Organizing Flight: The Roots and Moral Economy of the Salvadoran Guinda System Molly Todd University of Wisconsin-Madison (PhD, May 2007) Augustana College (beginning fall 2007) Occasional Paper 95 June 2007 c/o Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee PO Box 413 Milwaukee, WI 53201 www.uwm.edu/Dept/CLACS
[email protected] 1 ORGANIZING FLIGHT: THE ROOTS & MORAL ECONOMY OF THE SALVADORAN GUINDA SYSTEM ___________ Molly Todd Introduction: A Thin, Black Line? Gladis Guardado remembers exactly when and how the civil war arrived to her home town of La Hacienda, in northern Chalatenango, El Salvador. It was mid-December 1979. The Salvadoran Army and National Guard, along with paramilitaries from ORDEN, began forcefully dislodging people from nearby villages, including La Laguna, El Jícaro, Las Vueltas, El Ticahuite and Conacaste. About 400 campesinos1 from these and other villages descended on Gladis’s town of La Hacienda, where they stayed for a few weeks before moving on to Las Aradas, a hamlet of perhaps a dozen houses located on the banks of the Sumpul River. Initially, Gladis and others from La Hacienda decided to stay home but, a few months later, a new wave of violence hit. “La guardia [the National Guard] came, shooting first and then ransacking houses and stores... They tore down the doors with machetes, killed the animals and the people who stayed in their houses... they pulled them outside at bayonet point and beat them.”2 That was in March 1980. In late April, when la guardia started to kill, Gladis Guardado and many of her neighbors decided to leave La Hacienda.