NYT Magazine. 13 January 2002. El Mozote: Another Hallowed Terror Ground.
Here in America, we know what our victims need. The intense desire to name and acknowledge those who died in the largest terrorist attack on American soil, the need to bring the guilty to justice, the families' urgency to possess a shard of bone to bury -- these things Americans understand, instinctively, as the foundations of healing. Yet they have been denied the families of those killed in what is probably the largest act of terror in recent Latin American history, the massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador. Dec. 11, 1981, is now more than 20 years in the past. But there have been no trials, no judicial investigation. With 811 presumed dead, their bodies buried just a few feet or inches under the earth, only about 230 sets of remains have been recovered, first because of Salvadoran obstructionism and then because of limitations on the time and financing of the diggers. One day early last month, families reburied some of the bodies in a mass grave in El Mozote, in a ceremony as weighted with emotion as if the massacre had taken place last week. In the middle of El Salvador's civil war, the American-trained, American-financed Atlacatl Battalion decided to make an example of a town in the guerrilla stronghold of Morazan. The world knows of the events of El Mozote because of Rufina Amaya, the single known survivor. Her account, and eyewitness reports of the bodies, were dismissed by the Reagan administration and the government of El Salvador as guerrilla propaganda. For 11 years, military and government officials there insisted that no massacre had take n place at El Mozote. When the war ended and a truth commission was established, members of the Argentine forensics team who had carried out excavations worldwide were finally allowed to dig in El Mozote. In 1992, they found 143 sets of remains -- 131 of them of children under 12. At the time, they were hoping to collect evidence to be used in court. But after the truth commission issued its report, El Salvador passed an amnesty law. Now the excavations were for the families alone. The Argentines came back eight years later, with permission from El Salvador's Supreme Court, and again last fall. In 2001, they found 25 complete skeletons and shards of bones from at least 16 other bodies. These were reburied last month in a six-hour ceremony. Patricia Bernardi, a member of the forensics team, said that each time they have returned to the village, family members have been waiting, eager to find the remains of their loved ones. At this rate, it will take 60 more years to uncover the nearly 600 dead who lie, untouched, where they fell two decades ago. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews
