The assassination of Monsignor Romero, on March 24, 1980, sparked the interest of Venezuelan journalist Carlos Henríquez Consalvi in El Salvador.
“The news affected me deeply. For me, Monsignor Romero was a brave voice of freedom in the face of oppression. That made me turn my attention to El Salvador,” Henríquez Consalvi told the BBC Outlook program.
Before the priest’s murder, Carlos was a left-wing journalist born in Venezuela who, like many other young people in Latin America at that time, had traveled to Nicaragua to accompany the Sandinista revolution of 1979.
But the shot that ended Monsignor Romero’s life changed his life forever.
“After that murder, I felt that history was being written in El Salvador. And I think that all journalists have this desire to be close to where the story happens,” he remembers about those years.
It was early 1980. The country was going through a bloody civil warbetween the Armed Forces and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of leftist guerrillas.
The armed confrontation, which had begun a year earlier and would last until the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992, would leave a balance of 75,000 civilians killed350,000 injured and more than a million exiled.
Years later, the United Nations-led Truth Commission determined that 9 out of 10 human rights violations They were carried out by the Army and its paramilitaries.
Henríquez Consalvi thought, at 33 years old, that the best way to combat the repression that prevailed in that country was inform Salvadorans about what was happening.
Thus, a week after the assassination of Monsignor Romero, he decided to leave Nicaragua to join the ranks of the FMLN and create Radio Venceremos, the legendary clandestine station of the Salvadoran guerrilla that, for more than 11 years, broadcast from the mountains.
This is the story of Carlos Henriquez Consalvibetter known by his nom de guerre, Santiago.
The origin in Venezuela
When the Henríquez Consalvi family was forced to leave Venezuela to flee into exilelittle Carlos, 3 years old, experienced first-hand the effects of repression for the first time.
It was 1953 and the regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952-1958), which ruled with a heavy hand towards dissidence, ended up pushing his parents abroad.
Due to the political persecution against his father, he and his family traveled to Mexico. But soon after, his father decided to return to Venezuela to fight against the dictatorshipspending five years in prison.
“I was little, but I remember seeing my mother crying at the airport, saying goodbye to my father and feeling that what was happening would change our lives,” Hanríquez remembers about the time he lived with his mother, the two of them alone, in Mexico. .
For years, Carlos did not see his father again. In its place, there was a typewriter on which he spent long hours playing. This is how his interest in telling stories was awakened.
“In the oldest photo I have from our exile, I am standing in front of a typewriter, trying to write. Of course at that age I couldn’t do it, but it was like a magical object for me,” he recalls.
After three years living in exile, Carlos and his mother returned to Venezuela, waiting for the day when his father could finally join them.
The dictatorship fell in 1958 and the prison doors were finally opened.
At the age of 18 he was able to learn about the torture his father had been a victim of while in prison. That information, as well as his family history, planted the rebellious seed in Carlos, who was part of student movements in Venezuela.
The prelude to Nicaragua
In December 1972, Managua suffered the effects of an earthquake that destroyed much of the city.
Carlos, who was in Caracas but wanted to see the tragedy up close, traveled with a group of young people on a military plane that took doctors, food and medicine to Central America to assist the wounded.
“That experience marked my life”says Henríquez Consalvi.
Nicaragua, which at that time was under the military dictatorship of Somoza, was his gateway to the turbulent political reality that Central America was experiencing in those years.
It was there when he fell in love with a woman linked to the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a resistance movement that fought against Somoza, through which it became closer to the rebel groups in Central America.
Carlos did not stay in the country, he went to Paris to study History. But the fight against Somoza took him back to Managua.
In 1977 he began to write in Pedro Joaquín Chamorro’s newspaper, in which he denounced the crimes committed by the dictatorship, using the pseudonym “Carlos Gallo” to create a secret identity.
Two years later, as Carlos’ career as an undercover journalist grew, he decided to abandon his studies to move to Nicaragua and contribute to the resistance.
It was 1979, the Sandinistas had overthrown Somoza and taken power. It was during that “luminous moment,” as he describes it, that Carlos began to get closer to the political reality of El Salvador.
Every Sunday, I tuned into a Salvadoran radio station to hear the voice of Monsignor Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, who in his masses denounced human rights violations.
But on March 24, 1980, while giving mass, A man killed Monsignor Romero with a shot to the heartwhich aroused the indignation of thousands of left-wing militants, not only in Nicaragua but in the rest of the region.
The following week, Henríquez Consalvi was already talking to a Venezuelan journalist linked to the FMLN about the possibility of founding a clandestine radio station in El Salvador.
Within a few days, he decided that he would travel from Nicaragua to El Salvador to create the resistance radio stationa task that many believed was impossible in a country dominated by the military.
“I decided to leave the comfort of my life in Nicaragua to found a clandestine radio station in El Salvador under attacks and bombings,” he recalls.
Arrival in El Salvador
In December 1980, Carlos arrived in El Salvador.
He had left Nicaragua with the objective of joining the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation to, with the creation of a radio station, combat the repression of paramilitary groups and the Army.
On the way from the San Salvador airport to the mountains in the west of the country, Henríquez Consalvi remembers seeing a group of bodies, lying on the side of the road, victims of the so-called “death squads”.
“I was very nervous, it was a very bloody dictatorship”says.
For entire nights, he had to walk accompanied by a small group of rebels until he found one of the guerrilla camp hidden in the depths of the mountains.
Carlos was convinced of the importance of creating a clandestine radio station that was capable of disseminating information about what was happening.
“When I arrived, I felt alive and full of enthusiasm”remember about those days.
However, at the time, he realized that he had nothing more than an old World War II transmitter, a small console, a cassette recorder and a microphone. That was it.
And so, with a very modest team, was born Radio Venceremos.
The launch of the radio
“Radio Venceremos has begun broadcasting from the mountains of Morazán to accompany the social struggle that begins today,” Carlos said in front of the microphone on January 10, 1981, in the station’s first live broadcast.
The station’s launch date was not chosen at random. Radio Venceremos He made his first broadcast after the guerrilla launched its offensive, as part of a strategy to gain social support.
At that time, the stakes were high. The Army was well funded and trained. The guerrillas were very passionate but poorly equipped. Most of his sympathizers were farmers who had never taken up arms before.
But Carlos couldn’t go on air using his real name, he needed a nom de guerre, with which he could broadcast. That’s how it became Santiago.
“They gave me my nickname the first day I met a guerrilla. There was also a priest there and when they asked him what name they should give me, he said: Call him James, the most rebellious apostle. And it stayed! Today no one calls me Carlos here in El Salvador,” he says.
It took a while until the radio began to make direct contact with the guerrilla fronts throughout the country. Until finally they began to report on the status of the rebel groups.
But they did not only report on the conflict. They also broadcast music. Generally from an abandoned farm, they interviewed farmers and told things about religious festivals.
“The place was changing because when the Army invaded the region we had to move quickly. We played cat and mouse so they wouldn’t capture us,” he remembers.
The mission of Radio Venceremos was to broadcast every dayeven if they were under bombardment, “so that people knew that there were people fighting for the democratization of the country.”
The radio, in a country where many could not read or afford a television, became a vital news source, far from the censorship of the dictatorship and the propaganda of the government. The international press was also listening to it.
But, little by little, Carlos’s idealized perception began to take on the real color that a life that takes place in a war zone and that included the possibility of dying could have.
Multiple attacks
In this way, Radio Venceremos became the main objective of the Armyand Santiago and his teammates, mainly local farmers with no formal education, were plunged into the heat of the civil war.
In the 11 years of armed confrontation, they were attacked many times. The Armed Forces wanted to silence the radio and kill those who operated it, as well as all those who followed that cause.
“The fear you feel is indescribable when you hear the airplane engines approaching or the helicopters flying overhead,” he remembers.
In 1981 the Army launched an operation called “Anvil and Hammer”which led to the death of three of his companions and the confiscation of his transmitting device.
“Perhaps it was the most difficult moment of the war. Losing the transmitter was lose the possibility of continuing to exist as an alternative means of communication,” remembers Carlos, who made a long walk, several kilometers, to the sea to go look for the other transmitter that they had hidden.
On December 11, 1981, they received news that the Armed Forces had committed a massacre. Hundreds of people had been murdered in El Mozotein what was considered one of the most important massacres in the history of Latin America.
“We thought it was an exaggeration, but when we arrived at the ruins of El Mozote we realized the horrific scale of what had happened. We entered the town and saw the remains of hundreds of murdered children, women and elderly people. That was the most terrible moment of the war, seeing the cruelty towards the civilian population,” he remembers.
The Truth Commission reported years later that 978 people died553 of them minors. But it was not until after the war, when the mass graves were finally exhumed, that the United States, whose army had trained the battalion responsible for the massacre, acknowledged what had happened.
The tragedy did not stop either Carlos or the FMLN.
“What we felt was a greater responsibility to continue informing people and the world of what was happening,” he says.
The ambush
The military was determined to put an end to Radio Venceremos.
Faced with pressure, in October 1984, the guerrillas decided to place a bomb inside the radio transmitting equipment so that when the military chief Sunday Monterrosa launched his offensive, it was the military who found him.
“We heard Monterrosa on the radio announce that he was going to personally travel to Morazán to look for the transmitter. He had said that Radio Venceremos had been destroyed, the equipment had been annihilated and that it was one of the greatest victories of the entire war for the Salvadoran government,” Henríquez Consalvi recalls.
“I remember that afternoon, we saw in the distance, about 3km away, the Monterrosa helicopter rising among the mountains and then a huge fireball. The trap had worked!”, says.
As if by fate, the helicopter was shot down very close to The Mozote. But the guerrilla attack not only killed Monterrosa but also 14 other people.
“Adrenaline was running through my veins. Immediately after the helicopter was shot down, we install the radio antenna and the entire team, we turned on the generator to obtain power and sounded an alarm, the kind we used to signal important news,” he recalls.
In this way, they informed the world that the military operation had failedthat the news given by the international media about the destruction of the radio was not true and that in reality It was the military who had been attacked.
The news immediately appeared on the front pages of all the newspapers in the world and was a great victory for the FMLN.
But the happiest day in Henríquez Consalvi’s life was not that but when they finally came down from the mountains and placed the radio transmitter on top of the bell tower of the Cathedral of San Salvador before thousands of Salvadorans.
From there we informed the world, on January 16, 1992, that the war in El Salvador was over. Finally, democratic and free elections would be held.
“We won”Carlos remembers saying that day, after 11 years of fighting for what he considered a better future for El Salvador.
*This article is based on two episodes of the BBC World Service radio program Outlook. Is Anyone Out There? Rebel radiopresented and produced by Louise Morris. You can listen to it in English at BBC Sounds.
- The powerful images of the bloody civil war that ended 25 years ago in El Salvador
- My photo exposed a CIA setup in Nicaragua in the 80s and unleashed a political scandal in the US.