“We stayed awake all night long in a deep ditch,” says Zaida, from the municipality of Fildadelfia. “There was a woman with her children who did not know how to swim, how they cried… ‘Mom, I don’t want them to kill you!’ They didn’t have any compassion for us,” Vanesa Yubacero recounted. “We were traveling in a van, and we heard the shots fire out against us,” recounts a student from the Teacher’s College of Filadelfia.

These stories correspond with the testimony of the survivors of the Massacre of Pando, compiled by Red Erbol over the course of three days.

Zaida, a campesino from the Filadelfia municipality, tells of the nightmare that she experienced last Thursday:
“There, we spent the night awake in a deep ditch that they opened at three in the morning. The trucks of the Municipal Roads Service (SEDECAM) were there, the police have betrayed us, they have not protected us, they told us to stay, and came with a truck from which they shot us…we tried to escape through the river, but they shot at the water to kill us.”

Vanesa Yubacero, a campesino, recounts the ambush she fell victim to, her voice at times broken by tears:
“I was coming from the Nuevo Triunfo community, we arrived within five meters of the Puente Pozo bridge, and we were there when dawn came, and they told us that we should go back and they followed us… We continued moving forward and the police detained us, we waited but no one gave us water, they surrounded us without giving us any time, and they shot the children, they died just like that, with bullets in their hearts, how those children cried, facing those machine guns.

They escaped through the forest and there shots rang out, there was a woman with her children who did not know how to swim, how they cried…‘Mom, I don’t want them to kill you!’ They didn’t have any compassion for us,” concluded one of the survivors.

Another testimony, which came from a woman from Cobija, who did not want to identify herself for fear of reprisal, identified the employees of the departmental government offices as those culpable for the assassination of the campesinos in El Porvenir.

A women from Cobija, speaking to the press from Erbol, reported that the groups in control of Pando are very violent: “It is two groups, they have looted, they have robbed, it’s just not possible that Bolivians are killing each other like this.

A campesino from Filadelfia, the municipality that is still a target of attacks by the hit men, thanked the military presence, which he says makes it safe for him to go out: “Cobija is calm now because of the military presence, but now the war has moved to the rest of the municipality, we understand that there are many people who are seriously wounded in the forest, and some of our allies are still on the road, but we can’t return to the countryside because it is not safe for us.”

Oscar, a student at Teacher’s College of Filadelfia, was nervous as he recounted: “We were traveling on a bus, and on one side a truck of the departamental government offices came up and began to shoot at us.” Now, Oscar is in hiding in Cobija to protect his own life.

After the brutal massacre last Thursday in the El Porvenir Municipality, the number of deaths has risen to 25, with 25 people injured and 106 people disappeared, said the Federación Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Pando on Sunday.