Children of War : In Central America, Trauma Takes Many Faces

Pedro, a tiny 6-year-old with big brown eyes, cries in fear when he sees soldiers and often hides in the orphanage where he lives.

Tomas, 16, is the most aggressive child at another children’s home and “capable of breaking anything when he’s angry,” the home’s director says.

Angel, a Salvadoran boy about 14, saw his mother killed in the guerrilla war and ended up on the Guatemala City streets sniffing paint thinner.

On a wooded hillside in El Salvador, a slightly built, baby-faced boy who uses the nom de guerre William has an M-16 slung over his shoulder. Now 15, he says he has been a guerrilla for a year and a half.

Children of Violence

All are survivors and victims of Central America’s armed conflicts.

“The children who have seen violence, even if they haven’t been direct victims in terms of physical violence, will keep the trauma of the effect of war for a long time,” said Agop Kayayan, representative at the Central American headquarters in Guatemala City of UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund. “This can last for a lifetime.

“We’re really talking about the way the next generation is going to act or is going to think of the way things are done in society.”

Few statistics are available to show how many children have been killed, wounded or orphaned by eight years of war between leftist rebels and the U.S.-backed government in El Salvador, by the fighting for the better part of 10 years in Nicaragua and by the still-simmering 27-year conflict between leftist guerrillas and the army in Guatemala.

In Nicaragua, 40,000 children lost one or both parents in the 1978-79 Sandinista revolution, which ended 42 years of Somoza family rule. An additional 11,361 children lost parents in the more than six years of fighting between U.S.-backed Contra rebels and Sandinista-government troops.

Children form a large part of the more than 1 million people displaced in their own countries--from 60% to 80%, by some estimates. Thousands of others are among those who have fled to neighboring countries, or to the United States, Canada or Europe.

A Guatemalan court survey found more than 58,693 children without one or both parents as of August, 1986. But only 55% of Guatemalan towns responded to the survey, and the total number of those children is estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000.

The Salvadoran government agency charged with children’s welfare has no figures on the number of children who have lost one or both parents in El Salvador.

Throughout the region, but particularly in Guatemala where half the population is Indian, many orphans are taken in by relatives. Others, like Angel, the Salvadoran boy now in Guatemala, fend for themselves.

Teen-agers fight on both sides of the conflicts--for guerrillas or the governments.

Lino Hernandez Trigueros, executive secretary of the Permanent Human Rights Commission in Nicaragua, said the commission has found 12- and 13-year-olds with the military on the remote Caribbean coast. Military service is required for those 17 to 25.

Reporters have seen children as young as 13 in the Contra rebel ranks.

Bullet Shells for Toys

In the Salvadoran countryside, it is easy to spot children who appear years shy of the 18-year draft age with the army, as well as with the guerrillas.

Where clashes are frequent, casings of spent bullets often become the only toys children have to play with.

The trauma of living with war, in crowded refugee camps or in constant flight, has many faces.

“This can be seeing security forces as people who are going to kill or hurt rather than as security forces,” Kayayan said.

Seeing families, relatives or neighbors killed can lead young people to be violent, he said. The effect multiplies with the closeness of the relationship and the degree of violence.

A drawing by a third-grade Guatemalan refugee girl at a camp in southern Mexico shows soldiers shooting men tied to stakes. Decapitated bodies lie between them.

Orphanage personnel asked that children’s names be changed for this article to avoid reprisals against them.

When soldiers came to his village late last year, Pedro fell to the ground and covered himself with pine boughs. His father and the group of women the boy was with escaped, but Pedro was discovered and wound up in the orphanage.

“When he saw the little girls at the home he said he didn’t like women because they had abandoned him,” the orphanage woman said. When she took him to look for relatives among other displaced people, she added, “he wouldn’t go in because he saw the soldiers.”

“They shot him three times in the chest,” the director said. “He never saw his mother again. Some told him the town was burned.”

One day he began telling Connolly about nightmares he has of seeing his mother killed at their home in El Salvador.

“He vividly recalled to me the killing of his father, mother and two brothers,” he said.

The next day, soldiers found the boy asleep at home and brought him and his little sister to a base where his brother was a soldier.

“Soldiers came back to the base one day and said his brother had been killed,” Connolly said. “Then soldiers, friends of his or his brother’s, took them to the border and told them to go across.”

Shortly after arriving in Guatemala City, he lost track of his sister. One day, the director said, Angel wants to go back to El Salvador to find a younger brother.

He has been in and out of a home run by a religious group in the provinces.

In many children, the trauma is hidden.

“What you can say is that there have been many learning difficulties, many difficulties in relating,” said Nicole Dagnino, president of Enfants Refugies du Monde, a private French organization that works with refugee children in several countries.

Parents who are refugees become depressed, have no jobs, lose their traditional contact with the land. The child, in addition to having to leave his home, loses his father image.

“They have lost all points of reference,” Dagnino said.

A woman who works with refugee orphans said she had “several children who go around setting fire to everything.”

But although children in orphanages often fight with each other, she said, the refugee children don’t. “It is as if they protect each other.”

Perhaps worse than the direct effects, Kayayan said, is the money that military spending takes away from health, education and other programs to help children and the destruction of those facilities.

Adding to the problem is economic crisis in the already poor region--from both the wars and other factors.

UNICEF says that infant and child deaths are on the rise in the region and nearly two-thirds of the survivors suffer some degree of malnutrition.

A study by the Guatemala-based Nutrition Institute of Central America and Panama found that nutrition in rural communities of Guatemala had worsened significantly between 1985 and 1987, a period after the most recent peak in fighting.

40% Malnourished

“In the war atmosphere of Nicaragua and El Salvador it is impossible to collect data,” the institute’s Dr. Hernan Delgado said. “But it is reasonable to think that with the military and economic situations, there is a worsening in the state of health.”

About 40% of children under age 5 in the Central American region are believed to suffer some form of malnutrition. The average includes Costa Rica and Panama, where conditions traditionally are better.

In 1980, 64% of the population was below the poverty line and 41% could not afford the minimum food basket.

But Delgado said worsening nutrition levels or infant and child mortality were “like the tip of the iceberg,” the culmination of a series of changes such as more illness or reduced physical activity.

“It may be that it is not as important as all the change that occurs, what that implies in all the children who didn’t die,” he said.