The Mozote Massacre

I drove about 25 minutes through twisty jungle and pine-covered mountains until I got to the town of El Mozote. Back during the Civil War, for 3 days in December, a massacre killed over 1,000 people from this town and the surrounding area.

It was well known to the military that the region was full of FMLN Guerrillas that were hostile to the right-wing government.

A soldier from the government by the name of Colonel Domingo Monterrosa was sent into the region to make headway against the FMLN during the early years of the war. Monterrosa was a graduate of the "School of the Americas," a US 'school' in the Panama Canal Zone that trained members of dozens of Latin American countries on how to mount counter-insurgency campaigns against leftists that were starting to gain ground in Latin America during the Cold War.

The School of the Americas taught anti-guerrilla schemes such as torture, espionage, and one of the most destructive tactics: The "Drain the Ocean" protocol.

Monterrosa took this protocol to heart and employed it on the people of El Mozote. What did that mean? It meant kill everyone.

According to testimony, the military marched into the town with little resistance and told everyone that "the red cross was coming" so that they all had to leave their homes as it would not be safe in the area going forward. They rounded up everyone from the town and the countryside. They separated the men, women, and children. They started killing the men first. They then raped and killed all the women and children over the course of the next few days.

Children as young as toddlers and infants were stabbed or shot.

A woman by the name of Rufina Amaya was the sole survivor of the massacre of El Mozote. She hid in a tree during the shooting as all of the women were slaughtered. She could hear the screams of the children, 3 of them were her own, as they were being butchered across the square from where the women were killed. At nightfall, while soldiers were busy burning the bodies, she climbed down and crawled on her hands and knees amongst farm animals so she wouldn't be seen. She eventually made her way out of village and to the FMLN Guerrilla camp where she would tell her story with the help of the FMLN Radio Broadcasting team- "Radio Venceremos".


Radio Venceremos

Rufina Amaya, the sole survivor of the Massacre at Mozote, somehow made her way quietly to the FMLN Guerrilla camp, undetected, through the Salvadoran jungle with no food or water. Upon her arrival, she told her story and got in touch with Radio Venceremos, the official FMLN radio broadcast program. They interviewed the traumatized woman her while every detail was fresh in her mind. The story was broadcast out and picked up by international media observers, who used Radio Venceremos as a media source. The Salvadoran and American governments refuted her story, but it has since been corroborated with the mountains of evidence gathered at the massacre site after the Peace Accords called for the Truth Commission's investigation.

I rode my motorcycle south into the countryside past "The Monument of Peace" which had several statues. There was one for Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul II, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Further into the countryside, I rode deeper into the mountains with one goal. Google Maps showed a cave known as "Cueva de Murcielagos" or "The Bat Cave". That cave was one of the locations of Radio Venceremos.

I even saw a sign that gave me hope, it pointed the wrong way down a one-way street saying the radio was that direction. I followed what I could on the Maps.me map and asked several people for directions. It was pretty hard to find.

The roads got smaller, shittier, had more washouts, and finally the pavement ended next to a small rural school. A slew of kids sat outside and stared at me as I switched from jeans to shorts as I was ready to hike into the bush.

I hiked about 2 kilometers into the jungle and I found a sign. It was old and faded, not maintained, but I found it. The site of the Guerrilla Encampment that Rufina Amaya fled to after the massacre. As the crow flies, it was 6km (3.7 Mi) to the site from Mozote.

I was swarmed by mosquitos as I moved into the former camp. There was little evidence left aside from several informational kiosks, also badly kept and some with no information left. I finally followed some wooden yellow arrows nailed into trees until I found it. The "Bat Cave." This is where Radio Venceremos hid.

The Architect of the Mozote Massacre, Colonel Monterrosa, would eventually find the radio team. Fortunately for them, the radio team had escaped but had to leave all of their equipment behind. A fan of war trophies, the Colonel packed up their equipment into a helicopter so he could be airlifted back to friendly territory with his prize, proof of his victory over the guerrillas.

What he didn't know is that Radio Venceremos had hidden a bomb in the radio equipment. It detonated when he was airborne, crashing the helicopter and killing everyone on board. The radio team exacted a revenge upon the massacre's mastermind.

The wreckage of Col. Monterrosa's helicopter is on display at the Revolutionary Museum in Perquin.

The Garden of the Innocents

Back to when I was reading the names on the monument, an old portly woman approached. She was a local guide who gave us the local perspective of the massacre. Many bodies were buried under the site, but she also motioned to the only marked grave right in the middle of the monument. The sole survivor, Rufina Amaya, was buried here. She lived into her mid 60s and died in 2007.

I followed the guide to the church which was also on the square. On the side of the church was a metal fence that surrounded the "Garden of the Innocents." Tile Mosaics of children, a sun, and stars marked the side of the church. Below was a cordoned-off section of ground where the original tile floor of the patio remained from the massacre. The guide said the dark spots were blood stains, and even showed us a bullet hole in one of the tiles.

This was the site of the massacre of the children. Children's names and ages were etched into tiles that lined the bottom of the church wall. An informational kiosk gave the result of the UN Truth Commission's investigation into the massacre. Biological Anthropologists from Argentina were flown in to test DNA samples at the site. There were far more samples than bodies, which means the number of deaths must be much higher. Considering the bodies of infants were burned, it's obvious there are few remains left.

After taking in the guide's story, reading the testimonies, reading historical information, and taking in the monument, I began to break down. I had to sit down. I stared at the wall, covered in silhouettes of little boys and girls, some flying, holding hands, and playing. I began to cry. Tears welled up in my eyes.

I'm still processing what I felt while sitting there in the garden. The children on the wall looked like the same ones that you'd put in a daycare or on a playground or elementary school wall. The children on the wall represented the innocence of youth and how it was taken away.

I didn't feel anger. I've already felt anger for years after learning about American involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War. This time I felt sadness. I felt the humanity radiating out of the site. The works that the people had made, such as cutting out those sillhouettes of the children of the wall- the labor put into them-- it felt like a selfless display of humanity.

I felt a sense of connection. It felt like the folks who made this monument were reaching out to people like me. They want me to remember. They want me to tell this story.

What's the point?

The guide at the Mozote Monument told us that it was her job to inform Salvadorans, and international visitors like myself, what happened here so that it cannot happen again. After thinking it over, I know that it's impossible. Of course tragedies like this have happened since, and they will continue to happen in the future.

I don't believe her mission is futile, however. It will have a lasting effect on me and where I chose to direct my energy. It will hopefully impact people reading this blog.

I believe that this is still worth telling and people should still know.  Why?

I grew up in the immediate post-9/11 world. I remember jingosim being at an all-time-high. Everyone and their mother was thirsting for war, craving blood, and wanting to hurt people in a fervid tribalistic furvor. In the decades since the US began its impossible-to-win War on Terror, I've heard about drones striking innocent people numerous times. I hear about my tax dollars going to bombing happy people celebrating at weddings. In the early days of Wikileaks, I remember whistleblowers exposing human rights abuses that the US had directly afflicted on people of distant lands like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

I believe it's still important to hear these stories because it will help us consider the innocents. If the videos I've recently made on Mozote and this blog help you hesitate even for ONE SECOND the next time the US starts to beat the war drum, I'll have done a major part of what I set out here to do.

Americans protested the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War, we protested the Iraq War, but there weren't enough of us. These stories will hopefully get you, the reader, to go out there and talk or even marching and voting against wars that bring about massacres like the one here at Mozote.

For my American readers, it hopefully helps you give a little more of a shit about brown people in far away countries, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant they are to your extremely privelaged lives.

-JT

6/22/23