Alter Moment: December 10, 1981- The Massacre at El Mozote

Today is December 10, 2007, nearly 26 years ago on December 10, 1981, a massacre occured in the small El Salvadoran hamlet of El Mozote.  Its inhabitants were systematically exterminated by the Atlacatl battalion, a U.S. trained counterinsurgency force. From the beginning, Monterrosa, their U.S. Special Forces trained commander, worked to give his new force a mística -- a mystique.

According to Mark Danner of the New Yorker, the men of the Atlacatl

celebrated their graduation from training by collecting all the dead animals they could find off the roads -- dogs, vultures, anything – and boiled them together into a bloody soup. They chugged it down. Then they stood at rigid attention and sang, full-throated, the unit's theme song, "Somos Guerreros":
We are warriors!
Warriors all!
We are going forth to kill
A mountain of terrorists

Only, they mistook at least 733 civilians as ‘terrorists’ on
December 10, 1981. And they  slaughtered them all.

Articles about the massacres initially appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post, thanks, primarily to the testimony of one of the survivors,  an El Salvadoran woman named Rufina Amaya. She  explained that she had escaped in the confusion of the initial round up of civilians and hidden in a tree.

Soon the killing started.

It began with decapitation, but that was hard work, so the soldiers rounded up the women into a house and filed the men out into the forest. "All morning, you could hear the shots, the crying and the screaming," Rufina testified. "None of the women had any idea what would happen next. They just cried and hugged one another."

What came next was worse.  Soldiers of the Atlacatl battalion took their daughters, ten year old, twelve year old girls, and led them off into the jungle.
"Everyone was screaming, 'No! No! Don't do this!' But the soldiers would hit the mothers with the butts of their rifles, and they would reach behind and grab the girls and pull them along with them."

From the house, the soldiers marched the group of young women and girls -- some of them as young as ten years old -- out of the hamlet and up onto the hills. Before long, the women in the house could hear screams coming from the hills.
Rufina told the reporters that the soldiers killed her husband, her nine-year-old son, and her three daughters, aged five, three, and eight months.

According Mark Danner, "No fewer than ten American advisers were working with the Atlacatl Battalion at the time."

Amaya and a few other surviving peasants gave NY Times reporter, Raymond Bonner a list of 733 names, mostly children, women, and old people, who had been murdered.
The Reagan administration didn’t want to hear it. At the time, Thomas Enders, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, attacked the reports of the massacre before a congressional committee reviewing aid to El Salvador. He said 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." President Reagan accordingly certified that the Salvadorans were "making a concerted and significant effort" to end "the indiscriminate torture and murder of its citizens." Continued aide to El Salvador was approved.

The Washington Post reporter, Alma Guillermoprieto denies this, saying

"The fact is that evidence for the massacre existed from the day those stories appeared in the newspapers. Two journalists from two leading newspaper, traveling independently of each other, provided the same evidence. There were photographic documents, [there were] credible sources."

Finally, on October 22, 1992, over ten years after the incident, a report providing forensic evidence of the massacre was published.  Alma Guillermoprieto was in New York City when she read the story. "I was in the supermarket," she said, "and I started crying. I never in all my reporting career came face to face with so much evil, and I just felt the pain all over again."

•  Alter Moments explained...

  In my view, An ‘Alter Moment’ aims to become a snap shot of an historical time which focuses on the perspectives of individuals within society—as opposed to their rulers – as well as individuals and regions that were not previously considered historically important—Latin America, say, or Haiti.

  In other words, it will be a series of  stories designed and oriented around the perspective of someone who stands outside the dominant state or cultural authority.

  As such, I hope to provide a kind of through the looking glass experience for readers on any given day. For if there is a ‘national narrative’ produced by careful pruning and primping of the historical record, there is also a vast sea of nearly inchoate counter narratives—that tell a vibrant story of courage and tragedy as dear and worthy of respect as any dominant historical narrative. That’s what I believe, anyhow. And that’s what I hope an Alter-Moment can begin to capture for the readers here at DailyKos. Please let me know if you’d like to see more of these.

  by DelicateMonster on Mon Dec 10, 2007 at 08:40:52 AM PDT

  •  More, please.

    There can never be too much truth.

    This story would fit appropriately into Howard Zinn's narrative of American history, the hidden history of the average American, the heretofore untold history of oppression and manipulation at the hands of a powerful and unabashed elite.

    by scoff0165 on Mon Dec 10, 2007 at 08:53:32 AM PDT

    •  Zinn is excellent and was one of my 'models'

      if you will. The other was a fellow named Dan Roberts who does a spot on NPR called 'A Moment in Time' (at least locally, he may be national now, I'm not sure). So I wanted to tie the stories to a date, but also give them a 'bottom rail' perspective--keeping it reasonably short because it's obviously not 'current' news.

      Thanks for your support.

      by DelicateMonster on Mon Dec 10, 2007 at 08:58:47 AM PDT

•  See Also Joan Didion's review of Danner

  She also wrote a book, called Salvador, which was drawn from essays printed in the NYRev of Books.

  http://www.markdanner.com/...

  by Dartagnan on Mon Dec 10, 2007 at 08:50:57 AM PDT

  •  I've read good sized chunks of Salvador

    the prose is haunting and evocative. And she's spot on with her point about Danner, his book isn't so much about El Mozote, as about our refusal to believe it happened--at least for a time.

    by DelicateMonster on Mon Dec 10, 2007 at 08:55:21 AM PDT

•  Thanks for this diary.

  by TomFromNJ on Mon Dec 10, 2007 at 09:09:36 PM PDT

•  Thanks for making us remember...

  School of the Americas Watch remembers every year but this is mo' better.  Raymond Bonner got screwed by the so-called "liberal" NYT and was replaced by a right-wing business reporter.  

  by chalatenango on Tue Dec 11, 2007 at 11:09:51 AM PDT