July 10, 2002
This report was written by Mary Beth Kaufman, law
student, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley.
Trial Update, Day 9 - Testimony of Neris Gonzalez and Psychologist Glenn Caddy
The plaintiffs rested their case today with one of the most emotional testimonies in the case, as the third plaintiff, Neris Gonzales, took the stand. Ms. Gonzales began by telling the jury about the Salvadoran community where she was raised, San Nicolas Lempa, an agricultural community of peasants who worked on cotton and coffee plantations. Ms. Gonzalez grew up in a small house made of bamboo with her 12 siblings. To get to school, she walked an hour and a half each way. She became active in the church as a child and later became a catechist, preparing the church and sacraments for the local priest’s weekly visits and assisting with confirmations and communions. She felt a strong connection to the other communities in the area with whom her community shared church activities. As a catechist, she met Archbishop Romero twice. Her family also owned a small store which would lend products to the workers until they got paid.
One day she went to the fields and saw that the peasants picking cotton were only getting paid for half of what they had picked because they could not read the scale on which the cotton was weighed. She had studied through the ninth grade and decided to begin a literacy program through the church. The program was popular; many workers would come after the work day and learned to count from one to a hundred. With the assistance of the church, Ms. Gonzalez also began a program to train health care providers in order to compensate for the lack of medical services in the community. To help with the health program, Ms. Gonzalez used the book “Where There is No Doctor”– a book of diagnoses and treatments used in communities throughout the world that lack access to basic medical assistance.
When plaintiffs’ lawyer Jim Green asked Ms. Gonzales what happened in October 1979, she explained that it was the month of the coup, on October 15. After the coup, she explained, the repression got worse. The National Guard was constantly present in her community. They harassed, threatened, and abducted and killed whole families. Her house was under constant surveillance; the Guardsmen would come in and ask her why she had a first aid kit and “Where There is No Doctor?” As the repression worsened, Ms. Gonzalez called the Archbishop, the only one to whom denunciations could be made. Archbishop Romero would denounce the violence in his weekly homilies which were heard throughout the country. In her community, where there was no electricity, the people would gather around battery-operated radios. One time when she called the Archbishop, he told her “My child, let us have faith in God. God will take care of these people and lead them to understand.” Ms. Gonzalez would report the mutilated and disfigured cadavers, found more and more as time went on, to the Legal Aid Office of the Archbishop. One day, a close friend of Ms. Gonzales who also worked with the church was taken from a bus at one of the many National Guard checkpoints. The next day her decapitated body was found. Another friend was similarly killed and left with the sign “This is the way communists die.” Ms. Gonzalez told the jury she was so frightened that she would sleep with her little brothers and sisters in her arms, when she could sleep at all.
At noon on December 26, 1979, Ms. Gonzalez went to sell meat at the market. As she was leaving she was captured by three National Guardsmen and a civilian who accused her of being a subversive. The women in the market yelled, “Why are you taking Neris?” She was well-known and loved at the market, and she was eight months pregnant at the time. Before she continued with her story, Ms. Gonzalez paused and said, “I hope I have the strength to tell you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what happened to me in the National Guard post, after October 1979, when these men took over as Minister of Defense and Director-General of the National Guard.”
Giving her testimony well into the afternoon, Ms. Gonzalez explained how she was taken to the National Guard post where she was severely tortured and repeatedly gang raped by successive groups of National Guardsmen every night for over two weeks. The first night she was in a main office with a telephone, which rang frequently. During her weeks of captivity, Ms. Gonzalez was also forced to watch the torture and execution of others, including a teenage boy. She was interrogated about why she had taught peasants to count. After her brutal and relentless weeks of torture, she was thrown with a group of cadavers into a garbage dump. After she was found, she was nursed back to health over a period of 6 months. During that time, her son was born disfigured from the torture and died two months later. She explained how much fear and terror existed in El Salvador, too much to ever denounce what had happened. Archbishop Romero, the only person to whom they could make denunciations, was assassinated in March of 1980 after calling on the military to end the repression. Later, Ms. Gonzales moved to Chicago and received treatment at the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture. In Chicago, she is active in the church and works on issues of urban ecology.
On cross examination, defense attorney Kurt Klaus asked Ms. Gonzalez about her living children and her marital status. She explained that she had been married and divorced before her capture, and that her second husband, who was also the father of her unborn child at the time of her capture, had also been disappeared. Klaus then questioned Ms. Gonzalez about her involvement in the lawsuit and whether she knew anyone who had ever received compensation for human rights abuses from any group in El Salvador. She answered that she knew of no such thing.
When asked on redirect about her purpose in becoming a plaintiff in the lawsuit, she answered, “To tell the truth, to denounce what happened to me, to tell of the torture. I have had this with me for more than 20 years.” She ended her explanation to the jury saying, “I want to tell you that this is the best offering I can give to my son.”
In the afternoon, plaintiff’s put on their final witness, Glenn Caddy, clinical and forensic psychologist and a specialist in trauma. After explaining his credentials, he described the common psychological effects suffered by torture survivors. He explained to the jury that all of the plaintiffs suffered forms of post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety, among other long-term effects of their torture. After his testimony and a brief cross-examination, the plaintiffs rested their case. The jury was then dismissed.
The defense case will begin tomorrow, and defendant General Garcia is
expected to testify.
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