The memorial at El Mozote

The El Mozote Massacre took place in the village of El Mozote, in Morazán department, El Salvador, on December 11, 1981, when Salvadoran armed forces killed an estimated 900 civilians in an anti-guerrilla campaign. It is reputed to be the worst such atrocity in modern Latin American history. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... El Mozote is a village in Morazán department in El Salvador. ... Morazán is a department of El Salvador. ... December 11 is the 345th day (346th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Latin America consists of the countries of South America and some of North America (including Central America and some the islands of the Caribbean) whose inhabitants mostly speak Romance languages, although Native American languages are also spoken. ...

The massacre was both a low point and a turning point in the civil war that ravaged this Central American country between the late 1970s and early 1990s. As news of the massacre slowly emerged, the Reagan administration in the United States dismissed it as FMLN propaganda because it seriously undermined efforts by the U.S. government to bolster the human rights image of the Salvadoran government, which the US was supporting with large amounts of military aid^[1]. For other uses, see Central America (disambiguation). ... Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981 – 1989) and the 33rd Governor of California (1967 – 1975). ... The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (in Spanish: Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, FMLN) is a political party in El Salvador that was formerly a revolutionary guerrilla organization. ...

The evening before

On the afternoon of December 10, 1981, units of the Salvadoran army's Atlacatl Battalion (named after a famous indigenous fighter that battled the Spanish troops for El Salvador) arrived at the remote village of El Mozote after a clash with guerrillas in the vicinity. The Atlacatl was a "Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion", specially trained for counter-insurgency warfare. It was the first unit of its kind in the Salvadoran armed forces and was trained by US military advisors at the School of the Americas (today known as WHINSEC) at the beginning of 1981. Its mission, Operación Rescate ("Operation Rescue"), was to eliminate the rebel presence in a small region of northern Morazan, where the FMLN had a camp and a training center. El Mozote consisted of about twenty houses situated on open ground around a square. Facing onto the square was a church and, behind it, a small building known as "the convent", used by the priest to change into his vestments when he came to the village to celebrate mass. Near the village was a small schoolhouse. December 10 is the 344th day (345th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar, 21 days before the next year. ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Native Americans (also Indians, Aboriginal Peoples, American Indians, First Nations, Alaskan Natives, or Indigenous Peoples of America) are the indigenous inhabitants of The Americas prior to the European colonization, and their modern descendants. ... Look up guerrilla in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Counter-insurgency is the combating of insurgency, by the government (or allies) of the territory in which the insurgency takes place. ... The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), formerly School of the Americas (SOA), is a US Army facility at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, USA. It is a training facility operated in the Spanish language especially for Latin American military personnel. ... Former logo of the School of Americas, now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Georgia The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC or WHINSEC), formerly School of the Americas (SOA; Spanish: Escuela de las Américas), is a United States Army facility at Fort Benning... The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (in Spanish: Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, FMLN) is a political party in El Salvador that was formerly a revolutionary guerrilla organization. ...

Upon arrival, the soldiers found not only the residents of the village but also campesinos who had sought refuge from the surrounding area. The soldiers ordered everyone out of their houses and into the square. They made them lie face down, searched them, and questioned them about the guerrillas. They then ordered the villagers to lock themselves in their houses until the next day, warning that anyone coming out would be shot. The soldiers remained in the village during the night. Campesino may refer to A simple farmer is referred to as a campesino in Spanish. ...

The town square in El Mozote.

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December 11 and 12

Early the next morning, the soldiers reassembled the entire village in the square. They separated the men from the women and children and locked them in separate groups in the church, the convent, and various houses.

During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture, and execute the men in several locations. Around noon, they began taking the women and older girls in groups, separating them from their children and machine-gunning them after raping them. Girls as young as 12 were raped, under the pretext of them being supportive of the guerillas. Finally, they killed the children. A group of children who had been locked in the church and its convent were shot through the windows. After killing the entire population, the soldiers set fire to the buildings.

The soldiers remained in El Mozote that night. The next day, they went to the village of Los Toriles, 2 km away. Several of the inhabitants managed to escape. The others — men, women and children — were taken from their homes, lined up, and shot.

Related activities

Clashes had taken place on December 9 between government troops and the guerrillas, when a company of the Atlacatl entered the town of Arambala. They rounded up the villagers in the town square and separated the men from the women and children. They locked the women and children in the church and ordered the men to lie face down in the square. A number of men were accused of being guerrilla collaborators, and they were tied up, blindfolded and tortured. Residents later found the bodies of three of them, stabbed to death. December 9 is the 343rd day (344th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ...

The day before the El Mozote massacre, on December 10, Atlacatl had rounded up residents in the main square of Cumaro canton; no one was killed. December 10 is the 344th day (345th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar, 21 days before the next year. ...

Members of the Atlacatl Battalion repeated similar actions in La Joya canton on December 11, in the village of La Rancheria on December 12, and in the village of Jocote Amarillo and Cerro Pando canton on 13 December. December 11 is the 345th day (346th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... December 12 is the 346th day (347th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar, with 19 days remaining. ... December 13 is the 347th day of the year (348th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

The site of the old church.

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Aftermath

The victims at El Mozote were left unburied. During the weeks that followed the bodies were seen by many people who passed by there.

The guerrillas' clandestine radio station began broadcasting reports of a massacre of civilians in the area. On December 31, the FMLN issued "a call to the International Red Cross, the OAS Human Rights Commission, and the international press to verify the genocide of more than 900 Salvadorans" in and around El Mozote. Reporters started pushing for evidence. December 31 is the 365th day of the year (366th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is a private humanitarian institution based in Geneva, Switzerland. ... The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (the IACHR or, in Spanish, CIDH) is one of the two bodies that comprise the inter-American system for the promotion and protection of human rights. ...

Officials from the US embassy in San Salvador played down the reports and were unwilling to visit the site because of safety concerns.

The FMLN had a sophisticated sense of how to use the media and it independently smuggled two reporters from two of the most prominent newspapers in the US, Raymond Bonner of the New York Times, Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post, together with photojournalist Susan Meiselas, went to the site approximately a month after the massacre took place. Raymond Bonner is an American investigative reporter for The New York Times. ... The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. ... Alma Guillermoprieto (born May 27, 1949) is a Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press. ... ... Susan Meiselas (born 1948) is an American photographer. ...

News reports

News of the massacre first appeared in the media on January 27, 1982, in reports that were simultaneously published by the Times and the Post. Bonner wrote in the Times of seeing "the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles". January 27 is the 27th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... -1...

Guillermoprieto, who visited the village separately a few days later, wrote of "dozens of decomposing bodies still seen beneath the rubble and lying in nearby fields, despite the month that has passed since the incident". In what had once been a white-washed church, "countless bits of bones — skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column — poked out of the rubble".

Both reporters spoke to a woman named Rufina Amaya, who said she had escaped in the confusion and hidden in a tree. She told the reporters that the soldiers killed her husband, her nine-year-old son, and her three daughters, aged five, three, and eight months. The soldiers set piles of bodies on fire, she said, then left.

The villagers gave Bonner a list of 733 names — mostly children, women, and old people — all of whom, they claimed, had been murdered by government soldiers.

Ruins of a burned building.

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Backlash

Seeing the conflict as critical in its determination to prevent communist encroachment in Central America, the Reagan administration was determined to give the Salvadoran government military assistance in defeating the FMLN insurgency. This was seriously complicated by the reports from El Mozote, which appeared just as a new round of debate over the huge flow of money and arms being sent to El Salvador's armed forces was getting underway. Correspondingly, the reports drew immediate fire from Reagan administration officials and others on the American political right. Salvadoran army and government leaders said no such massacre had taken place and officials of the Reagan administration dismissed the reports "as gross exaggerations".

Accuracy in Media, the conservative press watch organization, charged the newspapers and the reporters with conspiring to hold their stories until late January, just before President Reagan was required to certify that El Salvador's military forces were making progress in human rights in order to continue the subsidies. The reporters denied the charge. Accuracy In Media (AIM) is an American organization which monitors the news media in the United States. ...

Thomas Enders, then Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, attacked Bonner and Guillermoprieto before a congressional committee, saying that although there had been a firefight between the army and the guerrillas in the area, "no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians". On February 8, Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, told a Senate committee that the reports of hundreds of deaths at El Mozote "were not credible", and that "it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas". Abrams implied that reports of a massacre were simply FMLN propaganda. February 8 is the 39th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Elliot Abrams Elliott Abrams (born January 24, 1948) is an American lawyer who has served in foreign policy positions for a number of U.S. Presidents, most recently George W. Bush. ...

In February, in a lengthy editorial titled "The Media's War," the Wall Street Journal critiqued US press coverage of El Salvador, singling out Bonner as being "overly credulous", and accusing the Times of closing ranks "behind a reporter out on a limb". The Journal warned that the debate in Congress was being distorted from reality by Bonner's and Guillermoprieto's "overly credulous" reports of the massacre. It cited Enders' denial and charged that because the two reporters had visited El Mozote under the protection of guerrilla guides, "this was a propaganda exercise". In Time Magazine, William A. Henry III wrote a month later: "An even more crucial if common oversight is the fact that women and children, generally presumed to be civilians, can be active participants in guerrilla war. New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner underplayed that possibility, for example, in a much-protested January 27 report of a massacre by the army in and around the village of Mozote." The Wall Street Journal is an influential international daily newspaper published in New York City, New York with an average daily circulation of 1,800,607 (2002). ... (Clockwise from upper left) Time magazine covers from May 7, 1945; July 25, 1969; December 31, 1999; September 14, 2001; and April 21, 2003. ... January 27 is the 27th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ...

Although attacked less vigorously than Bonner, Guillermoprieto was also a target of criticism. A Reagan official wrote a letter to the Post claiming that Guillermoprieto had once worked for a communist newspaper in Mexico. She denied ever working for any newspaper in Mexico, and told that to editor Ben Bradlee when he questioned her in the newsroom.

In June 1982, after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed cutting $100 million in military aid to El Salvador, US Ambassador Deane Hinton traveled to Washington to try to prevent the cutback. While he was there, he went out of his way to attack Bonner, particularly over the reporter's stories about the failure of El Salvador's land-reform program. Hinton denounced Bonner as an "advocate journalist".

In late July, Accuracy in Media devoted an entire edition of its AIM Report to Bonner. Its editor, Reed Irvine, declared that "Mr. Bonner had been worth a division to the communists in Central America". Irvine made insinuations about Bonner's political sympathies, noting that he had once worked for Ralph Nader, omitting that he had been a Marine Corps officer in Vietnam, and all but calling him a communist agent. Ralph Nader (born February 27, 1934), is an American attorney and political activist Issues he has promoted include consumer rights, feminism, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and democratic government. ... United States Marine Corps Emblem The United States Marine Corps (USMC) is the second smallest of the five branches of the United States armed forces, with 170,000 active and 40,000 reserve Marines as of 2002. ...

That August, Bonner was ordered to return to New York; he subsequently took a leave of office and left the newspaper shortly thereafter. The Post also recalled Guillermoprieto, promoting her to a staff position, and assigning her to cover suburban Washington. Guillermoprieto left the paper two years later.

In the course of the year, a number of Salvadoran human rights organizations denounced the massacre. The Salvadoran authorities categorically denied that a massacre had taken place. No judicial investigation was launched and there was no word of any investigation by the government or the armed forces. Bonner later published a book on his experiences, Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador (1984), but in the intervening years, the El Mozote story was slowly buried.

The Atlacatl Battalion went on to commit many more atrocities, including, nine years later, the murder of six Jesuits, their cook and her daughter, in November 1989. Among them the scholars Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Baró and Segundo Montes. Although the perpetrators tried to disguise it as the work of left-wing rebels, it soon became obvious that Atlacatl had been behind it, to universal condemnation. However, after the El Mozote massacre, the Salvadoran army as a whole moved towards gentler "hearts and minds" strategies in its attempts to undermine support for the FMLN. The Society of Jesus (Latin: Societas Iesu), commonly known as the Jesuits, is a Roman Catholic religious order. ... Ignacio Ellacuria Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J. (Portugalete, Biscay, Spain, November 9, 1930 – November 16, 1989) was a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian who did important work as a professor and rector at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA), a Jesuit university in El Salvador... Ignacio Martín-Baró Ignacio Martín-Baró, S.J. (Valladolid, Castilla y Leon, Spain, November 7, 1942 – San Salvador, El Salvador, November 16, 1989) was a scholar, social psychologist, philosopher and Roman Catholic Jesuit priest. ... Segundo Montes Segundo Montes, S.J. (Valladolid, Spain, May 15, 1933 - San Salvador, El Salvador, November 16, 1989) was a scholar, philosopher, educator, sociologist and Jesuit priest. ...

Vindication

On 26 October 1990, a criminal complaint against the Atlacatl Battalion was filed by Pedro Chicas Romero, of La Joya, who had hidden in a cave above the hamlet as the soldiers killed his family and neighbors, and judicial proceedings were instituted. One of the first witnesses called to give testimony was Rufina Amaya, and the judge ordered remains to be exhumed. October 26 is the 299th day of the year (300th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 66 days remaining. ... MCMXC redirects here; for the Enigma album, see MCMXC a. ...

In 1992, as part of the peace settlement established by the Chapultepec Peace Accords signed in Mexico City on January 16 of that year, a United Nations-sanctioned Truth Commission investigating human rights abuses committed during the war supervised the exhumations of the El Mozote remains by an Argentinian team of forensic specialists from 13 and 17 November 1992. The Chapultepec Peace Accords was a treaty which brought peace to El Salvador in 1992 after more than a decade of wrenching civil war. ... January 16 is the 16th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... The foundation of the U.N. The United Nations (UN) is an international organization whose stated aims are to facilitate co-operation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress and human rights issues. ... Motto En unión y libertad(Spanish) In Union and Freedom Anthem Himno Nacional Argentino Capital (and largest city) Buenos Aires Official languages Spanish Government Federal republic  -  President Néstor Kirchner  -  Vice President Daniel Scioli Independence from Spain   -  May Revolution 25 May 1810   -  Declared 9 July 1816   -  Recognized 1821 (by... Forensics or forensic science is the application of science to questions which are of interest to the legal system. ... 17 November is also the name of a Marxist group in Greece, coinciding with the anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic uprising. ... Year 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1992 Gregorian calendar). ...

The Salvadoran Minister of Defense and the Chief of the Armed Forces Joint Staff informed the Truth Commission that they had no information that would make it possible to identify the units and officers who participated in Operación Rescate. They claimed that there were no records for the period.

The Truth Commission stated in its final report:

There is full proof that on 11 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote, units of the Atlacatl Battalion deliberately and systematically killed a group of more than 200 men, women and children, constituting the entire civilian population that they had found there the previous day and had since been holding prisoner.

It added: December 11 is the 345th day (346th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

there is [also] sufficient evidence that in the days preceding and following the El Mozote massacre, troops participating in "Operation Rescue" massacred the non-combatant civilian population in La Joya canton, in the villages of La Rancheria, Jocote Amatillo y Los Toriles, and in Cerro Pando canton.

The newly rebuilt church in El Mozote

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The Times takes another look

On October 22, 1992, a headline on the front page of The New York Times announced "Salvador Skeletons Confirm Reports of Massacre in 1981". Reporter Tim Golden began: October 22 is the 295th day of the year (296th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1992 Gregorian calendar). ...

In a small rectangular plot among the overgrown ruins of a village here, a team of forensic archeologists has opened a window on El Salvador's nightmarish past. Nearly 11 years after American-trained soldiers were said to have torn through El Mozote and surrounding hamlets on a rampage in which at least 794 people were killed, the bones have emerged as stark evidence that the claims of peasant survivors and the reports of a couple of American journalists were true.

A similar article, by Douglas Farah, appeared the same day in The Washington Post.

In 1993, a special State Department panel that examined the actions of U.S. diplomats vis-a-vis human rights in El Salvador concluded that "mistakes were certainly made... particularly in the failure to get the truth about the December 1981 massacre at El Mozote."

That year, American journalist Mark Danner published an article in the December 6 issue of The New Yorker. His article, "The Truth of El Mozote", caused widespread consternation, for it rekindled the debate regarding the US role in Central America during the violence-torn 1970s and 1980s. He subsequently expanded the article into a book, The Massacre at El Mozote (1994). Mark David Danner (born November 10, 1958) is a prominent American journalist. ... December 6 is the 340th day of the year (341st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... The New Yorker is an American magazine that publishes reportage, criticism, essays, cartoons, poetry and fiction. ...

In a prefatory remark, Danner wrote:

That in the United States it came to be known, that it was exposed to the light and then allowed to fall back into the dark, makes the story of El Mozote — how it came to happen and how it came to be denied — a central parable of the Cold War.

In his study of the media and the Reagan administration, On Bended Knee, American author Mark Hertsgaard wrote of the significance of the first reports of the massacre:

What made the Morazan massacre stories so threatening was that they repudiated the fundamental moral claim that undergirded US policy. They suggested that what the United States was supporting in Central America was not democracy but repression. They therefore threatened to shift the political debate from means to ends, from how best to combat the supposed Communist threat — send US troops or merely US aid? — to why the United States was backing state terrorism in the first place.

Case reopened

On March 7, 2005, the OAS's Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reopened an investigation into the El Mozote massacre because of new evidence found by a team of Argentine forensic anthropologists in 2003. Recent efforts by lawyers in El Salvador to reopen the case, which was shelved in 2000, have repeatedly failed, even after a court ruling that year stripped protection under the national amnesty law from suspects in the most egregious human rights violations. March 7 is the 66th day of the year (67th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

If the Commission on Human Rights finds enough evidence tying the Salvadoran government to the killings, the case will go to the Inter-American Court. Though it is unlikely that the court's decision would result in jail time for those involved, the court could demand that the government conduct an investigation of the incident and require payment of reparations to the families of those who died or disappeared.^[2] The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is an autonomous judicial institution based in the city of San José, Costa Rica. ...

In a January 2007 report in the Washington Post, a former Salvadoran soldier, José Wilfredo Salgado, told of returning to El Mozote several months after the massacre and collecting the skulls of the youngest victims, whose remains were exposed by recent rains, for "candleholders and good-luck charms." ^[3]

References

Notes

Printed sources

• Danner, Mark (2005). The Massacre at El Mozote. Granta Books. ISBN 1-86207-785-1. 

Web

• The UN Truth Commission report on El Mozote (excerpts)
• "The Truth of El Mozote" (Mark Danner, The New Yorker, 6 December 1993)
• The El Mozote Massacre (various articles)
• "The Mozote Massacre: It was the reporters' word against the government's" (Mike Hoyt, Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1993)
• "Massacre of Hundreds Reported In Salvador Village", New York Times, January 27, 1982. 
• Tim Golden. "Salvador Skeletons Confirm Reports of Massacre in 1981", New York Times, October 22, 1992. 

• Testimony of Rufina Amaya: Sole survivor of the massacre (in spanish)