The Massacre at El Mozote

“[...] the United States had no choice but to go on supporting a ‘friendly’ regime, however disreputable it might seem, because the alternative—the possibility of another Communist victory in the region—was clearly worse [...]”

The United States’ position seems to be that it is better to take the lesser of two evils, the worse being a communist government in Central America. To avoid this, the US will go to extraordinary lengths, and ignore the accounts and much of the evidence suggesting a great injustice has taken place. as we’ll see in Chapters 6 and 7.

“That in the United States it came to be known, that it was exposed to the light and then allowed to fall back into the dark, makes the story of El Mozote—how it came to happen and how it came to be denied—a central parable of the Cold War.”

The final line of the first chapter, this passage essentially sums up Danner’s purpose within the pages that follow. This is his thesis statement, laying out the way in which the United States, during this time period, was willing to do whatever it took to not let communism prevail. This brings up one of the main questions of the book: at what point does ignoring the atrocities of the “good guys” become as bad, if not worse, than the “bad guys” winning? For the United States, in the actual historical moment, this line was never crossed. And yet Danner’s project seems to be to have us rethink this conclusion in the wake of the recently-uncovered evidence, as well as the first-hand accounts that had gone unheeded for a decade. 

“And later they saw thick columns of smoke rising from El Mozote, and smelled the odor of what seemed like tons of roasting meat.”

This early moment detailing the massacre’s carnage might initially take readers by surprise and acts as a warning of the level of detail that is to come, most especially in Chapter 5. This early foreshadowing, repeated in a slightly-altered manner at the end of Chapter 3, sets the stage, in an otherwise non-graphic book, for the horrifying account of the massacre.

“If the guerrillas were fish swimming in the sea of the people, as Mao had said, then the Army would do its best to drain the sea—‘quitarle el agua al pez,’ as the officers put it: to take away the water from the fish.”

This metaphor becomes a sort of mini refrain, being repeated here and there throughout the text, and it sums up the mission of Operation Rescue: to clear out the noncombatants in order to have a clearer shot at the guerrillas. Fish die when not in water, and this serves as a mild form of foreshadowing. It is also interesting to consider the dehumanizing effect of this saying: if it’s just a fish, the fact of its death is probably not as important.

“The argument over identity, over who was a guerrilla and who wasn’t and what constituted evidence […] one way or the other, would recur during the next two days.”

Much is made in these opening chapters of the difficulty of discerning friend from foe in this civil war, meaning that the level of uncertainty was very high, and thus that the threshold for violence was very low. All throughout the preceding chapter, the difficulty of this question hovered in the background. Ultimately, this passage highlights the theme of identity and its slipperiness.

“‘We were thinking that because they hadn’t killed us yet, maybe they wouldn’t,’ Rufina says. After all, no one had really been harmed, and, even if the promises of Marcos Díaz’s officer friend had been worthless—well, the people here had never had trouble with the Army. The people knew that they weren’t guerrillas, and the soldiers, despite their angry shouting, must know it, too.”

Because the narrative has already revealed, albeit in broad strokes, what will actually happen, this passage spoken by Rufina Amaya Márquez takes on an even greater sense of tragedy. This also coincides with the running theme throughout these opening chapters of the uncertainty caused by the civil war. As is mentioned in several places, including here, no one thought that El Mozote was truly in grave danger, and so the surprise of the massacre amplified its effects even more.

“‘If we don’t kill them now,’ [Captain Salazar] said angrily, ‘they’ll just grow up to be guerrillas. We have to take care of the job now.’”

This quote comes in the wake of members of the Atlacatl Battalion second-guessing the necessity of killing the children of El Mozote and in the surrounding hamlets, and encapsulates the vicious cycle at play in the region, increasing the sense of tragic inevitability of the events being related. Because the atrocities visited on the campesinos of Morazán drive people into the arms of the guerrillas, the army then feels the need to commit still more heinous atrocities.

“‘What we did yesterday and the day before, this is called war. This is what war is. War is hell. And goddammit, if I order you to kill your mother, that is just what you’re going to do.’”

Coming at the end of the incredibly graphic and violent account of what occurred at El Mozote and in the surrounding hamlets, this quote from an Army Captain named Salazar is striking in its use of abstract clichés (“War is hell”). The contrast between the seemingly hyperbolic and familiar—and therefore almost trivial—portrayal of the horrors of war here and the account that it follows gives the reader a sense of cognitive dissonance that highlights even further the enormity of what preceded this section at the end of Chapter 5.

“The guerrillas immediately sent reports of the killing to their commanders; but there was a problem. ‘The comandantes didn’t believe us—they didn’t believe the numbers,’ Licho said.”

As one of the first sentences of Chapter 6, which will largely be about the doubt cast on accounts of the massacre by American officials, Danner chooses to begin first with the guerrillas’ own doubts about the veracity of the reports coming from their own soldiers. This serves to highlight the enormity of what had happened, since the guerrillas should have been in a prime position to believe something of this nature, having witnessed the horrors of war. Also, as people who would benefit from news of this getting a lot of attention, it seems like they should have wanted to believe the accounts.

“If such a certification [that the Salvadoran government was taking steps to improve its human rights record] was not delivered to Congress by January 29th, and convincingly defended, all funds and assistance for El Salvador would be immediately suspended.”

Here, Danner provides a concise overview of what was at stake at the time: continued funding on the war efforts to keep the leftist forces at bay and prevent the spread of communism. Danner suggests here and elsewhere that it is largely because of these high stakes and the portentous timing that so much doubt gets cast on the affair. By foregrounding this aspect of the larger political context, before getting the first accounts from American reporters, Danner sets up the reader to experience the flow of information in a similar way to how the Reagan Administration, as well as the average US citizen, would have experienced it.

“Abrams stood the human-rights argument on its head, contending that to argue for an aid cutoff was, in effect, to argue for a guerrilla victory, and that at the end of the day, however badly the Salvadoran government behaved, those collective atrocities could never approach the general disaster for human rights that an FMLN victory would represent.”

This paraphrase of Abrams’s argument, which represents the feelings of a wide swath of Americans in the depths of the Cold War, pits hypothetical consequences against the real-life consequences of either acting on the reports of the massacre or not. In this case, the hypothetical consequences of a guerrilla victory loomed so large that it blotted out the view of the actual evidence of human rights abuses. By providing this context, Danner is able to contrast the reader’s experience, who has just read the harrowing account of Rufina Amaya Márquez, with that of the majority of people at the time, who had not yet heard the account in such vivid detail.

“(Radio Venceremos, meantime, managed to cast doubt on the entire issue by insisting that Americans had actually accompanied the Atlacatl in El Mozote—a charge for which no evidence exists. The radio also apparently claimed, among other things, that the soldiers had murdered children in El Mozote by baking them in ovens.)”

This parenthetical aside from Danner highlights one of the issues with having the accounts of what happened in El Mozote actually be believed: there was so much misinformation alongside the truth that it cast doubt on every account. The guerrillas were seen as biased (for good reason, it would seem here), as was the press, which was viewed as pro-guerrilla, and as we find out in the next chapter, the most “credible” witnesses—the investigators sent by Ambassador Hinton, including Todd Greentree—never actually got close enough to see any of the carnage first-hand.

“‘I’d had to image a lot of death, bodies upon bodies. If I’d thought I was there to prove a massacre had happened I would have imaged many more bodies.’”

Along with other layers of “proof” mentioned here and elsewhere, this account from photographer Susan Meiselas, who accompanied Raymond Bonner into the region of El Mozote to report on the massacre, represents the most definitive “proof” (until the bodies were actually unearthed roughly a decade later) in that she was able to bring back actual photographs of a number of bodies in the aftermath of the massacre. Photographs are generally perceived as having a higher level of credibility than eyewitness accounts. However, as she suggests here, because she was not there to prove the massacre occurred, she did not take as many pictures as she could have, a fact that has a lot of bearing on the way the official version in Washington got swept under the rug.

“‘You could see vertebrae and femurs sticking out. No attempt had been made to bury the bodies.’”

Part of Guillermoprieto’s account of what she saw as she toured El Mozote after the massacre, this quote highlights the specificity that marks the eye-witness accounts of the aftermath—accounts that were later dismissed. The notion of what constitutes “proof” under these circumstances is at the core of this later-middle section of the book. As one of the only accounts that circulated widely from someone who actually set foot in El Mozote, and by a journalist who’s international credibility could be seen as higher than that of Rufina Amaya Márquez, for instance, shows the multiple levels of “proof,” that existed, all of which were ignored or dismissed.

“‘[...] I mean, you talk to a soldier who thinks he’s taken part in some heroic operation—and a Latin soldier, I mean—you can’t get him to shut up. But these soldiers would say nothing. There was something there.”

In this quote from Todd Greentree, who authors the cable that features heavily in Chapter 7, we see a stark contrast with the same man’s official account of what could be proven. Here, we see the gut instinct and the circumstantial evidence that made him certain that “There was something there,” and yet, because the burden of proof was so high, these circumstantial pieces of evidence could not hold sway over official positions in the Reagan Administration. This calls into question what dictates “proof” when time is short and the consequences dire.

“[T]he rest of the summary consists of careful assertions of what could not be proved.”

The Greentree cable, which kicks off the chapter, illustrates the incredible lengths to which US diplomatic staff went to in order to avoid saying anything that could not be proven. The standards of proof were much higher in this case than in the average US court of law, for instance, because of what were seen as the vast consequences, fueled by the fear of communism.

“In other words, the possibility that the guerrillas were making a major propaganda ploy over a massacre that might or might not have occurred in El Mozote, and were doing so for the purpose of derailing U.S. policy—well, what the Embassy had to say about that event had to be very, very carefully phrased and controlled.”

In this quote, Danner illustrates the unfortunate double bind that everyone is in. Because of the timing of the massacre, which led to the guerrillas using it effectively as propaganda, the fact that it could have been a “ploy” took precedence over whether or not it actually was a ploy, at least for the U.S. Of course, for the guerrillas, because it was so horrible, there was no way to get the word out about it without it seeming like propaganda. This sort of Catch-22 is one of the central absurdities of the situation that lends it the description of a “parable.”

“‘Results’ [Senator Enders] would interpret to mean improvement. Thus he would be arguing, in essence, that, however horrendous ‘the human-rights situation’ might now be in El Salvador, the last year had in fact been less horrendous than the year before.”

The sort of rationalization and mental hoops that the Reagan Administration is jumping through in this quote (and this chapter as a whole), provide ample evidence of the great fear of communism felt throughout the US in the Cold War era. As Danner points out a little later, the sense of a progression of fewer political murders year by year—seen as “improvement”—is founded mostly on a manipulation of the facts.

“And so, because of this underlying agreement, the entire debate, loud and angry as it appeared at first glance, was not a debate. It was an exercise for the cameras.”

The summation of much of Danner’s treatment of the US’s reaction to the rumors of massacre in El Salvador, this quote emphasizes the way in which optics were foremost in the minds of US politicians. They were in a bind, unable to let El Salvador fall to the guerrillas, but also unable to stomach the methods by with the Salvadoran Army was fighting the war. The theme of the way things are versus the way they seem undergirds all of this.

“For El Mozote was, above all, a statement. By doing what it did in El Mozote, the Army had proclaimed loudly and unmistakably to the people of Morazán, and to the peasants in surrounding areas as well, a simple message: In the end, the guerrillas can’t protect you, and we, the officers and the soldiers, are willing to do absolutely anything to avoid losing this war—we are willing to do whatever it takes.”

This quote provides a good overview of the ideology represented by the Salvadoran Army and Monterrosa in particular. Although he later shifts tactics to less brutal methods, as Danner points out, part of the reason this was possible was that these brutal tactics were so effective. In this book of complexities, the way in which a horrible thing like the massacre at El Mozote could lead convolutedly to a reduction in future brutality maps onto the similar ideology of the US ignoring human rights abuses for the long-term goal of stopping communism, which was seen as by far the greater of the two evils.

“‘We realized that for someone as militarily talented as he was to start to do real political work could be very dangerous. I think it was at the beginning of 1983 that we started making plans to kill him.’”

Serving as a bit of foreshadowing, this quote sets up the remainder of the chapter, leading to Monterrosa’s death at the hands of the guerrillas. One of the interesting aspects of the war that Danner highlights in this book is that the rivalry between Monterrosa and Villalobos was often very personal, and that they also seemed to respect one another. We can see that respect in how dangerous Licho sees Monterrosa as.

“‘There are times when you have to make war to gain peace.’”

A quote from Monterrosa, this line highlights a central paradox of war in general, but also serves to bring Monterrosa’s character and approach to the war into focus. Despite the shift in approach, from a shock-and-awe brutality to a more conciliatory hearts-and-minds approach, Monterrosa’s core philosophy has not changed.

“It was an enormous political blunder, for it said to the world, and especially to the Americans in Congress, that after the billions and billions of dollars and all the fine words about ‘training’ and ‘reform,’ at bottom the Salvadoran Army remained what it had been at El Mozote. [...] The time had come for the war to end.”

Referring to the brutal murder of Jesuit priests at the hands of “men of the Atlacatl” (156), this quote links this incident directly back to the matanza of Chapter 5. After the interval of Chapter 8, when Monterrosa had savvily switched tactics, this quote highlights the effect that his death had on the war effort. Without him, the brutality of the Atlacatl returned, signaling a lack of “reform” that eventually brought the war to an end.