It was in the middle of our interview that Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala paused, remembering we were speaking nearly 45 years to the day from the infamous Sumpul River massacre in his native El Salvador. He was just nine years old at the time. 

Born into a devout family of poor subsistence farmers in the village of Carasque, in the remote and mountainous terrain bordering Honduras in the department of Cha­l­­at­en­ango, Evelio and the rest of the family, led by his mother, had gone fishing nearby at the Gaulzinga River, a tributary of the Sumpul, at a point just upstream from where the two rivers met.

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