly. Join us at the next GA in Atlanta, July 30-August 1, 2004.
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This was a very special period for me because, while I have always considered myself a person of faith, my experience in the seminary had started me on the way to losing my faith. I lost more of my faith at the university. But that all changed when I met Romero. With him my faith returned because I saw a different kind of church, a practice of the faith that identified with the majority of the people. The church that Romero promoted was a church that not only identified with the baptisms and communions of the sons of the rich (as it had in the past), but one that was in communion with the poor, con el pueblo. And not just to sit once a month at the table with them, but actually to live with them, to cry with them, to be with them, or as Monsignor Romero said, "to exist with the people."
This was the church that rechanneled the thoughts of many students and made us re-identify ourselves with it. For that church we were willing to suffer even the ultimate consequences that people were suffering because of the political regime that existed in El Salvador. This repression touched me as it did many people who worked in health.
One day we were in the north of the country, in Chalatenango, with the church. We were going to start a clinic. That day, in fact, we were going to have a surgery. It was a day dedicated to the Virgen of Guadalupe, who is very much revered in my country. Toward the end of the festivities, when we were still seeing patients and initiating the health promoter training, when everything was so festive, two truckloads of national guardsmen pulled up and started machine-gunning everybody in sight. I was in the clinic door and the first burst of gunfire hit me in the foot and in the head, and I just fell down. After the shooting, the soldiers started taking all the bodies to a truck where they were inspecting them to see who was dead and who was alive.
I was one of the first ones they found alive and they tried to kill me right then and there. Fortunately, the machine gun locked and did not fire. When they tried to cock the gun again, they kicked me and my backpack came open. They saw all the surgical equipment inside, but they did not know it was surgical equipment. They thought it was some sort of special weapon. That surgical equipment and my shoes saved my life. I had lost one of my shoes because of the gunfire, but I still had the other shoe on. Since the shoe was Range Rover brand, the soldiers thought I was a commander in the forces. I was the only person who survived that day—all the rest were killed and thrown into a mass grave. I was taken by helicopter to a town called El Paraiso, and from there to San Salvador.
In San Salvador my clothes were taken off, I was blindfolded and I was beaten. After that I was taken to see other prisoners who had been tortured. I could see some of them hanging from the ceiling; women with their breasts cut off, bleeding. Then I was tortured.
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“I was taken to see other prisoners who had been tortured. I could see them hanging from the ceiling; women with their breasts cut off, bleeding. Then I was tortured.” |
Throughout the whole interrogation process they just kept asking me why I was there with "those people." They kept telling me that all farmers are communists, all poor people are communists, all priests are communists. The punishment had to be the same for everyone, they said, even for those who helped them. I suffered all kinds of torture in the three weeks I was held by the National Guard. One of the worst I can remember is the electric shock. Everyday I was subjected to electric shock. I was also beaten, burned, raped; a hood was put on top of my head. Their goal was to make me say that poor people had guns, that farmers had guns, and that the priests and religious people were the ones giving the campesinos guns. But I could not say that because in my experience I had never seen any weapons among the priests or the campesinos.
Another reason I was tortured is that two of my uncles on my mother's side of the family were colonels in the Salvadoran army. High officials in the army went to visit me while I was detained and asked me what role my uncles played in the guerrilla war.
When I denied all their allegations, the torture got worse. They strung me up from the ceiling with wire through my finger tips. They called it the Chinese fingers. After hanging that way for ten days, they shot me in the left arm to show everybody that I was a leftist. They also cut off the tips of my fingers on my right hand.
I believe they had already made the decision to let me live, but they wanted to leave me mutilated so that I would always remember. And eventually it did happen. Through the influence of my family, particularly one of my uncles, I was released. Just before they released me, I was warned not to go back to help "those people."
So there I was wounded from the torture, knowing I could not go to the hospitals because the hospitals were controlled by the military. Lots of my friends who were physicians said they could not risk helping me either. Only one physician friend helped me and he only helped me twice because his family warned him that he was putting his life and theirs at risk. (In fact, one year after that physician helped me he was assassinated—they put a hand grenade in his chest and exploded his body to pieces.) My family told me, "Get out of the country. Get out of here because they will kill you and they will kill all of us." So I accepted that I had to leave. But that was an even greater torture for me, the torture of leaving my family and leaving my people.
I had to escape like a common criminal—without any passport or papers. I went through Guatemala, but Guatemala was in the same situation as El Salvador, so I had to hide myself there as well. Some friends took me to Chiapas, Mexico, and left me in a church there. At that church I began my recovery. A little while later I went to Mexico City and that is where I really started recovering. I actually wanted to stay in Mexico because Mexico is near El Salvador. I did not want to go North; I wanted to stay near my people. In Mexico City I met a very good priest, Sergio Mendez Arcel, who was very helpful to all the Guatemalans and the Salvadorans who were escaping their countries. He gave me the opportunity to open a health clinic in Cuernavaca, near Mexico City. In Cuernavaca, outside the clinic, we received a lot of refugees.
This clinic became a haven for immigrants and refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala who were on their way to the United States. On one occasion, I had a patient who was diabetic and needed insulin. She was on her way to the US, and that is how I ended up in the US, accompanying this elderly lady so that I could control her insulin intake.
Upon crossing the border, we were given advice on where to find our people, "If you're going to Los Angeles, go to McArther Park. If you're going to San Francisco [another park]. If you're going to Washington [another one]." And they were right. After sleeping only two days in McArther Park, I ran into somebody from my hometown. He connected me with a cousin and family in Los Angeles. I spent a couple of months in LA, but then I decided to go to San Francisco where I had family. But when I arrived, my relatives already knew what had happened to me and said it would be too risky for them to take care of me.
So I went to another church. There were many Salvadorans there. The priest asked me, "Can you help me with the needs I have here with this community?" He did not need to ask me twice. I immediately started organizing the community. We founded an organization called the Central American Refugee Committee to help us fulfill our basic needs: housing, food, how to get work, legal assistance, counseling, and also to speak about what had happened to us. There we found that by talking, by sharing, by expressing what we had felt, we felt better. There I learned something that I had never learned in medical school: the true value of psychotherapy.
What we wanted was to stop the terror that was reigning in El Salvador, and the only weapon we had was our voice, our pain. At that time the US was sending one million dollars a day in military aid to El Salvador. They were deporting 100 Salvadorans a day, putting them directly into the hands of the military they had fled from in the first place. We had to do something.
We trained mental health promoters because we found value in testimony: The personal value of how we can get out of this situation ourselves and at the same time how we could convince the American people that their taxes were being used for terror; how we could show Americans that their hands were covered with blood—the blood of innocents in El Salvador.
I want to share something that has happened recently that I am very happy about. Four years ago I was asked if I wanted to be a part of a civil lawsuit against a group of Salvadoran generals who had been implicated in torture and violence in El Salvador and were now living in the US.
For me, this was one more step towards my own process of recovery. I also saw this as an opportunity to achieve social justice. I personally felt that these scars that I have in myself, these spiritual scars, will not heal as physical scars so easily do. With psychological scars, just like with physical scars, if there's something rotten inside, something infected, they simply do not heal. Psychological wounds, just like physical wounds, have to be opened, cleaned and disinfected so the healing process can really be achieved. If there is no justice, there still is infection in those wounds.
I felt that only by having those generals be judged and found guilty would that pus start to get out of the wound. So, with other Salvadorans, and the aid of lawyers, psychologists and psychotherapists working pro bono, we initiated this case. The good news is that the verdict was just recently announced and we won. They were found guilty and ordered to pay $54.6 million in damages! (For details visit Justice & the Generals at www.pbs.org.)
It may be hard for you to understand how this has changed something completely for me. I don't expect to see any money, but now when I talk about my trauma and my torture, it's a completely different feeling for me. I now see light at the end of the tunnel. Now I believe in justice. Until this moment I had not been able to bury those who died. Now I believe that they can rest in peace, because these two generals represent everything that was bad and evil in El Salvador. Seventy-five percent of those killed during the war in El Salvador were killed between 1979 and1983, when those two generals reigned. They are the ones responsible for the massacre in the Cathedral on the 8th of March of 1979, for the murder of Monsignor Romero.
This judgment is also an international message. The message is that now each and every tyrant or torturer will not be able to just retire in peace. Generally, dany abuse of power is also connected to corruption, to stealing money from the government. These people pillage, rape, murder and rob, and then they come to the US and retire in tranquility. Now the tyrants will think they have to go some other place. And some of them who are hiding here are starting to pack their bags. Recently four more cases have been brought against military officers living in this country.
In my own country, where the norm is to bury these things and not speak about them, a dialogue has begun. Those who had disappeared, who were tortured, who suffered, are now finding that they are able to speak. This is healthy. I think it's a recovery of a conscience, a recovery of a health that was lost, and of a justice that seemed to have been lost.
— Read the full text of Dr. Romagoza's speech, which includes an overview of
the magnificent work being done at La Clinica del Pueblo.
