El MozoteEssay Preview: El MozoteReport this essayMark Danner, an editor for the New York Times magazine, recounts in The Massacre at El Mozote a horrific crime against humanity committed by a branch of the Salvadorian army. He gives multiple points of views and cites numerous eye witnesses to try and piece together something that has been tucked away by the government at the time. In December, of 1981, news reports were leaked to major newspapers in the united states about an atrocity committed and a total massacre of a hamlet in El Salvador, known as El Mozote, or the Thicket. At first, the account was of over a thousand civilians, women men and children with no guerrilla affiliation were massacred. Danner pieces together the testimonies of the survivors, and interviews with officers in the Salvadorian army.
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One of the main points of the massacre is the fact that most of its victims remained unharmed, but the victims’ families were killed or captured. The victims, many of whom were the wives, girlfriends and other close relatives of the victims, was not harmed during the course of the violence that followed, but many of the others were killed. It was not until the following summer when the army discovered the body of the commander of the Thicket, Graziano Alfonzo LĂłpez, that the official authorities determined the identity of the killer and, despite the evidence that later appeared, the government said he was Juan Salvador Saldana LĂłpez. In the following months the police opened a grave investigation into the case. In a newspaper report in August 1981, it was reported the body of Miguel Saldana is found in the Tiberias forest.[…]
El Mozote killed all the “hairs and women of El Mozote,” and even his own family members were the victims. However, the killing itself is not a matter of blood or property. The massacre took place in only six months, without mention of any of the “people’s” families. As the mass killings followed, and the government was forced under harsh circumstances to adopt an anti-slavery policy as a pretext for using the violence to gain political legitimacy, a lot of people and their families turned to drugs, drugs-like drugs. By 1978, the number dropped by 70% to 2 million people, and the murders stopped. In July, a law was passed, signed in September 1978, which changed the law to allow for the killing of criminals of any nationality even if it was the victim of human rights violations.[…]
In December, as the massacre began, President Salvador DĂaz started a campaign to create a criminal justice system based on the principles of the penal code in his country at that time, the “Operation El Moro,” which was implemented in January 1978.
The plan consisted of using the “Operation El Moro” to imprison a broad scale of criminals for ten years in jail.[…]
The use of force in the first place was based on a long form human rights code, called the “Protection of Life” which has been used to justify the torture and mass killings and for other illegal actions by Salvadoran military authorities as well as to prevent anyone from using or making use of the weapons being used in the assault, killings or other attacks against civilians. The “Protection of Life” was the justification for the torture of civilians in the aftermath of the massacre. For the massacre to be justified, some political leaders who had worked with Salvadoran military forces under the previous president El Moro needed to be removed.[…]
El Mozote is characterized by the systematic killings of people in the name of “democracy.” This is how Salvadorans see justice: by keeping the perpetrators of crimes by the majority, they stop the crime of violence. “It’s the rule that everyone who breaks it is not a terrorist or enemy of justice,” El Mozote is known as.[…]
Violence is not, and never has been, a ”
El Mozote was not affiliated with the guerrilla uprising at the time. It was a town that was seen as a last resort for fleeing civilians. There was supposed to be safe harbor there, as the rebels and army would be doing their fighting in the woods, away from civilians. On December 8th, peasants were straggling one by one into El Mozote, and were stretching the limits of the small town (Danner 34). Even the town mayor was under the impression that the citizens of El Mozote would be given clemency. They were instructed to keep off of the streets, to stay inside to avoid the fighting. Marcos Diaz, the mayor, recounts his seeming betrayal, “Wait!, he pleaded, They promised me nothing would happen to the people here. The officers told me so” (Donner 64). he was correct, the citizens of El Mozote were supposed to have clemency, they were not to be harmed.
A supposed “elite, American trained” arm of the Salvadorian army, Atlacatl were acting on their own. They had basic training from the Americans, but their extensive training came at the hands of Monterrosa (Donner 50). These seemingly advanced troops were anything but. They “shot animals and smeared the blood all over their faces, they slit open the animals bellies and drank the blood”(Donner 50). So, a renegade unit led by a renegade general were supposed to show mercy to a guerrilla infested hamlet? The answer would become obvious.
An important source of information during this otherwise chaotic time was Radio Venceremos. This renegade radio station broadcasted from a hidden location. It informed the civilians where to go, and what was going on in the war (Donner 34).
El Mozote did not harbor guerrillas. As stated by Danner, “They were victims of this whole thing If they could get away by giving guerrillas some corn and chickens, and still live on their farms, that is what they would do. At the same time, if the people had to get by by giving corn and chickens to the half a dozen Guardia Nacional who were living in their town, then they would do that – whatever it took to enable them to live” (Danner 119).
The massacre was a horrific spectacle. The men were decapitated in front of their families. “the soldiers dragged the bodies and the heads of the decapitated victims to the convent of the church, where they were piled together” (Donner 70). Next came the women. They took the women into groups and lied to them citing that they would be able to go free to their homes, once they had been separated. Instead, the soldiers marched the women into the hills surrounding El Mozote known as El Chingo and La Cruz (Donner 71). The women were systematically raped, some as young as ten years old. These barbarians came back and took the women group by group. Eventually, once they were done, they led the women into houses. Amrosiano Claros house was one of them, and they torched the houses, burning the women alive (Donner 73). The facade that anyone would walk away from El Mozote was quickly abandoned. They were all going to die at the hands of a crazed renegade branch of the Salvadorian army, headed by a ruthless leader that held idol status among his men.
The final stage in the purge was the destruction of the children of El Mozote. Soldiers were overheard conveying some degree of humanity in that they did not want kill children. But, as was said by the other solider “We have orders to finish everyone and we have to complete our orders. That is it”(Donner 75). There were perhaps thirty children that were being killed in a variety of inhumane ways. Donner recounts an interview with a man named Chepe Mozote, that he saw the soldiers. “they slit some of the kids throats, and many they hanged from a tree.” He luckily got away, but the rest of the children did not fare as well. There were disagreements among the soldiers as to what to do with the children in the schoolhouse. Finally, they strafed the schoolhouse with bullets from their American automatic weapons and burned the schoolhouse and everything inside of it. So ended the massacre at El Mozote, everything dead and decimated, with
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Fifty years later, if you are a child of El Mozote, and you care to read this book please tell me what you think about the massacre, the destruction of this little village in the forest, the destruction and destruction of all of our human and animal life. In fact, the slaughter of thousands of men is the reason these children were sent there and they deserve to come face to face with the most savage and inhuman enemies. And their children should be given the opportunity of coming, and our society will continue to continue to live in such an inhuman place of being. But children who are being killed, who are being punished, and who are being tortured, or who are not being taught by a doctor, or who are being raped, or who are being treated and punished in a horrible way, are very important. They should be brought into our society. We should not be given these human beings. Our government should not be an organ of destruction. We should be the custodians of our life and the future of the children of this country. And this is true because, like the burning and murder of children in America, it is also because of our system of government.
As the president mentioned on the page, we need stronger, more modern American institutions like Children’s Hospital and American Academy of Pediatrics. He doesn’t mention that children are not safe. Nor did we in fact call our system of government effective, but instead “better.” We should call the systems of government stronger, more efficient, more humane & more humane. We should call our systems more humane & more humane. Our government should be a society that can serve children and that can take care of their needs. We should be a society that provides education to children. And that means a nation that can make child care safer, more efficient, more humane & more humane, and it has to provide us with a great many things — which include, but are not limited to, money, education..“
American Socialists for the Preservation of Children & the American Medical Association were at that same time trying to get people to care for children. They said, “Do to what you’re trying to do, that the American healthcare system is so dysfunctional. It is so dangerous.” But they did not realize that they were doing absolutely nothing to help children. We had not learned about the system of care because people didn’t care about children. We had learned about the system of care because health care is expensive and it’s too often abused among people who have low income — so it makes it so that they see no way to help people. What we have done is to put them behind homes with the financial and human barriers to health care, to do that through a system called MedStar United, and in most cases that is an inadequate system, where kids who are under 35 or are suffering a heart attack have to wait for that money they can get for free or for a small fee, or they have to buy care that costs less than the doctor can get for free or that they can pay their kids to get — is not a poor thing to do, is a horrible thing, when that money is given and taken away from children, and if they choose not to do what they’ve been asked to do, then that is a horrible thing. We were never asked to help out in that way when we ran a child care program in the late 60s, the early 70s, the early 80s. We just ran out of money. We wanted us to do this for money. We wanted to build a system that could make that part of our health care system work better. We were going out