The wreckage of Col. Domingo Monterrosa's helicopter outside the Musem of the Revolution in Perquin, El Salvador.
Rufina Amaya outside her modest home in Morazan Province, El Salvador in 1998.
I don’t think about El Salvador as much as I used to. And the small Central American country rarely makes the news.
The horrifying civil war there in the 1980s is largely forgotten.
But to me this was still HUGE news:
The story is on the BBC website.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/....
El Salvador has been ordered to investigate the single worst massacre committed during its civil war in a bid to bring those responsible to justice.
The Inter-American Human Rights Court ruled that an amnesty law did not cover the El Mozote massacre in 1981, when soldiers killed some 1,000 people.
As usual I won’t expect much coverage in the United States, even though it was the United States that trained and equipped the “elite” unit that killed about 1,000 civilians in El Mozote, El Salvador between Dec. 11-13, 1981.
In the 1980s, I was an activist with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) in Ann Arbor, Mich. I didn’t know it at the time but CISPES was the target of an FBI investigation into whether we were secretly just a front for Salvadoran leftist rebels. The FBI even broke into our offices at the University of Michigan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/....
The horrific Salvadoran civil war, in which the Reagan administration backed nun-killing death squads and anyone remotely liberal was targeted for torture and disappearance, seemed like it would never end.
Now it is mostly forgotten.
But I urge us to not forgot El Salvador, at least not today.
Here is a story I wrote about El Mozote that appeared in the Tico Times, the English-language newspaper in Costa Rica, about 15 years ago:
SEGUNDO MONTES, El Salvador – The dense foliage in northern Morazan province is broken by a rough cobblestone path leading east from the Black Road, the only paved road in the region.
About 50 yards up this path is a cluster of three homes made of corrugated metal, boards, cinder blocks and cardboard.
In front of one of these homes, a small pig, tethered to a guacamaya tree, lies in the shade from the hot afternoon sun. A barrel stands ready to collect rainwater from the roof. Nearby, clothes have been strung out on a line, in the hope that they will somehow dry in the incredible humidity before the afternoon rains come.
Rufina Amaya lives in this home, along with the 8-year-old orphan boy she has adopted.
She carries a red plastic lawn chair onto her porch and invites her guest to have a seat.
Amaya, like thousands of others in Morazan, is simply trying to rebuild her life – a life shattered on Dec. 11, 1981, when a Salvadoran army unit, trained and equipped in the United States, entered the small hamlet of El Mozote.
It was the Day of the Killings.
What happened at El Mozote that December day has long been the subject of controversy.
On Christmas Eve that year Radio Venceremos, the official radio station of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) broadcast a report that as many as 1,000 people, mostly children, had been killed at El Mozote by the Salvadoran army’s “elite” – and U.S.-trained – Altlatcl Battalion.
The U.S. Embassy in San Salvador discounted the report as propaganda. A State Department cable noted that the entire population of El Mozote was estimated at only 300 prior to December 1981, suggesting the number of deaths must have been exaggerated by the FMLN.
The Reagan administration was at the time fighting Congress over renewed military aid for the Salvadoran government, which had been accused of a series of horrific human rights violations. So the State Department cable in the context of this political agenda, ignored reports that hundreds of refugees had sought safety in El Mozote prior to the massacre and that the killings also encompassed several nearby villages.
In 1993, a team from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Unit exhumed 117 skeletons at El Mozote, Eight five percent of them were children. Many had been decapitated. Hundreds of other bodies are believed to have been burned to ashes in the hamlet’s church and other buildings, or to have decomposed completely in the tropical climate.
Rufina Amaya helped guide the team in the search for the truth of El Mozote.
Amaya, now 56, is one of only three known survivors of El Mozote. She hid in the crab apple trees near her home as night feel and the killings began. She later crawled away into the jungle, listening to the screams of the men, women and children.
Her four young boys and her husband were among those killed.
“I’m just trying to rebuild my life,” Amaya says. “I am living on the beans and corn I can grow. My two daughters are helping me.”
Her eldest daughter was married and not in El Mozote on the Day of the Killings. Her younger daughter was born after the massacre.
Amaya says she has been ill, but doctors can’t tell her what’s wrong with her.
“I can’t sleep. I’ve lost much of my memory. The last few days I’ve been feeling a bit better,” she says with a cautious smile, which quickly fades.
“I still have nightmares. I don’t like to remember ‘that thing.’”
Amaya’s two-room home is near the resettlement community of Segundo Montes, named after one of the six Jesuit priests murdered by the Salvadoran army in San Salvador in 1989. Refugees from Morazan returned here after the war, from Honduras, other parts of El Salvador, and from the United States.
They have established a few modest factories, producing shoes, arts and crafts and agricultural products, mostly for the residents’ subsistence.
Amaya, like most people in Morazan, is deeply religious. She believes God allowed her to survive for a reason.
“I’ve been very afraid since then,” Amaya says. “A lot of people ask about me, because I spoke out. But I believe in God and I survived. God game me the responsibility to speak the truth of El Mozote. I’m the only one who saw everything. I’m still very afraid.”
Things have changed dramatically in Morazan since 1981. The Salvadoran army, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid, was unable to defeat the rag-tag force of FMLN guerrillas in their mountain strongholds, despite a scorched-earth campaign for which civilians like Amaya paid dearly.
In 1992, a peace accord finally ended 12 years of fighting that left at least 75,000 dead in the small country. Under the accord, most of the country’s security forces, which were blamed for many human rights violations, were disbanded. The paramilitaries were demobilized. The dreaded Treasury Police was dissolved.
And FMLN guerrillas were integrated into a new civil police force, providing a measure of security for the frightened population of Morazan.
There are still security checkpoints along the highways, but staffed by both former FMLN and former Salvadoran security forces. This plan has worked well, with security for all travelers no matter which side they backed in the civil war, and the former rebels and former military personnel often become friends.
The FMLN is now a political party. The mayor of San Salvador is an FMLN member and the leftist coalition has a good chance of winning the presidency next year.
This would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when any left-leaning candidate would have almost certainly “disappeared” – tortured to death, with body parts being found the next morning.
Political killings in El Salvador are increasingly rare, though crime is rampant in the country has all too many guns left over from the war. In 1997, 20 people a day were murdered in El Salvador. During Holy Week this year, a traditional time of celebration, more than 400 people died in shootings, knifings and beatings. A culture of violence remains intact.
“Life isn’t worth much here,” said a 23-year-old man who said his name was Carlos. He said he fled to the United States during the war but has since returned, working in the agricultural cooperative at Segundo Montes. “Down here, they’ll kill you for your shoes – your Payless shoes. We’re just trying to survive.”
While the peace accord has provided a slim measure of security for Salvadorans, the root causes of the war remain largely unaddressed.
The nation’s oligarchy, the so-called Fourteen Families, still owns most of the country’s arable land, growing cash crops such as coffee and sugar cane for export, while hunger stalks the vast majority of Salvadorans in the countryside, who have barely enough – and often not enough -- land to grow the beans and corn they need to survive.
And justice for the El Mozote massacre has been more poetic than real.
An amnesty law passed by a right-wing parliament soon after the peace accords were signed granted immunity to all accused of human rights violations. There would be no trails.
But in 1984, justice of a sort came to Col. Domingo Monterrosa, the army officer who ordered that everyone in El Mozote – including the children – be killed.
The colonel had long sought the transmitter for Radio Venceremos, whose broadcasts from a hidden location in the mountains of northern Morazan were a constant thorn in the side of the government and a reminder that the guerillas had not been defeated.
On Oct. 22, 1984, during another military sweep of northern Morazan, Monterrosa and his troops landed by helicopter in the village of Jocoatique, barely four miles from El Mozote. The troops captured a handful of FMLN fighters, and nearby, in a graveyard, they found a radio transmitter, apparently abandoned by the fleeing guerrillas.
A delighted Monterrosa loaded the transmitter onto his helicopter for the return flight to Ilapango air base, headquarters for airborne operations in eastern El Salvador.
But as Monterrosa’s helicopter rose into the sky above Morazan, an FMLN guerrilla in the nearby mountains pushed a button on a remote control device, detonating a bomb hidden in the transmitter. The helicopter exploded in an angry thunder, echoing through the valleys. The wreckage of the helicopter is now on display in a courtyard outside the Museum of the Revolution in Perquin, which was the FMLN headquarters throughout the war. Colorful murals painted y the children of Morazan look down upon the twisted metal.
On the other side of the museum, a deep bomb crater is ringed by a circular garden, a humble tribute to the victims of El Mozote.
“Everybody was happy when the helicopter came down, because of what he had done to the people,” Amaya said. “God gave him justice for doing that. He’s the one who burned all the children and everything, and he died here too. He got burned, just like the children got burned.
Asked what she would like to say to the American people, Amaya hesitated, and wiped a tear from her cheek.
She cannot hide her bitterness.
“They destroyed so many lives. Why don’t they help us now? We have no work, no jobs – nothing. The United States helped to destroy this country, but not to rebuild,” Amaya said. “Those people got trained in the United States just to come here and kill everybody.”
The rains of Morazan were beginning to fall. Thunder startled Amaya, as it still does for many here who live through he days of scorched earth.
She rose from her chair on the porch and walked slowly into the yard, looking up into the sky as if searching for something.
“When I see a rainbow, it reminds me of my children’s smiles,” she said.
The rainy season was nearing its end. But on this October day, Amaya saw no rainbow.
During that trip I also found Andrea Marquez. She’s a young woman who was forced to bury her child in the mountains after the massacre. She went mad. The people of rural El Salvador are very religious and superstitious. So Andrea became the “Witch of El Mozote,” feared by villagers. But I found her working with children at Segundo Montes. She was doing OK, but did not want to talk to me.