The American-funded Salvadoran military officers carrying out horrific torture on El Salvadoran political activist Maria Guardado had only one response when interviewed in her biographical documentary screened last night at the Hoff Theater.

“The bitch should be dead now,” they said.

For names and addresses of friends, Guardado described being tortured, beaten, stripped naked, tied up, having strong electric shocks surge through clamps attached to her breasts and genitals and a metal rod jammed in her rectum. She then was taken to a cold shower to clean off the ocean of blood surrounding her body.

She described her horrors in Testimony: The Maria Guardado Story, a film that chronicles Guardado and her first visit to El Salvador in 2000 after 20 years of asylum in the United States. She traveled there for the anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a Salvadoran human rights activist.

“It is part of my own conscience and objective to tell people about my story,” Guardado said, with the help of a translator. “To be quiet is to admit that [the government] did not torture me. The torture was so terrible and inhumane.”

Guardado has attracted national attention through her protests about the U.S. government’s funding of regimes such as El Salvador’s that openly practice torture and murder.

“It was a terrorist government supported by the United States government,” Guardado said. “I wasn’t going to ignore everything around me. It was the politics in the United States government supporting terrorism in El Salvador.”

The goal for Guardado and filmmaker Randy Vasquez is to educate the public about the horrors in many Third World countries. She’s gone through a massive amount of therapy to be comfortable with her past, which is a process she wants no future generations to go through.

“There are no films like this that contain such experiences,” Vasquez said. “Almost every Salvadoran you meet will have been affected by the death squad in some way. The media had and has a lot of fear. There was no alternative media back then for such information to be known, and now there is.”

Guardado believes that there is a much larger context than just torture and civil war. The civil problems have caused many to migrate to the United States, a major concern in current politics.

“Our parents have died; our children have died, all in this war,” Guardado said. “It’s terrible because we cannot visit back, we cannot go back. The cultural identity problem the children of these survivors face is also all caused by the capitalist system and its problems.”

Guardado’s involvement in dozens of unions and organizations to better the lives of immigrants and people in Third World countries has provided fame and hope that the general public will know about such horrors and atrocities, said senior government and politics major Roberto Juarez.

“This is still happening in El Salvador,” Juarez said. “Guardado’s actions will hopefully harbor immigration rallies and teaching.”

Contact reporter Arslaan Arshed at newsdesk@dbk.umd.edu.