42 years after the annihilation of a column of almost a hundred Honduran guerrillas Hondurans, led by the doctor José María Reyes Mata, relatives of some of them cry out for justice before the authorities of Honduras. “Those were the true revolutionaries, the men who really fought for their homeland,” Edna Salazar, who was the wife of Juan Ramón Dermith, one of the members of the guerrilla column that entered Honduras in September 1983 from Nicaragua through the border department of Olancho, east of the country, told EFE in Tegucigalpa. Dermith “gave his life, he was a man dedicated to training peasants, training workers, writing poetry, denouncing social injustices, he was a very brave man, a man who dedicated his life to just causes,” he added. Salazar is part of the Truth and Justice Search Group that emerged two years ago, made up of relatives of several guerrillas, including José María Reyes Mata, the American-Honduran Jesuit priest Guadalupe Carney, Juan Ramón Dermith, Luis Antonio Isaula, René Bulnes, Jorge Alberto Maldonado and Rafael Alberto Salazar. The group has developed several activities in September commemorating the 42 years since the disappearance of the members of the guerrilla column, whose chaplain was Guadalupe Carney, who arrived in Honduras in the mid-1970s. With Juan Ramón Dermith, who was 33 years old, “we had three children and our children always longed for their father’s embrace. For me, this situation is very difficult, because when I speak of him it seems that a wound bleeds again because of his absence,” Salazar emphasized. He also pointed out that “Juan Ramón was a great man who truly gave himself, those of that time were the true heroes because they gave their lives for a just cause, to see that there were no social inequalities.” Salazar reported that during the time her husband was active in the revolutionary column, she had no communication with him because “he was in a guerrilla training process”. “He sent me poems, he sent me letters, but he didn’t tell me where he was, he only told me that he was in a process of formation and that he would come at some point. He didn’t meet his last child because I got pregnant by him, but I didn’t have direct communication with him,” she expressed. Justice with the hope of recovering the remains of the guerrillas She also recalled that in 1983, after it became known that the guerrilla column had been annihilated in the mountains of Olancho by Honduran military personnel, with the support of the United States Army, she looked for her husband in national and international human rights organizations, “but nobody gave any information about him”. It is still unknown where the remains of many of the members of the rebel movement commanded by Reyes Mata are, who graduated as a doctor in Cuba and in 1967 was perhaps the only Central American who was part of the second column of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that entered Bolivia. Salazar said that in the first years of searching for her husband, some people told her that the remains of him and other guerrillas were thrown from a plane in the mountains of Olancho, near the Patuca River. “We have never been told anything, where they are, or anything about them. Yes, we know they were sacrificed, tortured, massacred, I ask for social justice, I ask that they really give them to us (the remains), because reviving them will not be possible,” he emphasized.
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