CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF ISSUE #37 FEATURING THE COMPLETE INNOCENT VOICES STORY

WORDS Kristie Bertucci

Another night of restless sleep is disrupted by rapid gunfire. Bullets fly through the darkness in all directions, making small peepholes in a rundown, barely standing shack. Inside, four children cower on the floor. Their mother away at work, they must fend for themselves. They quickly go through the motions of an all-too-familiar routine. The eldest sister makes sure the two younger boys are close to the ground, while one of the boys quickly places a ratty, old mattress against the wall—as if it offered a steel wall of protection. All four children end up under a rusted bed frame, hoping to make it through another night. Yet amidst the crossfire between government soldiers and guerrillas, the children find a way to “escape.” They play games trying to pretend the outside world doesn’t exist. They use their mother’s make-up to paint clown faces on each other and build an imaginary fort with walls made of blankets that no bullet can penetrate. This was the childhood of Oscar Torres, a survivor of El Salvador’s civil war.

For Torres, speaking about his childhood is still a painful experience. His eyes start to water as he tries to describe what it was like for a child growing up during the war. The only thing that stops him from shedding a tear is that he is in public. He must fight back his emotions in order to relive the memories and tell his story. He takes a deep breath, as if to summon his strength, and begins.

MAN OF THE HOUSE
Torres was the second eldest in a family of four. He had one older sister and two younger brothers. He was known as Chava. When Torres was eight years old his father left home, and his mother deemed Chava the man of the house. At the time, little Chava did not really understand what this meant. All he knew was that his father had left for America and would send for the family later. Torres was content with the promise of toys. But the toys never came, and he soon realized his father was never coming back. “As a kid you still keep that hope alive, that one day your dad will show,” Torres says. “In our most vulnerable times, when there were shootings or no food, we wished there was a man to help out.” The first time Torres felt like the man of the house was when he had his first job. “I was fixing up tombs at a cemetery and brought home some money, probably equivalent to a dollar, but we ate that night,” Torres recalls.

As Torres grew into his role as the man of the house, his main concern was his family’s safety. “There was always a lot of fear, but it was mostly for your family. It was never a self fear that you would die. It was more along the lines of what I would do if one of my family members were to get shot.”

The feeling was universal for all children growing up in the midst of a war. Torres witnessed many children killed by stray bullets during the shootouts between the military and guerrillas. Each night he would pray it would never happen to one of his own family members. Torres recalls a time when there was a huge shooting at his school. As the gunfire erupted, he and his friends could hear their mothers’ screams echoing outside the school. The boys could see their mothers hiding behind tanks through a small window on a door of the school facing the street. Torres instinctively ran to his mom. Dodging bullets and running soldiers, he miraculously made it to his mother. Some would call that bravery, but Torres disagrees. “I wasn’t thinking about being brave, I was just trying to get to my mom and make sure she was safe. I didn’t think about getting shot or hurt. Now that I think back on it, it was a stupid move because I didn’t think about the consequences. But I was just a child, thinking I was invincible.”

UNHAPPY BIRTHDAY
Apart from getting caught in crossfire, the biggest fear for any boy growing up during the civil war was turning 12. That was the age at which the government considered you old enough to go to war. When the war first started in 1980, the recruitment age was 16, but as the years went by and the fighting intensified, the age limit dropped to 12. Towards the end of the war, boys as young as nine were being taken from their families and forced into battle. Originally it was the military that “recruited,” while the guerrillas relied on volunteers. As the number of able-bodied men dwindled, however, both sides were taking boys.

Torres remembers the roundups that took place in school, the village raids, and the abductions that occurred while boys walked innocently through the town. The military was relentless in its conscription of children. Torres and his friends would go out of their way to avoid the military station that was ironically between the school and the church. But it wasn’t easy for Torres to avoid the military. He had to help his mother by going into town to sell dresses she made to small shops. What was once a ten-minute walk home, turned into a 30-minute journey. “When the military wanted you, they got you. All you would feel is a hand grabbing the back of your shirt and you were theirs,” Torres recounts.

Avoiding the military’s village raids was another challenge. Luckily Torres and the other boys discovered an extremely effective hiding spot: the roofs of their houses. Many of the roofs were made of tin, which meant the boys had to endure back burning pain as they waited for the military to leave. “Once the soldiers were close, you couldn’t move no matter how hot it got,” Torres explains. “You had to lie there stiff as a board, because if not, the soldiers would catch you.” Sometimes the boys were forced to stay on the roofs for hours at a time. “We would count stars and even fall asleep on the roof,” Torres says. Unfortunately, the roof hideouts only worked for about a month before the soldiers caught on. “But it saved the lives of many boys and gave them extra time before raids,” says Torres.

Torres does not remember celebrating birthdays because it meant you had to grow up and lose your childhood innocence to the war. Torres saw numerous friends and family change once they were in the military. They would come home to visit their families, but they were no longer innocent children. War had taken over them. “Instead of being our friends, they were robots controlled by the military. They would come back and try to prove how big their balls were by the size of their gun,” Torres remembers. “The last thing you wanted was to grow older and become like them.”

Torres recalls feeling guilt when witnessing his friends being forced into service. “If you were alive you felt guilty. If you ate that night you felt guilty, if you weren’t taken you felt guilty,” Torres says. “ War is about guilt.” To a child, the fact that your friends were leaving also meant that you had fewer friends to play with.”
Despite the war that raged around them, the children of El Salvador found ways to live life as normally as possible. Boys cherished what little childhood they had. They played each day as normal children do and cursed the curfew placed on the city and neighboring villages because it cut their playtime short.

This curfew was a daily routine enforced by the military. Each day a bell would sound, warning everyone to stay indoors for the rest of the day and night. It sometimes lasted several days and its time varied depending on the day’s events. If a skirmish erupted that day, curfew would come earlier. Curfew was strictly enforced, meaning anyone outside during the curfew could be immediately shot at by the military.
In spite of curfew, recruitment roundups, and the numerous shootings, Torres remembers certain aspects of his childhood fondly. “I still tried to be a kid through it all, because war takes away children’s dreams and their ability to be children.”

Nevertheless, Torres and children like him obviously faced an oppressive fear every day of their lives. When asked what his dreams and goals were as a child, Torres replies, “To see another day.”

COMING OF AGE
With so much violence and abuse going on around Torres, it was hard, even for a boy, to stand by idly. Torres recalls feeling helpless as he witnessed a soldier looking at his sister in a sexual way. He decided the only way to truly save his family would be to join the guerrillas and fight against his oppressors. His uncle, who was part of the government opposition, had introduced him to the guerrillas. With a small knapsack in hand, Torres and some friends sneaked off one night to join a guerrilla camp. Torres was determined to protect his family. “You needed a gun to do anything around there,” Torres states.

Little did he know, that night would almost be his last. Shortly after arriving at the guerrilla camp, the military raided it and took Torres and three other friends for the “walk.” The walk was a march to a remote part of the river where the military executed guerrillas and anyone else who resisted their control. Torres remembers the area being polluted with bodies lying face down on the ground and in the river. As Torres walked to his death he remembers wishing for many things: one last look at his family, one last hug, one last kiss, one last everything. Once at the river, the soldiers lined up the four boys and began to shoot them one by one in the back of the head. Torres was third in line. As a soldier approached him and prepared to pull the trigger, a miracle happened. There was a family crossing the river up ahead with a little boy tugging tightly on his mother’s dress, looking straight ahead trying not to see the executions taking place. The soldier paused to look up at the family. That pause saved Torres’ life, because a second later, a band of guerillas started shooting at the soldiers. In the shooting and confusion that erupted, Torres was able to safely run off and hide. “I still wonder if I imagined the family crossing the river, but all I know is that that pause saved my life,” Torres says with glistening eyes as he tries to hold back his emotions.

ESCAPE
Torres and his family would soon become nomads. Always seeking to stay one step ahead of the conflict, they would pack their clothes, a few pieces of furniture, the sewing machine, then hit the road. He remembers moving several times although he’s not even sure how many. Eventually his mother decided it would be best to get Torres as far away from the war as possible. She called an uncle who worked for the government. He was able to get Torres a visa under an alias, so that Torres could come to America legally.
Despite his near death experiences, the hardest thing Torres ever had to do was leave his family. “Leaving my family behind broke my soul more than the war ever did,” Torres says. “I felt guilty to be in a safe country while my little brothers were still trapped in the war.” At the age of 13, Torres arrived in Los Angeles, finally managing to escape the war. It would be eight long years before he would see his family again.

REFLECTIONS
Today, Torres and his entire family live in L.A. The little boy who was so good at dodging bullets has grown up to become an actor and screenwriter. In fact, Torres has turned the painful memories of his childhood into a screenplay. In perhaps another testament to his good fortune, Torres met director Luis Mandoki (Message in a Bottle, When a Man Loves a Woman) while on the set of a commercial. He handed Mandoki the script, who was immediately captivated by Torres’ story. Within two years his childhood had become a film, the aptly titled Innocent Voices. Not wanting to give into Hollywood’s standards of movies, Torres’ challenge was to keep the story as real as possible. He feels it was the only way to stay true to himself and fellow Salvadorans. The film has gained accolades and recognition on the independent film scene, and it will be entered for Academy Award consideration in the Best Foreign Film category.

Surprisingly, Torres does not harbor any resentment towards the Salvadorian government or its soldiers, nor does he suffer from any post-traumatic stress disorders. To the casual observer, Torres resembles any other Latino living in Los Angeles. It is only when he starts describing the past that one notices the painful scars of his childhood. All the anger he could not express in El Salvador came out during high school, causing him to get into pointless fights. Torres’ real healing came after he finished his screenplay. “When I started writing, the memories just kept flowing…I would be crying one moment, then laughing the next.”

Growing up as a child caught in the middle of a war made Torres realize that life can never be taken for granted. Although he no longer has to worry about bullets rushing past his head or getting snatched from his family by the military, Torres still lives each day as if it were his last. He understands, better than most, that life is too short to waste even a moment.

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