"It
was 1987, the second of November when they attacked our cooperative,
El Juste, on a Tuesday at three in the morning. [ed. note - a Witness for Peace account says
it was Nov. 3rd, and the calendar shows that Nov. 3rd was a Tuesday].
The child [Alexi] was recently born. He was two months old. Even with the small
military base near the cooperative there were only about
five of us against 57 contra. My wife, Geraldine, carrying
Alexi, escaped with the others but returned when she thought
she heard some people shouting, 'We have beat them, they have already
run away!'" "When she was entering, they [the contra)] shouted,
'here comes a piricuaca' ["rabid dog," a word used by the contra
for the Sandinistas]. They started to shoot machine guns and one
of them caught her here in the back and it went through her and took
off Alexi's leg. She fell down and then got up, she got up with one
hand grabbing him and the other holding her stomach… "I watched all
this from a hill… I wanted to go down to them but the leader grabbed me
and said I would only be killed. But with that pain seeing my son shot
and the woman, my wife, also shot, I wanted to go there but I stayed.
From there we saw them take all the shoes, clothes, and everything
we had in the cooperative store and everyone of the houses lit on fire,
burning. "When we arrived at the base, there were her two brothers.
One had been shot from head to foot. The other had a bullet
in his forehead and had been set on fire. Then we found her mother,
dead, in a burned house under some zinc roofing. Finally, we found
Geraldine with everything inside on the outside."
|