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Forty years ago, on December 11, 1981, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history began in El Salvador. The town of El Mozote and its surroundings.
About 1,000 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed for several days by the elite Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran army, which was. trained, Funded and supplied by the United States.
A Jacobin Magazine tribute published on the 35th anniversary of the massacre recalls some horrific scenes:
“The soldiers entered the house and started beating the children with machetes, breaking their skulls with rifles and drowning. The youngest children were crammed into the church convent, and the soldiers unloaded their rifles.
The bloodbath took place in the context of the 1980-92 civil war in El Salvador, which ultimately killed more than 75,000 people – most of the atrocities committed by the right-wing state in collaboration with paramilitaries and death squads.
Joining in a collaborative effort was, of course, everyone’s favorite superpower in the Northern Cold War, as the U.S. managed to destroy many human lives throughout its existential struggle to make the world safe for capitalism.
Between 1980 and 1982 alone, US military aid to El Salvador rose from $ 6 million to $ 82 million and then rose by more than $ 1 million a day.
Continued overfunding was made possible, in large part, by Ronald Reagan administration officials covering up the terror of the state of El Salvador, including El Mozot, who lied for their shamelessness.
The administration also launched a campaign to exclude a few journalists who intend to expose the truth, such as Raymond Bonner, a former New York Times correspondent, author of Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador’s Dirty War.
In a new documentary called “The El Salvador Massacre,” Bonner and photographer Susan Meiselas reflect on the sordid affair of El Mozote, finding together in January 1982 a “ghost town” and a severely traumatized woman named Rufina Amaya. one of the only survivors.
Amaya, whose blind husband and three daughters, who were five years, three years and eight months old, were killed in the murder, she later recalled hearing a conversation between Atlacatl battalion soldiers:
“‘Lieutenant, someone here says he’s not going to kill the kids,'” one soldier said. ‘Who is the son of ab **** who said that?’ replied the lieutenant. “I’m going to kill him.”
Near the beginning of the documentary “Massacre in El Salvador,” a video clip of President Reagan, a former Hollywood actor, shows the following lines in an apocalyptic tone that fits the silver screen better than reality: “It’s very simple, the guerrillas are trying. Establish a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship in the people of El Salvador. ”
It does not matter that the massacre of 1,000 civilians is not a way to “save” them from the specter of communism – or to bring a form of equality and justice to a country that has long suffered from dangerous guerrilla attempts. an extraordinarily savage elite.
Surely the U.S. has never had a problem with the savage tyranny of the right, as long as the profits are in the interests of the U.S..
Now, four decades after El Mozot and almost three decades after the end of the civil war, the last Salvadoran tyrant – President Nayib Bukele and Twitter star, who has been strangely identified as “the most beautiful dictator in the world” – is joining forces. It’s a great job to make sure the country’s justice system is always elusive.
El Salvador has fortunately turned Bitcoin into a dystopia, and Bukel has taken a number of other actions against a dictator, such as the release of five judges and the Attorney General of the Supreme Court of El Salvador earlier this year.
It is significant that Judge Jorge Guzmán, who has been investigating the El Mozote case since 2016, was released after the post-civil war amnesty was revoked. In return for the amnesty, the perpetrators of the massacre opened up the possibility of being held accountable for their crimes, and people like Maria Rosario, who lost 24 members of her family in the massacre, were able to achieve the emotional closure that humans generally demand. to move on with their lives.
And yet, El Mozote’s responsibility extends beyond the individuals of the Atlacatl battalion who were beaten and beheaded in and around the town.
The US too direct manager as well as other episodes of state terror in El Salvador and other parts of the world.
The advantages of imperial privilege, however, make history and responsibility disappear at the same time, except, of course, when things like 9/11 happen, and then the global population is ordered to “never forget”.
Well-known Elliott Abrams, who was appointed Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in 1981, diligently promoted the U.S. version of “human rights” by denying that the El Mozot massacre had ever occurred. A few years later, the Reagan administration continued to say that it had a legacy of El Salvador’s “wonderful achievement.”
But even if the 40-year-old murderous impunity is an achievement, except for the fabulous one.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.
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