Spanish teacher Patricia Portillo went home this summer for only the third time in 28 years. She returns infrequently because her home town of Veracruz––and, consequently, all of El Salvador––evokes terrible memories.

In the ’70s, El Salvador was fraught with discontent stemming from social inequalities, a poor economy and restrictions implemented by dictators.

This led to a civil war between the right-wing National Conciliation Party and the left-wing antigovernment guerrilla units led by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.

Amidst all this chaos lived a young Portillo with her mother and five siblings.

“We lived under more fear of being raped than being killed,” Portillo said.

Her father emigrated to the United States in 1974 to earn money for their family.

For a while, Portillo and her family lived with their uncle, but later––when she was 9 and before the war broke out––they left to live by themselves in a house purchased with her father’s
savings.

But when the civil war started, Portillo’s childhood became a nightmare.

From 1979-81, right-wing death squads killed approximately 30,000 people, and military death squads decimated villages that were thought to support guerrillas.

“We were conscious of the fact that we were an easier target without a man in the house,” Portillo said.

Approximately 75,000 people died because of the civil war––the majority of them civilians.

At Portillo’s school, death squads kidnapped the groundskeeper, then raped his wife and chopped off her hair.

“I was in the fifth grade when that happened, and I still remember,” Portillo said. “Not only did they damage the family, but they terrified all the kids and teachers of the school.”

This wasn’t the only strategy the death squads used.

According to Portillo, a military helicopter flew back and forth on the edge of the school to threaten the teachers.

“(These events) caused me to have nightmares,” she said. “Looking back, they caused me to have a different understanding on what war is like than most people,” she said.

Portillo’s cousin, Jose Guillermo Rivas Gonzalez, who was part of this social movement, tried to organize a union for fair wages and better working conditions.

“He knew he was going to get killed, and people were begging him to take the bribe that the right wing was offering him (to stop organizing a union),” she said.

Rivas Gonzalez, age 24, was on his way to work and about to enter a bus when he noticed people following him. To escape his pursuers, he ran into a shop. The death squad that was following him entered the shop and gunned him down in front of witnesses.

Portillo’s mother left for the United States in 1982 with Portillo’s three older siblings.

“There wasn’t enough money to take all six,” she said. “And the older girls were more at risk of being raped.”

Portillo left El Salvador with the other two siblings for the United States in 1983, when she was
13, and didn’t return until 1990.

Although the war was over in 1992, violence was still prevalent.

“Things kept on escalating,” she said. “The first night, I got sick to my stomach because I heard shootings and bombings.”

Portillo returned again in 2000 and spent a month in El Salvador.

However, as soon as she arrived, she could see that not much had changed.

“There was some economic development, but there was a feeling that the countryside hadn’t changed at all,” she said.

An example of the lack of social change in El Salvador was when she and her husband stumbled upon farmers trimming coffee trees.

“When my husband asked, ‘How much do these people get paid?’ the man in charge said that they didn’t get paid at all,” Portillo said. “He said that they just take home the wood they chop.”

When she visited this year, she took her daughter, fifth grader Gabi Alvarado.

“Gabi would tease me that she wasn’t El Salvadorian until she went there,” Portillo said.

The two went to the beach, traveled and spent time with family.

“(Gabi) played with little girls her age,” Portillo said. “Within a week she had the Salvadorian accent (down).”

Alvarado was very curious as well.

“She asked a lot of questions like ‘Why is it that people don’t have any money here?’” Portillo said.

Portillo believes the money sent by people in the United States to their families in El Salvador keeps them in a survival mode, and this, ultimately, keeps them from rising up.

“You can tell when you’re walking around in the rural areas who has families in the United States,” she said. “They’re better off.”

But all wasn’t bad when she returned this year. Portillo met up with a best friend that she hadn’t seen since she left.

“It was really sweet to hear she had kept the letters that I sent to her when I arrived in the United States,” she said.

“It was difficult—sort of like a bittersweet moment because our time and space separates us.”