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.