On Sunday, March 15th, at 430 a.m. I accompanied a group of 45 young adults from the parish on a 4 hour bus trip to the tiny village of El Mozote, in the province of Morazan, in northeastern El Salvador. I knew of the massacre that had occurred there and heard Rufina Amaya–the only survivor– speak many years ago at a protest outside the gates of Ft. Benning, Georgia, where the School of the Americas was located. Though I knew it would be a long and uncomfortable ride in the broken-down bus, I felt I had a responsibility to witness the scene of such a horror in which my own country was so intimately involved. The following is a rough sketch (cf. Wikipedia) of the horrors that happened in what came to be known as the El Mozote Massacre.
“On December 10, 1981, the Atlacatl Battalion entered El Mozote with a plan to kill everyone in the village who stood in their way of capturing the Guerillas. In the lapse of three days every inhabitant of the village was executed. On the fatal afternoon of December 10, soldiers rousted the civilians from their homes and gathered them in the central plaza where they were forced to lie down on the streets. Soldiers then brutally kicked, threatened and seized jewelry and valuables along with accusing the people of being Guerillas. At night fall people were ordered into their homes and warned not to step outside or else they would be murdered.
The following morning the citizens were forced outside where they were divided into groups of men with boys and women with girls and children. Men and older boys were taken to a church and the rest were taken to vacant homes. In the church, the soldiers blind folded the men and killed them by decapitation or shooting them at point blank range. Many of the men were tortured before being executed. At the same time women and girls were forced to walk up hillsides where they were first raped before being murdered. Then the soldiers rounded up the children and released shots killing every single child in the village. After proceeding with the executions of all the inhabitants, they left obscene writing on the walls prior to burning the homes and the bodies. The soldiers didn’t stop with eliminating the inhabitants, but killed all their animals as well. The “Angels of Hell”, as the Atlactl Battlion called themselves, had completed their mission”. 
As bad as the above description is, it is incomplete. It fails to mention there were babies who were only one or two days old; one or two months old. (Take a moment to read and reflect on the children and their ages, engraved on the stone tablets which line the mural commemorating them in the little catholic church “Garden of Peace”). According to Rufina Amaya, eyewitness of the massacre, the infants and smaller children were tossed into the air and impaled on the bayonets of the soldier’s rifles. Rufina, herself, took advantage of a moment when the soldiers were distracted to run and climb up a nearby tree. She saw her husband decapitated and heard her son screaming out “Mommy, they’re going to kill me!”.
The idea of killing the “guerrillas” or the “communists” here was absurd. This village was well known for being neutral. They sold supplies to government forces and likewise to the guerillas. In fact, in the guerrilla recruitment effort, it was well known that it was a waste of time to try and get young people from Mozote to sign up. Both the residents of Mozote and the population from the countryside who had come into the town seeking refuge before the imminent military incursion, were poor, simple peasants who were simply eking out their existence in peace. At the end of the Atlactl “mission” over a thousand innocent women, men, teens, children and babies were dead. The image below is the principal monument in the town square with the names known of all those murdered inscribed on its walls. It is a cool, quiet space where town volunteers instruct visitors on the horrors that occurred here in 1981. Such memorials are essential to educate we and our children that such inhumanity not be repeated in our day. The second photo shows the 40-some students and young adults from the parish after our prayer service at the memorial.
You might wonder how it was possible that military personnel, many of whom were from the same campesino people, the same rural areas as those they tortured and murdered, could be compelled to do so. This is another story, in and of itself, but suffice it to say that the experts in low intensity conflict, counter-intelligence, jungle and other “special” operations, know how to transform an enthusiastic, hormone pumping 18 year-old into an unthinking killing machine. Ask any of the staff at the School of the Americas who, as part of US policy to aid the Salvadoran government in repressing the “communist” rebels, actually created and formed the infamous Atlacatl Battalion. Our US tax dollars and our US military personnel trained these troops in everything from torture to assassination to every form of harassment and intimidation guaranteed to crush opposition moments, militants and democracy in general.
This was all done under the cold war rubric of “anti-communism” which actually came to mean just about anything happening in any government/country in Latin America/Carribean that doesn’t coincide with US business interests. Any democratic or human rights movement in the southern hemisphere was labeled “subversive” and “communist” thereby justifying the use of US dollars, arms, military personnel and/or training local military personnel, to eradicate all such opposition. In the US we were told we were promoting democracy in the region, while most people there, except the rich elites and the military, experienced our policy and our presence as one that crippled attempts at democracy even as it propped up dictators who would protect US corporate profits.
When I tried to write this blog the day after I visited Mozote, the first thing that came into consciousness was “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”. It was both a feeling and a thought. It was reassuring in the sense that it captured something deep within me while, at the same time, disturbing in that it brought to mind the image of yet another massacre, that of over 200 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee reservation in South Dakota in 1890. Contemplating the mystery of human violence and cruelty this week, I found myself overwhelmed by this plague that continues as I write, both here in San Salvador and across our world.
Oscar Romero, in his preaching and teaching, constantly encouraged believers to exercise their faith in the context of the history in which they were living. “The Christian must work to exclude sin and establish God’s reign. To struggle for this is not communism. To struggle for this is not to mix in politics. It is simply that the gospel demands of today’s Christian more commitment to history…We must save not the soul at the hour of death but the person living in history”. (July 16, 1977) Religion is not “in the air” or an abstraction. Authentic belief can only be realized through engagement with the world in which we live. Jesus tells us only the truth can set us free, as unpalatable and difficult to accept as it might be.
This Lenten season, as we move towards Holy Week and the passion of Christ, is an opportune time to reflect on human suffering and especially suffering caused deliberately, with intent, by other human beings. Here we come to the reality experienced by the poor: these are always the ones displaced, murdered, disappeared, taken advantage of, deceived, despised and cast aside, casually.
In what is likely an unpleasant spiritual exercise, I invite you to join me these final days of Lent, and reflect on the massacre at Mozote. In some sense our thoughts, our further research, and, above all, our prayers, are a way of giving voice to the victims and allowing their suffering and death to become a catalyst for greater involvement on our part in naming and ending such state sponsored terror against the poor. As we recognize the role our country played in this inhuman and unnecessary violence, we keep such “dangerous” memories alive as we seek deeper personal conversion to the non-violent, crucified Jesus. May the peace of Christ be with you!
“On December 10, 1981, the Atlacatl Battalion entered El Mozote with a plan to kill everyone in the village who stood in their way of capturing the Guerillas. In the lapse of three days every inhabitant of the village was executed. On the fatal afternoon of December 10, soldiers rousted the civilians from their homes and gathered them in the central plaza where they were forced to lie down on the streets. Soldiers then brutally kicked, threatened and seized jewelry and valuables along with accusing the people of being Guerillas. At night fall people were ordered into their homes and warned not to step outside or else they would be murdered.
The following morning the citizens were forced outside where they were divided into groups of men with boys and women with girls and children. Men and older boys were taken to a church and the rest were taken to vacant homes. In the church, the soldiers blind folded the men and killed them by decapitation or shooting them at point blank range. Many of the men were tortured before being executed. At the same time women and girls were forced to walk up hillsides where they were first raped before being murdered. Then the soldiers rounded up the children and released shots killing every single child in the village. After proceeding with the executions of all the inhabitants, they left obscene writing on the walls prior to burning the homes and the bodies. The soldiers didn’t stop with eliminating the inhabitants, but killed all their animals as well. The “Angels of Hell”, as the Atlactl Battlion called themselves, had completed their mission”. 
As bad as the above description is, it is incomplete. It fails to mention there were babies who were only one or two days old; one or two months old. (Take a moment to read and reflect on the children and their ages, engraved on the stone tablets which line the mural commemorating them in the little catholic church “Garden of Peace”). According to Rufina Amaya, eyewitness of the massacre, the infants and smaller children were tossed into the air and impaled on the bayonets of the soldier’s rifles. Rufina, herself, took advantage of a moment when the soldiers were distracted to run and climb up a nearby tree. She saw her husband decapitated and heard her son screaming out “Mommy, they’re going to kill me!”.
The idea of killing the “guerrillas” or the “communists” here was absurd. This village was well known for being neutral. They sold supplies to government forces and likewise to the guerillas. In fact, in the guerrilla recruitment effort, it was well known that it was a waste of time to try and get young people from Mozote to sign up. Both the residents of Mozote and the population from the countryside who had come into the town seeking refuge before the imminent military incursion, were poor, simple peasants who were simply eking out their existence in peace. At the end of the Atlactl “mission” over a thousand innocent women, men, teens, children and babies were dead. The image below is the principal monument in the town square with the names known of all those murdered inscribed on its walls. It is a cool, quiet space where town volunteers instruct visitors on the horrors that occurred here in 1981. Such memorials are essential to educate we and our children that such inhumanity not be repeated in our day. The second photo shows the 40-some students and young adults from the parish after our prayer service at the memorial.
You might wonder how it was possible that military personnel, many of whom were from the same campesino people, the same rural areas as those they tortured and murdered, could be compelled to do so. This is another story, in and of itself, but suffice it to say that the experts in low intensity conflict, counter-intelligence, jungle and other “special” operations, know how to transform an enthusiastic, hormone pumping 18 year-old into an unthinking killing machine. Ask any of the staff at the School of the Americas who, as part of US policy to aid the Salvadoran government in repressing the “communist” rebels, actually created and formed the infamous Atlacatl Battalion. Our US tax dollars and our US military personnel trained these troops in everything from torture to assassination to every form of harassment and intimidation guaranteed to crush opposition moments, militants and democracy in general.
This was all done under the cold war rubric of “anti-communism” which actually came to mean just about anything happening in any government/country in Latin America/Carribean that doesn’t coincide with US business interests. Any democratic or human rights movement in the southern hemisphere was labeled “subversive” and “communist” thereby justifying the use of US dollars, arms, military personnel and/or training local military personnel, to eradicate all such opposition. In the US we were told we were promoting democracy in the region, while most people there, except the rich elites and the military, experienced our policy and our presence as one that crippled attempts at democracy even as it propped up dictators who would protect US corporate profits.
When I tried to write this blog the day after I visited Mozote, the first thing that came into consciousness was “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”. It was both a feeling and a thought. It was reassuring in the sense that it captured something deep within me while, at the same time, disturbing in that it brought to mind the image of yet another massacre, that of over 200 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee reservation in South Dakota in 1890. Contemplating the mystery of human violence and cruelty this week, I found myself overwhelmed by this plague that continues as I write, both here in San Salvador and across our world.
Oscar Romero, in his preaching and teaching, constantly encouraged believers to exercise their faith in the context of the history in which they were living. “The Christian must work to exclude sin and establish God’s reign. To struggle for this is not communism. To struggle for this is not to mix in politics. It is simply that the gospel demands of today’s Christian more commitment to history…We must save not the soul at the hour of death but the person living in history”. (July 16, 1977) Religion is not “in the air” or an abstraction. Authentic belief can only be realized through engagement with the world in which we live. Jesus tells us only the truth can set us free, as unpalatable and difficult to accept as it might be.
This Lenten season, as we move towards Holy Week and the passion of Christ, is an opportune time to reflect on human suffering and especially suffering caused deliberately, with intent, by other human beings. Here we come to the reality experienced by the poor: these are always the ones displaced, murdered, disappeared, taken advantage of, deceived, despised and cast aside, casually.
In what is likely an unpleasant spiritual exercise, I invite you to join me these final days of Lent, and reflect on the massacre at Mozote. In some sense our thoughts, our further research, and, above all, our prayers, are a way of giving voice to the victims and allowing their suffering and death to become a catalyst for greater involvement on our part in naming and ending such state sponsored terror against the poor. As we recognize the role our country played in this inhuman and unnecessary violence, we keep such “dangerous” memories alive as we seek deeper personal conversion to the non-violent, crucified Jesus. May the peace of Christ be with you!
