El Mozote, Part 1

In December of 1981, the inhabitants of a small Salvadoran hamlet, named El Mozote, were systematically exterminated by the Atlacatl battalion, a U.S. trained counterinsurgency force. The Atlacatl battalion was one of the first US military trained units in El Salvador. From the beginning, Monterrosa, their U.S. Special Forces trained commander, worked to give his new force what he liked to call “a mystique.”

According to one reporter, the men of the Atlacatl celebrated their graduation from training by collecting all the dead animals they could find off the roads -- dogs, vultures, anything – and boiled them together into a bloody soup. They chugged it down. Then they stood at rigid attention and sang, full-throated, the unit's theme song, "Somos Guerreros":

We are warriors!
Warriors all!
We are going forth to kill
A mountain of terrorists

Only, they mistook at least 733 civilians as ‘terrorists’ on December 10, 1981. And they slaughtered them all.

Articles about the massacres initially appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post, thanks, primarily to the testimony of one of the survivors, an El Salvadoran woman named Rufina Amaya. She explained that she had escaped in the confusion of the initial round up of civilians and hidden in a tree.

Soon the killing started.

It began with decapitation, but that was hard work, so the soldiers rounded up the women into a house and filed the men out into the forest.

Rufina told the reporters that the soldiers killed her husband, her nine-year-old son, and her three daughters, aged five, three, and eight months.

According to New Yorker writer, Mark Danner,

“No fewer than ten American advisers were working with the Atlacatl Battalion at the time.”

Tune in for our Next Hidden History when the Reagan administration attempts to suppress news of the massacre, attacking the reports to prevent a cut off of military aide to El Salvador.