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The Nephew
Well,
the reason why I lost my relatives is something that I never, that I never
have understood. Because my family - my cousin was a school teacher. But
as he didn't know anything - he was innocent of all this - they picked
him, they killed him, they killed him with sticks and hacked him in the
head together with the Del Parro guide, when they shot him at the lake
and he emerged dead.
It was terrible - it was the beginning of
the tragedy of my family. And after his death the kidnappings began. There
was a time when you couldn't even walk around after dark, nor in the evening,
because the army daily... daily there were kidnappings. Then we saw a
massacre - the first, I would say, because almost 19 people died, murdered
by the army because they got caught. And at that time the army massacred
a lot of people who were working in the coffee plantations, and we began
to see the use of torture, because a lot of people were shot, and others
appeared along the roads which go to the south cost, people who had been
badly tortured.
And speaking of torture - at that time we
didn't know the word torture, we didn't know it - and that was the start
of a life where we learned what torture means, because people were strangled,
suffocated with beams and sticks and barbed wire. Tongues were cut off,
the hands were burnt, they were killed with bullets. So many things they
did to those people. They even cut off pieces of the soles of their feet
or of their hands. We began to find our people dead.
And then you begin to understand what torture
means. We certainly can't forget it. To say that you had forgotten it,
would be a lie. The community was a war zone. So we began to understand
the meaning of torture.
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