June 12th, The Tablet

A bishop who has compared the abuse being inflicted on immigrants by the US government to the suffering of Jesus on the Cross was himself an undocumented migrant fleeing poverty and political violence in El Salvador / By MICHAEL TANGEMAN

IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE of our interview that Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala paused, remembering we were speaking nearly 45 years to the day from the infamous Sumpul River massacre in his native El Salvador. He was just nine years old at the time. 

Born into a devout family of poor subsistence farmers in the village of Carasque, in the remote and mountainous terrain bordering Honduras in the department of Chalatenango, Evelio and the rest of the family, led by his mother, had gone fishing nearby at the Gaulzinga River, a tributary of the Sumpul, at a point just upstream from where the two rivers met. 

“We saw a group of people hurrying across the river, carrying things, carrying bundles. And we said, ‘What’s going on?’” Menjivar recalls. Then, about 200 yards upstream, they saw armed government troops running across a narrow, suspended footbridge – soldiers rushing toward the village upriver and the civilian population fleeing downstream. 

“We heard a big bombardment going on up above. And then we realised what had happened to the village up there,” he recalls. “They had all been massacred … massacred.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE at The Tablet … in PDF here or online here.