A memorial to those killed located in El Mozote, El Salvador. (photo: Archbishop Romero Trust/Jacobin)
Remember
the El Mozote Massacre
By Micah Uetricht and Branko
Marcetic, Jacobin
14 December 16
Thirty-five years ago this week, El Salvador’s US-backed soldiers
carried out one of the worst massacres in the history of the Americas at El
Mozote.
Which
son of a ***** says that?” It was December 11, 1981 in El Mozote, a small town
in El Salvador, and the major wanted to know which one of his men had refused
to kill the children.
The
military had just spent an entire day murdering its hundreds of inhabitants.
Now, just the town’s kids were left. Gathered outside a schoolhouse in which a
number of the children were being kept, the soldiers had had an argument. Some
didn’t want to kill the kids, many of whom were under twelve years old and some
of whom were infants. The major, without hesitation, walked over, scooped a
little boy from a crowd of kids, flung him into the air, and speared him with a
bayonet as he came back down. There was no more arguing.
The
boy was one of over eight hundred slaughtered that day and the next,
thirty-five years ago.
El
Mozote was neither the first nor the last mass atrocity in El Salvador’s
nightmarish civil war. The rape and murder of
four US churchwomen by the National Guard, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero while
he held mass, the massacre of at least three hundred civilians at Sumpúl River, a similar
mass killing a year later at Lempa River, the execution-style murder of
six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of
Central America — the list of horrors goes on and on, and is so long and brutal
that it risks overshadowing the daily dumpings of bullet- and torture-riddled
bodies of those who dared to speak out against the hard-right government on
city streets and in public parks during the Salvadoran Civil War, which
stretched from 1980 to 1992.
The
overwhelming majority of these atrocities was carried out by the Salvadoran
National Guard and the death squads to which many of their soldiers and other
sympathizers belonged. Their aim was to destroy the Farabundo Martí National
Liberation Front (FMLN in its Spanish acronym), a coalition of leftist
guerrillas with strong support throughout the country; any workers, peasants,
and religious workers who sympathized with them; and any other dissenters who
disagreed with the program of the corrupt, right-wing government, which could
not have existed or endured without US backing.
At its
height, the United States was giving over $1 million a day to the Salvadoran
government in various forms of training, arms, military advising, and other aid
in an attempt to prevent a Sandinista-style takeover by the FMLN and its
supporters. “By the late 1980s,” Walter LaFeber writes, US aid “approached 100 percent of the
Salvadoran government budget.”
During
the war, no suppression of democracy and egregious human rights violations by
El Salvador’s government went too far for the United States, particularly under
Ronald Reagan. Every murder of civilians, every rape, every execution of
leftist-sympathizing clergy, every mass killing of innocents was justified by a
zealous anticommunism that sought to maintain crushing levels of poverty and
wealth and political power in the hands of a tiny, brutal, US-friendly elite
with no popular support but the full backing of American power behind it.
The El
Mozote Massacre was unique in the sheer number of innocent lives lost, and
perhaps for the wanton brutality exhibited during it. It should be remembered
for these reasons. But it should also be remembered because it was not unique.
Quantitatively,
it was the largest atrocity committed in El Salvador during the civil war and
one of the worst in the history of the Americas; qualitatively, it was of a
piece with US policy of tacitly encouraging or looking askance at such acts,
then covering them up.
Over
eight hundred innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered over two days
at El Mozote and surrounding hamlets. Not only was the loss of these lives not
enough to convince the United States to change its brutal course in El
Salvador, but the Right sprang into action to downplay the massacre and attack
the journalists who first reported it.
Operation
Rescue
The
killings, which are most clearly laid out in Mark Danner’s The Massacre
at El Mozote, an expanded version of a New Yorker article,
came during Operation Rescue, an eleven-day scorched-earth operation aimed at
the La Guacamaya region, just south of El Mozote and the location of the
command post of the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), Morazán’s leading
guerrilla group and one of the five members of the FMLN.
La
Gaucamaya also happened to be home to Radio Venceremos, an underground radio
station that specialized in spreading guerrilla propaganda, reporting on
guerrilla and social-movement organizing, and merciless mockery of the
government. The station enraged the Salvadoran military. Lieutenant Colonel
Domingo Monterrosa Barrios, the commander of the Atlacatl battalion unit which
carried out the operation, said that “so long as we don’t finish off this Radio
Venceremos, we’ll always have a scorpion up our ass.”
Atlacatl
was trained and equipped
by the US government. Monterrosa himself had spent some of his early
years attending courses at
the School of the Americas, which has long churned out Latin American soldiers
responsible for subsequent human-rights abuses and coups throughout the
hemisphere.
The
battalion landed in Perquín, Morazan, on December 8 and, after recruiting ten
locals against their will as guides, began moving southward. Along the way, the
more than one-thousand-strong battalion killed seven men in a nearby village
whose names matched a list of suspects while aircrafts bombed the hillsides
around El Mozote. At one point, bombs fell close to the town and damaged its
school.
It was
the kind of situation that might have prompted people to flee the town and
escape what appeared to be almost certain, approaching death. The guerrillas,
who themselves were packing up and escaping in advance of the operation —
including Radio Venceremos, whose members lugged heavy radio equipment as they
fled — tried to warn some townspeople to join them.
But
the locals had every reason to stay in El Mozote. Days before, Marcos Díaz, the
owner of the town’s general store, had been informed by an officer about the
coming operation, and told that while anyone found in El Mozote would be
spared, those outside would not. Later, speaking to a gathering of hundreds of
townspeople, Díaz — who was the richest man in town and well-respected —
put his reputation at stake, insisting that nobody leave. Most did not. Upon
hearing this news, many inhabitants of the surrounding towns made the trek up
to El Mozote, seeking refuge.
Beyond
this, however, it was inconceivable that El Mozote would become a target of
government forces. The guerrillas had never been able to establish a foothold
in this town of mostly Protestant evangelicals, who tended to look sourly on
communism. Many townspeople also likely reasoned that their odds would be
better staying in a town without guerrillas than to be caught somewhere else
with them, which would almost certainly result in death.
So it
was that hundreds of people were sheltering in the town when the soldiers
arrived on the evening of December 10 (coincidentally, the forty-third
anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The
battalion wasted no time.
Marching
into its deserted streets, soldiers banged on the doors, ordering the
inhabitants out. They did not find any guerrillas or the equipment for Radio
Venceremos. Shouting and pushing, the hundreds of Atlacatl members gathered the
people into the street, some carrying infants or holding onto children, and ordered
them to lie face down.
The
gathered prisoners laid in the street for an hour while soldiers walked up and
down, hitting and kicking the civilians, pointing their rifles at them and
bellowing insults and questions amid the children’s crying. When Marcos Dìaz
protested that he had been assured no harm would come to the town, he was met
with laughter from the soldiers. The soldiers then began collecting jewelry and
other valuables from the townspeople, before sending them back into their
homes, warning them against showing “even so much of their noses.”
According
to Danner’s account, the soldiers knew there were no guerrillas among the
townspeople. By this point, there were no longer any lists of suspects. Rather,
their aim — at least to begin with — was to interrogate the townspeople and
find out how the guerrillas were transporting their supplies and where they
were getting their weapons. The townspeople had no such information.
At 5
AM the next day, before the sun had risen, the soldiers again pulled the
sleepless townspeople from their houses, pushing them with their rifle butts,
and made them form two lines: one for the women and children, another for the
men. After standing for hours, the women were sent to the house of a local
merchant while the men were taken to the local Church of the Three Kings.
According to the Tutela Legal report later produced on the atrocity, even the
soldiers didn’t know what was to come next.
Monterrosa
called a meeting with several other high-ranking officers, after which they
gave an order: exterminate the people. All of them.
The
thirty to forty men of the third section of the Fifth Company, under Lieutenant
Salvador Augusto Guzmán Parada, were helicoptered in, while the rest of the
battalion was withdrawn and forbidden from entering the town without
authorization.
It
took the soldiers just one hour to “interrogate” the men before the killing
started. Around 8 AM, the soldiers started decapitating the men with their
machetes inside the church, where the men lay face down on the dirt floor. They
then dragged the headless bodies to the church’s convent to pile them up.
Soon,
however, they switched to taking the men out in groups of around four each,
blindfolded and their hands tied behind their backs, marching them out to the
forests, ordering them to lie on the ground, and then shooting them in their
heads.
Rufina
Amaya, the massacre’s sole survivor, recalled to Danner seeing her husband led
out in one of the first groups. She and her son watched as he and another man
were gunned down while trying to escape, then beheaded as they lay dying.
After
this, there was no illusion about what was taking place. Terror and hysteria
filled the house where the women and children were kept, as they watched groups
of men march out into the woods, then disappear, followed by screaming and
begging, then gunfire, and, finally, silence.
At
noon, a group of soldiers entered the house and informed the women it was their
“turn.” The men had already been released, the soldiers explained, and now the
women would be led out in groups and set free to do what they wished. They
started picking out and removing the older girls and younger women, some as
young as ten, hitting the mothers who clung onto the girls with their rifles.
Soon
after, those left in the house could hear the screams of their daughters coming
from the hills as the soldiers took turns repeatedly raping them over the next
eighteen hours, before killing them. One of the guides told Danner that the
soldiers would emerge from the forest joking about their fondness for the
twelve-year-olds.
While
this was going on, the soldiers began taking the women out in groups of around
twenty. Instead of setting them free, they murdered them just as they had the
men. After a while, terrified children and crying infants were all that
remained in the house.
Other
soldiers were piling up the bodies in some of the town’s houses, then setting
them alight. Those who had opted to leave the town and hide in the hills later
reported seeing plumes of smoke rising from the town, wafting up along with the
scent of burning meat.
Rufina
was led out in one of the last groups, and managed to get away in the midst of
confusion when the woman at the head of her group spotted the corpses in one of
the burning houses and started screaming that the soldiers were killing people.
The other women began begging and resisting the soldiers.
Rufina,
at the back, dropped to her knees and begged God for forgiveness. When the
soldier behind her went up to help the others with the women at the front, she
crawled between a pine and crab-apple tree, unseen, fifteen feet away from the
house they were being led into.
That
evening, the soldiers looted Marcos Dìaz’s store, quenching their thirst with
sodas. Then, they turned to the children. Apart from the girls, whose screams
could still be heard coming from the hills, they were the only ones still
alive.
The
soldiers entered the house and began slashing the children with machetes,
breaking their skulls with their rifles and choking them to death. The youngest
children were crammed into the church’s convent, where the soldiers unloaded
their rifles into them. Around thirty more children were killed in the morning,
when the soldiers went from house to house, collecting those who had missed out
on the carnage. These children, some as young as two years old, had their
throats cut or were hung from the trees.
Rufina,
who was still lying undiscovered between the pine and crab-apple trees, had
four of her children in the house, including an eight-month-old daughter. She
could hear the screams of her children, crying out for her as they were killed.
She
crawled across the road underneath a barbed-wire fence, hid in a patch of
maguey, and dug a small hole for her to bury her face into and cry. Later,
after very nearly being discovered by a soldier, she crawled away and was found
days later by the FMLN, the sole surviving eyewitness to the massacre.
The
soldiers set fire to every building that contained the bodies of the dead or in
which they had been killed. They also killed the animals and
burned the town’s crops. Over the course of a day’s work, they had slain more
than eight hundred people, half of whom had come from El Mozote. More
than 40 percent of the dead
were younger than ten years old.
Reagan’s
Response
Word
of the massacre soon spread beyond El Mozote. Several weeks after the killings
ended, the guerrillas made contact with Raymond Bonner of the New York
Times and invited him to Morazán, where he arrived with Susan
Meiselas, a photographer, on January 3. The Washington Post’s Alma
Guillermoprieto would get there several days later. Both spent days hiking
through the mountains before reaching El Mozote; Bonner and Meiselas arrived on
January 6.
“My
strongest memory,” Meiselas told Danner, “was this grouping of evangelicals,
fourteen of them, who had come together thinking their faith would protect
them. They were strewn across the earth next to this cornfield, and you could
see on their faces the horror of what had happened to them.”
The
reporters had more grotesque stories than they knew what to do with.
“We
started smelling it from Arambala,” Guillermoprieto told Danner, referring to a
municipality near El Mozote.
The most traumatizing thing was looking at these little houses
where whole families had been blown away — these recognizable human beings, in
their little dresses, just lying there mummifying in the sun. We walked
. . . to the center of town, where there was [a sacristy], and, in
it, a stupefying number of bones. There was a charred wooden beam lying on top
of the bodies, and there were bones sticking up, and pieces of flesh. You could
see vertebrae and femurs sticking out. No attempt had been made to bury the
bodies.
Both
Guillermoprieto and Bonner published front-page stories detailing the massacre
on January 26 — based in large part on their interviews with Rufina Amaya.
The
two had been the first reporters on the scene, where it was immediately clear
that scores had been killed — most of the decaying bodies were still lying
about. The guerrillas put the number slain at seven hundred, though it was
impossible at the time for anyone to obtain an accurate count. Even if that
figure was exaggerated, the number of victims clearly totaled in the hundreds.
El
Mozote had become a slaughterhouse, and Bonner and Guillermoprieto — and Amaya
— had told the world.
But
the Reagan administration was not happy with their reporting. Human rights
atrocities like the rape and murder of the American nuns and the assassination
of Romero had grabbed headlines and raised questions about what the United
States was doing in the country — whether American aid was bankrolling
widespread, indiscriminate, unjustifiable slaughter in its supposed attempts to
fight Communism.
In
response to outcry from the burgeoning Central American peace movement,
Congress required the administration to certify that the Salvadoran regime was
making progress on upholding human rights in order to continue to receive US
dollars. Reports of such a large-scale massacre in the country’s two most important
newspapers suggested that such progress was not being made.
Following
the publication of the articles detailing the massacre, the US embassy sent an
official, Todd Greentree, to collect evidence at El Mozote for their own report
on the incident. At the time, the human rights certification was being
discussed in Congress; Greentree openly admitted to Danner years later, “The
primary policy objective at the time was to get the certification through” —
apparently no matter what the human rights situation was like on the ground.
Greentree
and Major John McKay of the defense attaché’s office received briefings from
Salvadoran officers, who predictably denied any massacre. The two Americans
then attempted to examine the areas where the massacre had taken place, but
they were in hostile territory under guerrilla control. When their helicopter
attempted to land near El Mozote, they came under fire.
They
eventually interviewed some inhabitants of a refugee camp in the nearby
municipality of Gotera, but were accompanied by Salvadoran soldiers, making
honest and open discussion impossible. Though Greentree could sense terror on
the part of some refugees and received a strange silence from the soldiers he
interviewed, leading him to tell Danner that while it was clear “something bad
had happened,” he could not secure an exact story.
Greentree
and two other Americans attempted to convince some soldiers to take them into
El Mozote, but halfway there, the soldiers refused to go any further. The
official US investigation into the massacre at El Mozote never actually made it
into El Mozote and did not speak to Rufina.
That
didn’t stop Greentree from writing a cable, eventually sent under Ambassador
Hinton’s name and then used in testimony to Congress, that cast doubt upon and
downplayed the reports of mass slaughter, despite Greentree’s later admission
that his account was shaped almost entirely by Salvadoran army
accounts — the very army, of course, that was desperate to keep open
the spigot of money and support from Washington to maintain the brutal war
against the FMLN.
After
Danner questioned Greentree at length about the cable, Greentree eventually
admitted the cable “wasn’t a satisfactory account” and implied, perhaps
unwittingly, that he distorted the truth in the cable to serve US strategic
aims in the region.
The
admission surely made for shocking reading when Danner’s article was first
published, in 1993. But by then Greentree’s cable had long accomplished its
task for the Reagan administration: throw enough doubt onto the accounts of the
massacre to dismiss Bonner and Guillermoprieto’s reporting and ensure that the
US could continue funding wholesale slaughter in the country.
“[T]he
cable supplied to officials in the State Department a number of arguments that
they might find useful in impeaching the press accounts of El Mozote — deeply
misleading arguments that would form the basis of the government’s effort to
discredit the reports of the massacre,” Danner wrote.
Two
days after the cable arrived, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
Affairs Thomas Enders went in front of a House subcommittee to make the Reagan
administration’s case for continued funding of the far-right Salvadoran regime.
El Mozote was on everyone’s minds, and Enders masterfully obfuscated the facts
of the massacre and the broader human rights situation in El Salvador.
Dishonestly,
he stated that there weren’t even as many residents in El Mozote as the Post and Times reports
suggested were murdered (both articles made clear that the massacre took place
in El Mozote and a number of surrounding hamlets), that the US
investigation had not led to any evidence of a massacre, and that Bonner and
Guillermoprieto were parroting guerrilla propaganda.
“The
[human rights improvements] are slow in coming . . . But they are
coming,” he told the subcommittee. Evidence of the massacre brushed aside,
Congress soon voted to affirm that progress and thus keep the Salvadoran
killing machine humming.
Media
Apologists
Guillermoprieto
and Bonner’s respective reportage on the slaughter of hundreds of civilians had
failed to force an end to US support for a brutal regime. But maintaining their
Central American intervention wasn’t enough for the US right. The reporters,
and Bonner in particular, had to be punished for exposing what they had seen in
El Mozote.
Danner
writes that “Bonner and his ‘credulity’ had become a minor cause célebre in the
press and on the television talk shows.” The Wall Street Journal wrote
a long editorial on February 10 that spent several paragraphs attacking Bonner
and Guillermoprieto. “There is such a thing as being overly credulous,” the
piece read.
A
coauthor of the editorial, George Melloan, told a reporter that “obviously Ray
Bonner has a political orientation” to his coverage. A right-wing newsletter
cited by the Journal, Accuracy in Media, accused Bonner
of playing a role in “a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas.”
Six
months after the editorial, the New York Times removed Bonner
from Central America. The paper’s executive editor at the time, A. M.
Rosenthal, denied that he had pulled Bonner because of pressure from the Right.
Whether
or not this is true (in interviews both recent and at the time, Bonner claims
he doesn’t think it is), Danner wrote that the decision had a major impact on
the way the paper covered the Salvadoran Civil War: “The New York Times editors
appeared to have ‘caved’ to government pressure, and the Administration seemed
to have succeeded in its campaign to have a troublesome reporter — the
most dogged and influential in El Salvador — pulled off the beat.”
Bonner
went on to write a book, Weakness and Deceit: America in El Salvador’s
Dirty War, which came out in 1984 and was republished this year. The
reader quickly understands why the Right sought to make Bonner a target: he was
a meticulous reporter who unflinchingly reported on the US-trained and -funded
barbarity that was overtaking the country, while also prying scores of
documents out of the American government’s hands through Freedom of Information
Act requests and convincing his US contacts in the country to covertly provide
him with numerous, damning documents that the State Department refused to give
him.
Bonner
assembled a dense record of brutality in writing the book — and no doubt would
have exposed even more had he stayed on the Salvadoran Civil War beat until the
conflict’s conclusion in 1992.
Few
today would deny that the massacre took place, that somewhere around eight
hundred civilians were killed, and that the Atlacatl battalion carried it
out. But that vindication is little comeuppance for the activists whose corpses
continued to show up on San Salvador’s streets; or the six Jesuit priests and
their housekeeper and her daughter who were executed at the University of
Central America; or the tens of thousands throughout the country who were
murdered and the hundreds of thousands who were displaced — all in the years
following El Mozote.
Bonner
and Guillermoprieto were eventually vindicated, and Rufina spent the rest of
her life telling the world what had happened at El Mozote. But their reporting
and Rufina’s testimony couldn’t stop the United States from propping up a
depraved, quasi-fascistic regime in El Salvador for nearly a dozen years,
thanks in part to the government’s apologists in the US media.
Escaping
Justice
The
perpetrators of the killing have never faced justice. In fact, many appear to
have been rewarded.
Lieutenant
Colonel Monterrosa is one of the clearest examples. He perished three years
later in a helicopter crash. (Though different stories of his death exist, one
has his obsession with crushing Radio Venceremos killing him: the FMLN lured
him into a trap that led him to believe he had finally captured the guerrillas’
radio transmitter and could destroy the station. But the transmitter was
actually a bomb, and exploded in mid-air.) He was given a hero’s treatment in
his country and in the press.
As
the New York Times reported at the time,
he received what was almost a state funeral, with a mass in downtown San
Salvador attended not just by top military and civilian brass, but by US
military advisers and the US ambassador. A priest declared him a martyr and his
death a national tragedy.
The Times piece
itself — written in the post-Bonner era by James LeMoyne, who proved much more
sympathetic to the Reagan administration’s view on El Salvador — dwelt more on
his “military talents” and his representation of “the possibility of change in
a traditionally corrupt and often brutal army,” while mentioning his
involvement in the El Mozote Massacre only once, halfway through the article,
as an example of the modern Salvadoran army’s “contradictions.”
One US
Embassy official told the Washington Post that
his death was “a major setback for El Salvador . . . just when things
seemed to be going well.” “US officials repeatedly identified Monterrosa as one
of the brightest and most effective commanders, the sort of man who inspired
his units to previously unheard of military success,” the Post wrote.
It didn’t contain a single reference to El Mozote.
A
number of those involved received promotions over the following decade. Captain
Walter Oswaldo Salazar — who, according to Danner, berated his men after the
operation for questioning what they had done (“Goddamnit, if I order you to
kill your mother, that is just what you’re going to do”), and justified the
decision to kill the children on the basis that “they’ll just grow up to be
guerrillas” — became a lieutenant colonel. Major Natividad de Jesus Caceres
Cabrera — the man who had tossed and impaled the little boy at his troops’
reluctance to kill children — became a colonel.
Attempts
to obtain justice received their greatest setback in the form of 1993’s General
Amnesty Law, which shielded the perpetrators of all crimes during the
Salvadoran Civil War, both guerrillas and soldiers, from accountability. While
the blanket amnesty sounds “balanced” on its face, the fact that the
overwhelming majority of killings and atrocities were carried out by the
government meant that the government was the principal beneficiary of the
provision. The law passed just five days after a
truth commission published its report on the conflict, finding evidence
of widespread human rights abuses.
But
things are changing in El Salvador. In 2012, in a tearful speech,
then-president Mauricio Funes of the FMLN (which is now one of the country’s
two major political parties) apologized for what was done in El Mozote, one
month after asking for forgiveness for the massacre and three years after
apologizing for civil war–era crimes more generally. And earlier this year, the
country’s Supreme Court struck down the
Amnesty Law as unconstitutional, opening the door to bringing those
perpetrators who are still alive to justice.
In
October, a judge ordered the El Mozote
case reopened, calling for military and other records to be turned over and,
eventually, for a public hearing to be held. Those guilty of crimes will not
face jail terms, however. Rather, the goal is to get a full, accurate
accounting of decision-making behind the massacre, and for perpetrators to
admit their roles and ask forgiveness.
This
builds on earlier efforts to hold the guilty accountable. In January of this
year, former general José Guillermo García-Merino, who had served as defense
minister from 1979 to 1983, was deported from Florida.
García-Merino had not only been involved in atrocities, but had blocked investigations
into a number of atrocities — including at El Mozote. He had lived in
Plantation, Florida since 1989, when the first
Bush administration had granted him political asylum. Prior to this, in 2002, a
US court in Florida ordered García-Merino to pay $55 million to three
Salvadoran citizens tortured under his watch.
Most of
those involved in El Mozote have managed to escape legal repercussions for
their actions. But efforts like these may help ensure they don’t escape the
judgement of history.
El
Mozote’s Statement
One
might assume that a massacre on a scale as unfathomable as El Mozote would have
been a watershed moment in a conflict like the Salvadoran Civil War, a time
when the conflict’s principal purveyors of misery might take a hard look at
themselves and change course. It was not, and they did not. Mark Danner concludes
that the massacre served its purpose.
El Mozote was, above all, a statement. By doing what it did in El
Mozote, the Army had proclaimed loudly and unmistakably to the people of
Morazán, and to the peasants in surrounding areas as well, a simple message: In
the end, the guerrillas can’t protect you, and we, the officers and the
soldiers, are willing to do absolutely anything to avoid losing this war
— we are willing to do whatever it takes.
Lucia
Annunziata, an Italian reporter who was in El Salvador, told Danner,
The point [of El Mozote] was to create a turning point, a
watershed, to turn the tide, and to do it by scaring the hell out of the enemy.
It was a deliberate demonstration of cruelty to show them that the guerrillas
couldn’t protect them. And [Domingo Monterrosa] understood that you do this as
cruelly, as brutally as possible; you rape, impale, whatever, to show them the
cost.
If the
massacre was intended to strike so much fear into the hearts of guerrillas and
their supporters that they would give up their arms, it failed. The war dragged
on for more than a decade. Despite the lopsided advantage the government held
over the FMLN in weapons, funding, and training, the guerrillas eventually
fought the army to a draw. They continued to launch significant military
offensives and maintain significant public support.
But
the FMLN was decimated, exhausted, and unable to penetrate a government
that had been designed and long ruled by the far right. It would be
twenty years before they could restructure themselves from a
military organization, designed for guerrilla warfare and constantly
incurring mass casualties of their own forces and Salvadoran civilians in
events like El Mozote, to a political one and win a presidential
election — during which time the Right was able to advance sweeping
neoliberal reforms and loot the state for personal enrichment.
In
this respect, then, atrocities like El Mozote were a success.
Historian
Greg Grandin writes that it was not
any “public relations schemes designed to win hearts and minds but, according
to a 1991 Defense Department study, ‘lavish brutality’ conducted by the death
squads and security forces that prevented a guerrilla victory in El Salvador. …
[T]he containment of the rebels was ‘not the result of reform but the
consequences of the murder of thousands of people.’”
El
Mozote showed what the Salvadoran regime was capable of, and what the US
government was willing to tolerate, excuse, and cover for in service of
supposed anticommunism.
After
it became clear that the Atlacatl battallion had decapitated men in a church and
bayoneted a child to death and slaughtered entire families, the obvious
questions for the Reagan administration were: are these crimes barbaric enough
to convince you to change course? Is there any limit to the kind of vile acts
you will excuse in order to pursue your foreign policy aims?
The
answer to both questions, provided by El Mozote and its aftermath: a resounding
“no.”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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