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 trained by the United
States military killed at least 1000 civilians in an
anti-guerrilla campaign.
It is reputed to be the worst such atrocity in modern
Latin America history.
The massacre was a low point in the
Salvadoran Civil War war that ravaged
this
Central American country
between the late 1970s and 1990.
As news of
the massacre slowly emerged, the Reagan administration in the United States
attempted to dismiss it as FMLN
propaganda because it had the potential to seriously embarrass the
United States government
because of its reflection of the human rights abuses of the
Salvadoran government, which the US was supporting with large
amounts of military aid.
December 10
On the afternoon of December 10, 1981, units of the Salvadoran
army's
Atlacatl Battalion (named
after a famous
indigenous fighter who
battled the Spanish troops for El Salvador) arrived at the remote
village of El Mozote after a clash with
guerrilla 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 United States military advisors.Its mission,
Operación Rescate ("Operation Rescue"), was to eliminate
the rebel presence in a small region of northern Morazán 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.
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.
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 that had been locked
in the church and its convent was 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.
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. 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 December 13.
The site of the old church.
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.
Officials from the US embassy in San Salvador played down the
reports and said they were unwilling to visit the site because of
safety concerns.
The FMLN smuggled in reporters from two of the most prominent US
newspapers,
Raymond Bonner of the
New York Times,
Alma Guillermoprieto of the
Washington Post, who,
together with photojournalist
Susan
Meiselas, went to the site approximately a month after the
massacre took place.
News reports
News of the massacre first appeared in the world media on January
27, 1982 in two reports that were simultaneously published by the
New York Times and the
Washington Post. Raymond
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."
Alma 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, and 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.
Backlash
Seeing the conflict as critical for a
right-wing Central America, the Reagan
administration was determined to give the Salvadoran government
military assistance in defeating the FMLN. 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 US political
right.
Salvadoran army and government leaders said no such massacre had
taken place and officials of the Reagan's administration dismissed
the reports as "gross exaggerations." The Associated Press reported
that
"the U.S. Embassy disputed the reports, saying
its own investigation had found ... that no more than 300 people
had lived in El Mozote."
The conservative press-watch organization
Accuracy in Media 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.
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.
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."'
Although attacked less vigorously than Bonner, Alma Guillermoprieto
was also a target of criticism. A Reagan official wrote a letter to
the
Post claiming that she had once worked for a communist
newspaper in Mexico. Guillermoprieto denied ever having 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.
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
continued to categorically deny 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 the victims were the scholars
Ignacio Ellacuría,
Ignacio Martín-Baró and
Segundo Montes. Although the
perpetrators tried to disguise the murders as the work of left-wing
rebels, it soon became obvious that Atlacatl had been behind it, to
universal condemnation. After the El Mozote massacre, the
Salvadoran army as a whole moved towards less brutal "hearts and
minds" strategies in its attempts to undermine support for the
FMLN.
Vindication
On October 26, 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.
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 Commission on the Truth
for El Salvador investigating human rights abuses committed
during the war supervised the exhumations of the El Mozote remains
by an Argentinian
team of forensic
specialists beginning November 17.
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:
- "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
A second 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:
- "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 United States' 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).
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, US 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."
Investigation 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. However, 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.
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.
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."
Kathleen Norris published a
poem about the El Mozote massacre called "Afterward," in her book
Journey: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburg Press, 2001).
References
Notes
- El Salvador death squads
- The New York Times > International > Americas
> O.A.S. to Reopen Inquiry Into Massacre in El Salvador in
1981
- El Salvador death squads
- From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El
Salvador, Part Four ("Cases and patterns of violence"),
Chapter Three ("Massacres of peasants by the armed forces"), El
Salvador Truth Commission Report, from the United States Institute
of Peace. Retrieved 2008-05-04.
- Richard Boudreaux. "Many Die but No Agreement on How Many and Why,"
Associated Press, February 12, 1982. Retrieved 2008-05-04.
- Bernard Weinraub, "Envoy Says Salvadoran Plan Is Intact," New
York Times, 12 June 1982, 3 (cited in John F. Kirch, " Raymond Bonner and the Salvadoran Civil War - 1980
to 1983" presented at the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication in Toronto, Canada, August
2004)
- The words were that he was "worth a division to the communists
in Central America." See "The Ray Bonner Division," ed. Reed
Irvine, AIM Report XI, no. 14 (July 1982): 1. (cited in John F.
Kirch, " Raymond Bonner and the Salvadoran Civil War - 1980
to 1983" presented at the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication in Toronto, Canada, August
2004)
-
http://books.google.com/books?id=qv9o4qoOnFEC&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=atlacatl+jesuits+battalion&source=web&ots=UBWkXSylFC&sig=NN-8T31qFK9ILNajglKXGQNjTVQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA91,M1
- The New York Times > International > Americas
> O.A.S. to Reopen Inquiry Into Massacre in El Salvador in
1981
- Former Salvadoran Foes Share Doubts on War -
washingtonpost.com
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