The Autobiography of a Salvadoran Socialist Revolutionary
Roger Blandino Nerio was a guerrilla leader with the leftist FMLN during El Salvador’s bloody civil war. As these selections from his memoir reveal, he was, like many guerrillas, an ordinary person spurred by conscience and history to extraordinary action.
Roger Blandino Nerio, January 1992. (Courtesy of Lety Méndez)
In the following excerpt, Blandino’s guerrilla column is on the march through El Salvador’s mountainous eastern region in June 1984.
The darkness was total. It rained cats and dogs again and the column moved slowly, the ground was slick and we were drenched to the bone and freezing cold. The garbage bags we wore as capes over our heads and packs as protection were insufficient. It poured, and we kept advancing.
It was maybe 3:30 AM when we reached the village of Loma de la Cruz, in Jucuapa. Taking advantage of a brief stop, another combatant, Mayra, and I approached a house where we perceived activity. A fire was burning, and we could hear the slapping sounds of women preparing tortillas. The aroma of corn tortillas was seductive on the heels of our miserable march, but it was the cold that was really getting to us, and we sought the opportunity to ask for a cup of coffee. I was disappointed to find that they hadn’t prepared “tree coffee,” but they offered us “corn coffee” [a blend of ground toasted corn and water], and I thanked them and went out to continue our journey.
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