El Salvador Perspectives

Sixth in a series This past Monday, President Funes met with relatives of the victims of the massacre at El Mozote and promised reparations. Translated from the article in DiarioCoLatino : President of the Republic, Mauricio Funes, revealed [December 5] that on the coming 16th, during a ceremony commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Peace Accords, he will present a set of collective reparations for victims of gross violations to human rights. The President revealed this initiative today at a meeting behind closed doors, he had with family members and representatives of organizations that were formed after the slaughter at El Mozote. "It will be a public act, we want to have widely available, because it is an occasion to again express to the people and the international community the commitment of the government of El Salvador with full respect for human rights and the policy of reparations," the leader told the relatives of victims of the massacre recorded on 10, ...

Fifth in a series This post in my series on El Mozote is a reprint of an essay by Bethany Loberg originally posted by my friends at SHARE on Tuesday.   They have graciously allowed me to reprint it here. December 11th, 2011 marks the 30th anniversary of the El Mozote massacre – one of the largest, most brutal massacres in Latin America. As part of the military’s scorched earth campaign to remove any possible source of supplies for the guerrilla by killing entire rural villages, members of the armed forces entered El Mozote and the surrounding villages in December of 1981, rounding up, separating, and systematically killing men, women, and children. Through investigations including exhumations and testimonies, Tutela Legal, the San Salvador Archdiocese’s human rights office has identified 819 individuals killed in the massacre – over half under the age of twelve. Thanks to Rufina Amaya’s tireless efforts to tell her story, as the sole survivor of the massacre, interna...

Fourth of a series How much responsibility does the United States have connected to the massacre at El Mozote? The massacre at El Mozote was carried out by the Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran armed forces.   It was an elite unit, and the US was proud of having played a role in creating it.  An Americas Watch report  wrote in 1992 : The history of U.S. human rights policy in El Salvador is not only one of downplaying or denying the war crimes of the Salvadoran military. U.S. officials often went one step further, asserting that the behavior of the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion, in particular, was "commendable" and "professional" in its relations with the civilian population. The Atlacatl Battalion, which carried out the massacre at El Mozote, was created in early 1981 and trained by U.S. advisers drawn primarily from the Special Forces in a first effort to reorganize the Salvadoran military to wage a full-scale counterinsurgency war. By mid-1981, 1200 s...

Third of a series The story of the El Mozote massacre, as testified to by Rufina Amaya, became known to the world through the reporting of two journalists,    Ray Bonner  of the New York Times and  Alma Guillermoprieto  of the Washington Post . News of the massacre had been filtering out of northeastern El Salvador during late December 1981, as the FMLN's radio station, Radio Venceremos told the story.  But as the propaganda vehicle for the guerrillas, the broadcasts lacked credibility.  The FMLN brought Bonner and Guillermoprieto separately into Morazan and to El Mozote where they saw, and then reported, the evidence of a massacre. Bonner's article appeared January 27, 1982 in the New York Times with the headline Massacre Of Hundreds Reported In Salvador Village .  The article began: From interviews with people who live in this small mountain village and surrounding hamlets, it is clear that a massacre of major proportions oc...

Second of a series When the Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran army massacred the civilian population of El Mozote, they left only one survivor.   Rufina Amaya's husband and children were all executed, but somehow she managed to escape.   For the next 25 years, she would be the sole voice for those hundreds of victims.   She was the one witness, the one to testify to what she had seen, to keep the world from forgetting what had happened in El Mozote. The following two videos on YouTube contain one of the many times Rufina told the story of El Mozote: Part 1 Part 2 Rufina Amaya passed away on March 6, 2007.  The New York Times carried this obituary of Rufina .  After her death Journalist blogger Jorge Avalos described her as: la mujer más humilde que he conocido. Una mujer que venció con su palabra tantas mentiras y tanta inhumana brutalidad para recordarnos el poder de la memoria y de la verdad.   the most humble woman...

The government of Spain has formally requested the extradition of 15 former Salvadoran military officers accused of directing or covering-up the November 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.   As I wrote recently , this action forces the courts of El Salvador to act, and forces the country to consider whether and how the crimes against humanity from the civil war era will be addressed.   A lawyer for some of the officers said in an interview in El Faro that they had been expecting this development and were not worried.

The El Mozote Massacre December 11, 1981 Thirty years ago, one of the worst atrocities of the Salvadoran civil war, the El Mozote massacre, took place. All but one of the civilians taking refuge in the small village of El Mozote, more than 800 men, women, children and babies, were brutally killed by the Salvadoran army. It is a tragedy the world must never forget. Over the next week leading up to the 30th anniversary, I will have a series of posts about the massacre.  Today I start with the basic facts of the massacre. On the afternoon of December 10, 1981, soldiers of the Salvadoran army's elite Atlacatl battalion arrived at El Mozote in northeastern El Salvador. The Atlacatl was a "Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion" specially trained for counter-insurgency warfare. It was the first unit of its kind in the Salvadoran armed forces and was trained by United States military advisors. Its mission, Operación Rescate ("Operation Rescue"), was ...