“When that young man arrived, he started taking the kids. He stayed in El Salvador for a time and is now returning to the United States. There, he joined a gang, and when he was 23, he was expelled from the country. His mother left him when he was young and moved to Los Angeles, sending for him when he turned 13. The street was peaceful until a deportee returned between 20, the grandmother says. The two daughters left with their families: one to the United States, pushed out by the poverty, and the other to Mexico, pushed out by violence. The sons live with her in the same neighborhood and she shares her house with the youngest one. She no longer works-she doesn’t have the strength-and her husband, who was the breadwinner, died four years ago. The past 50 years, she lived on this street in Santiago Nonualco. The grandmother has lived in the country for 76 years, splitting wood, cutting cane, cleaning corn fields and raising chickens. The only thing left for us is to die,” she sobs, “but I just hope it’s not viciously.” Almudena Toral / Univision. They live with constant fear of threats and death. Neither she nor her family members can leave the house to work. The grandmother wants to send them a message via WhatsApp so she records this message for her son-in-law:Ī grandmother cries in her home in rural El Salvador. Since then, she hasn’t seen them, and doesn’t believe she’ll see them again, other than in photos on Facebook. It’s been a year since her daughter, son-in-law, and four grandchildren escaped from the neighborhood in a rush, carrying only the clothes on their backs.
When the dogs bark or gunshots ring out, the grandmother thinks it could be the neighbor, the Mara Salvatrucha gangs from La Galilea or the rural police of San Rafael Obrajuelo, who are close and coming for her. The only sounds are the song of the talapo, a local bird, and the hum of buzzards. Hers is a dirt road, surrounded by mango trees, corn fields and sugarcane fields.
She lives in the town of Santiago Nonualco, in the La Paz Department of El Salvador. The grandmother still lived next to her family’s abandoned house, some 15 meters from where her oldest grandson was allegedly killed and half a kilometer from the well where she suspects the neighbor dumped his body. Narrated by Juliana Jiménez 1 Life alongside the well
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