Ana Guadalupe Martinez was a student in El Salvador who joined the leftist FMLN guerrilla movement, eventually becoming a commander in the rebel army. This interview, which was conducted for the COLD WAR series in September and October of 1997, has been translated from Spanish.

On joining the Salvadoran rebels:

The division in society during the Seventies was what actually set the stage for the confrontation. When I started university, there was a lot of talk about the 14 families who owned most of the lands in El Salvador, who owned the coffee plantations, the cotton-growing farms, all the most luxurious mansions in San Salvador and in the provinces, about their children having the opportunity to study abroad. So those 14 families practically ruled the country, because the army was at their service.

On the other side, there was the rest of us, including the middle class. And no one supported the oligarchy; we were all on the other side. [There was a] very profound division between rich and poor, between those who owned everything and those who owned nothing; because even the middle class felt deprived given that there was no political freedom -- they may have lived comfortably at home but they had no political freedom, so they felt deprived just like the poorest of the poor. That was the ideal stage for the development of conditions which would lead to a confrontation. ...

I began my studies at the National University, and I found an environment buzzing with political activity. When we began to learn about the workers' living conditions and about the state of health and education, it had an impact on young people like myself. ... One of the things that shocked me most was the state of health of the Salvadoran population, especially when we started doing fieldwork and visiting the marginal areas of San Salvador. And of course what one saw there was poverty: poor housing, poor nutrition, a large number of Salvadorans living in very difficult conditions, which was something I had never seen before. ...

I was contacted by a colleague who lived in the same city as I did, because he knew that I had voiced my indignation about the health situation, the poverty and the repression; he had found out from my comments that I was shocked at what I was starting to learn about, and this led him to ask me to become involved with the guerrilla movement -- not directly, but by doing him a favor, because he had a friend who had a security problem. At that time I didn't know what a "security problem" was, and he explained that [this friend] had had a problem with the police. I didn't really understand what sort of problem it was, but it turned out to be Joaquin Villalobos, who, together with some other comrades, had had a confrontation with the police. And because they were afraid of being detected or identified, they had decided to leave their homes and seek refuge somewhere else where they couldn't be found so quickly. So this comrade -- whose pseudonym was Marcelo -- asked me if I could put up this young man in my house, because, as he explained, he had a problem and he needed to be put up somewhere where he couldn't easily be found out. I agreed, because I wasn't conscious of any danger or any particular fear at the time, since I was unaware of the existence of a guerrilla movement or guerrilla fighters, and I didn't know what Marxism or communism was; I just regarded it as a favor, a humanitarian gesture, something one could do without committing oneself to anything.

[Later], they would ask me to take some small parcels, whose contents I didn't know about. And because I didn't care and had no idea what I was carrying, I had no hesitation in taking them, for example, from San Salvador to San Miguel, or from San Salvador to Santa Ana. What these parcels actually contained were propaganda leaflets, calling [on people] to organize clandestinely and join the armed struggle. So those were my first tasks, to act as a postal service, taking packets and finding out information. ...

After that period of carrying out small tasks, they started asking me to do other things, until finally they explained to me that there was guerrilla warfare going on in the country, that it was an armed movement, and that it was clandestine and couldn't come out in the open because they were being persecuted by the police and the army. So they explained that the only way the military government in El Salvador could be confronted was through armed struggle. ...

They persuaded me quite easily. Why? Because I witnessed [the poverty and repression] every day, I experienced them, and I did think it was true that the situation had to be changed. Of course, that didn't mean that I wasn't scared, because being told that I had to learn to handle pistols, which was dangerous -- because it was one thing to be at home with one's family, even if one felt differently from the government, and it was another thing to be involved in the guerrilla movement, to carry arms and confront the security forces and the army. The risk of losing one's life was very real, and it was quite probable that we wouldn't survive that situation.

On being arrested:

The circumstances of my arrest were rather special. They captured another comrade who had been active in the same area as myself, and after being subjected to torture, humiliation and threats, this comrade decided to cooperate, and amongst other things he identified me, who had been working closely with him in the same area. And since it would have been difficult to find me on the basis of his description, they drove him in patrols cars around San Miguel, which is a small city, looking for me. I didn't have much warning, because although I knew that he had been captured, I didn't imagine that he would decide to cooperate by pointing me out directly. ...

When they captured me, I was unarmed, despite the fact that we almost always carried arms; but I was dressed in such a way as to make it difficult for me to be recognized. However, he had been so close to me that no matter how many wigs or different clothes I might put on, he would always recognize me. So he recognized me while driving around with the political police in several cars, and they captured me in the city of San Miguel. ...

The capture really was very violent, because the first thing they need to show is their power, that they are capable of controlling the person they've captured. And therefore, in order to weaken the resistance I put up when they captured me, they beat me up a lot. And of course, since I wasn't carrying my pistol, my resistance was basically just a way of saying, "I won't let myself [be taken]." So it was a very violent moment and I suffered many beatings. I tried to get away, and I managed to break loose from the one who was holding me and almost managed to escape, but others immediately came to his aid, and that led them to beat me up very badly. They even hit me a number of times with their pistols to stop me resisting. Captures were always very violent at that time, as a way of creating the feeling that all was lost and that one wouldn't come out of that situation alive. All of us who were involved as guerrillas in the underground struggle knew that to fall into the hands of the army or the political police meant almost certain death, because they didn't spare anyone's life. They killed everyone. If one refused to cooperate during the days following the capture, one would either die under torture, or if they decided they weren't going to get information out of someone, they would end up killing them.

On being tortured:

In the first few hours, during the journey from San Miguel to San Salvador, they beat me up a lot, because since we were traveling in a car they couldn't do much more than beat me up, or put a pistol to my head and tell me that they were going to kill me there and then. But that wasn't what worried me, because to be told that you're going to be killed in that kind of situation feels more like a liberation than a dangerous situation or torture. So the fact that they threatened to kill me didn't bother me. My thoughts at the time were rather that I hoped that [my comrades] would soon realize that I had been captured and would leave all the places that I knew about, because I was afraid that -- well, they were beating me up, but I didn't know what they might do to me later, once we arrived at the National Guard headquarters here in San Salvador.

So, because they were sure that they would manage to get information out of me, they amused themselves greatly during the journey from San Miguel to San Salvador, especially by threatening to kill me in an isolated spot. Since it was daytime, there wasn't much they could do, because they couldn't very well take me out on the street and subject me to other types of torture. But once we arrived in San Salvador, the main torture consisted in beatings, not letting me sleep and interrogating me constantly. And sometimes those who beat me up would leave, and someone else would come and say that the ones who had just left were bad people, but that he wanted to help me, and that any useful information I could give them would be enough for him to be able to help me, so if I could just say something...

Initially they thought that [they could get information] just by beating me up and putting psychological pressure on me. The good thing was that they had no idea at the time who my mother and father were. My mother had died, and on the whole my family was not involved in politics: it was a middle-class family, quite well-known in the town where I was born, and [the police] didn't have much of a chance of pressuring me by telling me they were going to go and capture my family or kill them -- which was the main torture they used in other cases: i.e., they would capture another member of the family and torture them in front of the prisoner, so that the suffering of the loved one would force the prisoner to cooperate. In my case, however, [the torture] consisted in beatings, electric shocks and rape, and in keeping me naked, because as soon as I was taken to the headquarters I was undressed, my hands and legs were handcuffed and I was blindfolded me so that I couldn't see the faces of my interrogators. It's very hard to be forced to stand naked in front of one's captors, because apart from the knowledge that one is in their hands, the lack of clothes makes one feel even more defenseless. All these were psychological ploys aimed at making me cooperate. The electric shocks were given to me by a special group of interrogators; they weren't the same people who had been interrogating me on a daily basis. ... What I felt was some ice-cold metal which they placed first of all on my arms; but in the end, when they realized that it was no use [giving me electric shocks] on my arms, legs or head, they decided to apply them to my vulva, and what happened then was that I fainted from the pain, and since they couldn't carry on interrogating me while I was unconscious, they stopped the torture. ...

The rape happened later. When they saw that the electric shocks didn't achieve any results, and that I was very weak after several days in detention without food, they decided to humiliate me by using sexual violence to try to weaken my resistance and get me to cooperate. What they did was, several of them held me down, and the chief came into my cell and raped me. And it seems that this became known, and they called the ones who were on duty that day -- it became known because my family took an interest and wanted to know if I was alive or not, and they had many contacts in the army -- especially my father, because he had been a military man himself -- so I think that prevented me being subjected to any more rapes. However, they didn't tell them that I was alive or that I was being kept at the National Guard [headquarters].

On the rebels' final offensive in 1981:

What greatly exacerbated the situation was the escalation of the repression in an attempt to put an end to what they called the guerrilla struggle. They began to carry out mass arrests of all those they thought might be connected with the guerrillas. ...

All protest -- for example, demands put forward by the trade unions -- was repressed, and people were frequently being killed on the streets of San Salvador. There were many people who were captured at night by the death squads, and the following day they would turn up dead, decapitated, mutilated, having been horribly tortured. So a climate of generalized repression and fear was created, and in particular the feeling that unless we ourselves did something, we would be wiped out. Aside from this, they had recently murdered Monsignor Romero. The fact that they had murdered the Archbishop of San Salvador, who was the highest Church representative, and that they had no qualms about killing him, made us all feel practically defenseless. And we said, "Either we take the struggle into the open on the mountains, or they'll kill us all here in the city."

So this led to a moment of collective fury, let's say, and a feeling of rebellion, and in particular [the awareness of the need to] protect ourselves and that the moment had come when we had to move to the rural areas. And the final offensive was seen as the solution to the problem, because we were going to pitch all our strength against the regime in an attempt to achieve a victory. So the 1981 offensive arose out of the need to defend ourselves, to do something for ourselves. I think that was what made everyone join in -- although we ended up being defeated.