El Mozote, Part 2

[Mp3 link coming soon]

What you were just listening to was a sound collage from the Deconstructionist site built on fragments of testimony from the survivors of the massacre at El Mozote that occurred nearly 26 years ago on December 10, 1981.

Amaya Rufina and a few other surviving peasants gave NY Times reporter, Raymond Bonner a list of 733 names, mostly children, women, and old people, who had been massacred.

But The Reagan administration didn’t want to hear it.

At the time, Thomas Enders, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, attacked the reports of the massacre before a congressional committee reviewing aid to El Salvador. He said that although there had been a firefight between the army and the guerrillas in the area, "no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians." President Reagan accordingly certified that the Salvadorans were "making a concerted and significant effort" to end "the indiscriminate torture and murder of its citizens." Continued aide to El Salvador was approved.

The Washington Post reporter, Alma Guillermoprieto (Jewlermoprieto) denies this, saying "The fact is that evidence for the massacre existed from the day those stories appeared in the newspapers. Two journalists from two leading newspaper, traveling independently of each other, provided the same evidence. There were photographic documents, credible sources."

Finally, on October 22, 1992, over ten years after the incident, a report providing forensic evidence of the massacre was published. Alma was in New York City, when she read the story. "I was in the supermarket," she says, "and I started crying. I never in all my reporting career came face to face with so much evil, and I just felt the pain all over again."