My One and Only Oscar Nominated Documentary

In 1981, while writing about the revolutionary movements in Central America, I happened to be in Santa Rosa de Copan, a small town in Honduras, within driving distance of the border with El Salvador. I was interviewing Fausto Milla, a local priest. In 1980 Milla denounced a massacre of Salvadoran peasants at the Rio Sumpul. It was a coordinated military operation of the Honduran and Salvadoran armies. At least 600 people were butchered. Days afterwards pieces of bodies were still to be found in the river. Despite clergy observers and first-hand testimony, the massacre was all but ignored by the U.S. media.

Milla was telling me about his arrest and interrogation by Honduran authorities for denouncing the massacre, when he received a telephone call from La Virtud, a Honduran village on the Salvadoran border, near the Rio Lempa, which separates the two countries.

Milla hung up the phone. He was visibly shaken.

He told me that the caller urged him to hurry to La Virtud, that another massacre was taking place. This time at the Rio Lempa.

La Virtud was already crowded with Salvadoran refugees living in tents. Several foreign relief organisations were providing services to the refugees, especially health and sanitation.

"My contact said hundreds of people, women and children, were trying to cross the river and that the Salvadoran army was killing them," said Milla. "He said the Honduran army was also participating."

Although it was late in the evening, we decided to drive to La Virtud. We drove all night in Milla's four-wheel drive, along narrow, pitch-black, mountainous roads, wondering what we would find when we got to the border at sunrise.

What we found in the early morning light was hundreds of traumitized campesinos, peasants, camped out under trees, along dusty paths. The makeshift clinic operated by Medecins sans Frontieres was crowded with the wounded. Most of the patients had been shot, or wounded by mortars. One woman had her jaw shot off. The hills echoed with the sound of crying children.

Milla and I interviewed as many eyewitnesses as we could. By mid-morning a small group of refugees approached us. They wanted us to go with them back to the river, to help them find survivors. Since I was a journalist from the United States, they thought I could protect them from Honduran soldiers or Salvadoran death squads known to operate in the area.

Milla and I agreed to accompany the handful of men and women to the river.

At the river we came across a little girl named Segundo. She must have been about eight or nine years old. She was lying near a path, moaning. A woman was sitting next to her. As I stood in front of Segundo, I saw that she had been wounded by a heavy caliber bullet. Her hip had been torn open. It was filled with maggots.

While the refugees who accompanied us made a makeshift stretcher to bring Segunda to the clinic at La Virtud, Milla and I walked down to the river. Both banks were strewen with clothes and discarded tools. On the Honduran side we came across the body of a pregnant woman. She had been shot in the head. We heard dogs barking. I looked up toward the Salvadoran side of the river. A dog was eating the body of a little girl. I threw a stone across the river. It had no effect.

We evacuated Segunda and her aunt to the refugee camp. Nearly a year later I was back in the area. I asked about her. We were reunited. I was glad to see that her wound healed nicely. She was laughing and playing with her friends.

Within days I appeared on ABC News Nightline with Ted Koppel, presenting the evidence I had gathered about the massacre. No one was held accountable. No one took responsibility for the murder of innocent woman and children.

I was furious. I contacted one of the Salvadoran guerrilla leaders . I told him that I wanted to join up, that I wanted to kill the bastards who had massacred the innocents at the Rio Lempa. Luckily, he talked me out of it. I then decided to quit my job at the newspaper and go back to El Salvador and make a feature-length documentary film.

With the brilliant support of a brave and talented crew, led by Frank Christopher, an award-winning director who specialized in making documentaries for TV, we raised enough money to go back. We spent weeks in the hills of El Salvador, living with the guerrillas and their supporters and accompanying them into battle. We shot everything on Super 8.

The result was In the Name of the People, narrated by Martin Sheen. The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1985, and we got to go to Hollywood. We lost out to a documentary called The Times of Harvey Milk.

To my pleasant surprise, In the Name of the People can now be seen at this link:

http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=In+the+Name+of+the+People&hl=en&emb=0&aq=f#q=%22In+the+Name+of+the+People%22&hl=en&emb=0.

Most of the people in the film were already killed by the time it was edited and shown in theatres in the United States.

As far as I know the little girl, Segunda, survived.