Memory and oblivion

the massacre of peasants during Holy Week in 1978 in San Pedro Perulapán, department of Cuscatlán, El Salvador

Abstract

This text is the result of an investigation carried out in the Oral History Workshop, in which the collective memory of a traumatic event in a community is analyzed, in this case, through the silence about a massacre that occurred during Holy Week in 1978. in the town of San Pedro Perulapán, as a survival mechanism to avoid tensions and violence between neighbors in the present time. When this massacre occurred, San Pedro Perulapán had an extended religious organization, in the parish many people were part of the “Base Ecclesiastical Communities (CEB’s)”, which in the 1970s represented a strong impulse and development of the peasant organization. San Pedro Perulapán was within a fairly large radar where Jesuits such as Inocencio Alas, Rutilio Grande and diocesan priests such as Alfonso Navarro had a lot of influence.