Forty years after massacre in El Salvador, search for justice continues
Dec 14, 2021
WASHINGTON — On the 40th anniversary of one of the worst massacres in Latin American history, the head of the U.S. embassy in El Salvador said the diplomatic mission in the country has turned over all pertinent documents the U.S. has on the case.
"Yesterday we delivered documents from our government requested by the court in charge of the case," tweeted Brendan O'Brien, chargé d'affaires of the U.S. embassy in El Salvador, Dec. 11. "We support the rights of the victims of El Mozote and their surviving relatives to seek truth and justice."
To date, no one has been convicted of the killings of an estimated 800-1,200 Salvadoran civilians slaughtered by government forces in the village of El Mozote, in a mountainous region of eastern El Salvador, Dec. 11 and 12, 1981. But the latest attempt at justice has focused on seeking records, including documents in the custody of the Catholic Church, to pin down those responsible.
"Over the span of a few days, troops of the Salvadoran armed forces, many of them U.S.-trained, massacred over 1,000 people. The overwhelming majority of them women and children," tweeted Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern Dec. 10.
More:
https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/forty-years-after-massacre-el-salvador-search-justice-continues
Remember El Mozote
BY
MICAH UETRICHT BRANKO MARCETIC
On December 11, 1981, El Salvador’s US-backed soldiers carried out one of the worst massacres in the history of the Americas at El Mozote.
Which son of a bitch says that?” It was December 11, 1981 in El Mozote, a small town in El Salvador, and the major wanted to know which one of his men had refused to kill the children.
The military had just spent an entire day murdering its hundreds of inhabitants. Now, just the town’s kids were left. Gathered outside a schoolhouse in which a number of the children were being kept, the soldiers had had an argument. Some didn’t want to kill the kids, many of whom were under twelve years old and some of whom were infants. The major, without hesitation, walked over, scooped a little boy from a crowd of kids, flung him into the air, and speared him with a bayonet as he came back down. There was no more arguing. The boy was one of over eight hundred slaughtered that day and the next, thirty-five years ago.
El Mozote was neither the first nor the last mass atrocity in El Salvador’s nightmarish civil war. The rape and murder of four US churchwomen by the National Guard, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero while he held mass, the massacre of at least three hundred civilians at Sumpúl River, a similar mass killing a year later at Lempa River, the execution-style murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America — the list of horrors goes on and on, and is so long and brutal that it risks overshadowing the daily dumpings of bullet- and torture-riddled bodies of those who dared to speak out against the hard-right government on city streets and in public parks during the Salvadoran Civil War, which stretched from 1980 to 1992.
. . .
During the war, no suppression of democracy and egregious human rights violations by El Salvador’s government went too far for the United States, particularly under Ronald Reagan. Every murder of civilians, every rape, every execution of leftist-sympathizing clergy, every mass killing of innocents was justified by a zealous anticommunism that sought to maintain crushing levels of poverty and wealth and political power in the hands of a tiny, brutal, US-friendly elite with no popular support but the full backing of American power behind it.
More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/el-mozote-el-salvador-war-reagan-atlacatl-massacre
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El Salvador: Groundbreaking Insights into U.S. Cover-Up of El Mozote Massacre
29 April by El Faro
The Atlacatl Battalion during its 1992 disbandment. Photo: Giuseppe Dezza
A United States military advisor, Sergeant Major Allen Bruce Hazelwood, was on location, and on duty, in December of 1981 as Salvadoran soldiers carried out the El Mozote massacre, slaughtering almost a thousand civilians.
This groundbreaking revelation was the big takeaway from the expert testimony of Stanford University political scientist Terry Karl during pretrial hearings in El Salvador on Monday, April 26. The news of Hazelwood’s presence — along with Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, commander of the Atlacatl Battalion — at the scene of the massacre offers new insight into the extent of the U.S. role, as well as what Karl calls a “sophisticated cover-up” on the part of the Reagan administration and Salvadoran civil-military junta.
It also rekindles the debate about the United States responsibility in the Salvadoran armed conflict, as well as the need for both governments to fully declassify internal documents on the massacre and other war crimes, which they have withheld for four decades.
“Had [Hazelwood’s presence at El Mozote] come to light at the time, it would have meant cutting off United States aid,” said Karl. She added: “The participation of an advisor in wartime activities is against our laws, and it was illegal at the time.”
More:
https://www.cadtm.org/El-Salvador-Groundbreaking-Insights-into-U-S-Cover-Up-of-El-Mozote-Massacre
Indigenous villagers carrying remains of loved ones from a mass grave to a more respectful cemetery for reburial.