by BELEN FERNANDEZ
Justice and accountability for the El Mozote massacre and other crimes of US-backed Salvadoran forces remain elusive.
Forty years ago, on December 11, 1981, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history commenced in El Salvador, in the village of El Mozote and its environs.
Some 1,000 civilians, most of them women and children, were slaughtered over a period of several days by the Salvadoran military’s elite Atlacatl Battalion, which had been trained, funded, and equipped by the United States.
A Jacobin Magazine tribute published on the 35th anniversary of the massacre recalls some of the gruesome scenes:
“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.”
The bloodbath took place in the context of El Salvador’s civil war of 1980-92, which ultimately killed more than 75,000 people – with the vast majority of atrocities perpetrated by the right-wing state in collaboration with paramilitary outfits and death squads.
Joining in the collaborative effort, naturally, was everyone’s favourite Cold War superpower to the north, the US, which throughout the course of its existential battle to make the world safe for capitalism has managed in the process to destroy countless human lives.
Between 1980 and 1982 alone, US military aid to El Salvador soared from $6m to $82m and would later skyrocket to more than $1m per day.
The continued overzealous funding was made possible in large part by the shamelessness with which officials from the Ronald Reagan administration lied to cover up Salvadoran state terror, including at El Mozote.
The administration also waged a campaign to discredit the few journalists intent on exposing the truth, such as former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner, author of Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador’s Dirty War.
In a new documentary titled “Massacre in El Salvador”, Bonner and photographer Susan Meiselas reflect on the whole sordid affair in El Mozote, where they arrived together in January 1982 to find a “ghost town” and a severely traumatised woman named Rufina Amaya, one of the sole survivors.
Amaya, whose blind husband and three daughters – aged five years, three years, and eight months – had perished in the slaughter, would later recall overhearing a conversation between soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion:
“‘Lieutenant, somebody here says he won’t kill children’, said one soldier. ‘Who’s the son of a b**** who said that?’ the lieutenant answered. ‘I am going to kill him.’”
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