Mark Danner Publications: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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From the beginning, Monterrosa worked to give his new force a mística -- a mystique. "They shot animals and smeared the blood all over their faces, they slit open the animals' bellies and drank the blood," a lieutenant in another unit told me. "They were a hell of a raunchy unit. They had no discipline of fire, none at all. I mean, they saw something moving out there, they shot it -- deer, pigs, whatever. You'd be out there in the field trying to sleep, and all night those assholes would keep shooting at things." According to one reporter, the men of the Atlacatl celebrated their graduation by collecting all the dead animals they could find off the roads -- dogs, vultures, anything -- boiling them together into a bloody soup, and chugging 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!
By the fall of 1981, the Atlacatl was well on its way to building that mountain. The pattern of its operations had become well known: units of the regular Army and the security forces would move into place along the border of one of the red zones, walling it off, with the help, very often, of a natural barrier, like a river or a mountain range. Then a blocking force would invade the zone, pushing before it everyone and everything living. Finally, the helicopters would sweep in, and the men of the Atlacatl would storm out, bombard all whom the trap had snared with artillery and mortar fire, and then with small arms.
It was the strategy of "draining the sea," or, as Monterrosa was heard to describe it on occasion, of La Limpieza -- the Cleanup. Those parts of El Salvador "infected" by Communism were being ruthlessly scrubbed; the cancer would be cut out, even if healthy flesh had to be lost, too. "El Mozote was in a place, in a zone, that was one hundred per cent controlled by the guerrillas," one of the original American advisers with the Atlacatl told me. "You try to dry those areas up. You know you're not going to be able to work with the civilian population up there, you're never going to get a permanent base there. So you just decide to kill everybody. That'll scare everybody else out of the zone. It's done more out of frustration than anything else."
Joaquín Villalobos, the E.R.P. comandante, freely conceded to me in an interview that in a number of the most notorious operations, both before and after El Mozote, many of the civilians killed were in fact sympathetic to the guerrillas. "In San Vicente in 1982, for example, the massacre at El Calabozo that involved more than two hundred people," he said. "This was a situation where the Army was stronger, where our guerrilla force was too weak to protect our followers. We simply weren't able to provide those people sufficient military protection. It was the same in 1980 at the Sumpul River in Chalatenango, where a group of our sympathizers were fleeing, trying to cross the river." The guerrillas, benefitting from very good intelligence and excellent mobility, generally managed to escape from the zones ahead of the Army; it was their supporters, and any other civilians who happened to be there, who took the punishment.
In the case of many of the massacres during the early eighties, then, the Salvadoran Army was managing to do what it set out to do: killing Salvadorans who were sympathetic to the insurgents. However blatantly this behavior violated the rules of war -- however infamous it was to murder men, women, and children en masse, without trial or investigation, simply because of the political sympathies of some of their number -- the strategy did at least have some rationale. Even against this grim background, El Mozote stands out. "El Mozote was a town that was not militant," Villalobos said. "That's why what happened at El Mozote was special."
Sometime during the incident at La Tejera that Wednesday afternoon, word came over the radio that the First Company of the Atlacatl had engaged the guerrillas. "There was an exchange of fire, an armed confrontation," the guide says. But, like so much else in this story, the battle -- its intensity, even its precise location -- has become a matter of fierce dispute. From the start, the Salvadoran military claimed that the fighting took place at El Mozote itself. On December 17th, a C.I.A. officer cabled from San Salvador that "the heaviest fighting had occurred at El Mozote ... where 30 to 35 insurgents and four Salvadoran soldiers were killed."
It is impossible to know for sure, but from the context of the cable it seems very probable that the C.I.A. man's information came, one way or another, from the Salvadoran Army. The guide, on the other hand, who was a few miles away and heard the report on the fighting as it came over the Atlacatl radio, places it "around Arambala. It was a little skirmish," he told me, "and it happened at El Portillón, near Arambala -- a little over a mile from El Mozote."
Villalobos, who appears to remember the operation in great detail, also insists that the fighting took place at Arambala, which "was in effect our rear guard," he said. "Although most of the serious fighting took place south of us, along the Torola, there was a minor level of fighting, including maybe a little mortar fire, near Arambala." He went on to say, "It's normal when you displace a large force to leave small units to protect the retreat and keep up resistance." Guerrilla squads around Arambala, north of La Guacamaya, were in a perfect position to protect the flank of the main guerrilla force as it retreated west.
Santiago, who was still in La Guacamaya, readying his Radio Venceremos crew for that night's retreat, describes how "the pressure of the enemy was growing in his north-south advance." On that day, he writes in his memoirs, "the comrades of the Fourth Section took by assault a position of the Atlacatl Battalion and captured two rifles" -- a plausible number in view of the four dead that the Salvadoran Army apparently acknowledged. But Santiago makes no mention of the "30 to 35 insurgents" killed that are claimed in the C.I.A. cable, and neither, so far as I know, does any other guerrilla memoir. This would have been a very large number of dead; the fact that no one mentions them, and the fact that, in the wake of this fighting, the guerrillas did indeed manage, as Santiago recounts, to "maintain the lines of fire and organize the movement to break the circle and make a joke of Monterrosa's hammer blow" -- these two facts lead one to wonder whether the officers, in providing their reports to their own superiors (and possibly to the C.I.A.), had created a victory at El Mozote from what was in fact a defeat at Arambala.
The officers would have been especially reluctant to admit a defeat at the hands of the Fourth Section. An élite guerrilla unit, it had been trained, in large part, by Captain Francisco Emilio Mena Sandoval, an Army officer who had deserted to the guerrillas the previous January. Salvadoran officers had developed a deep hatred for Mena Sandoval, regarding him and others like him as much more despicable forms of life than, say, Villalobos: in their eyes, the latter was merely a delinquent terrorist, whereas officers like Mena Sandoval were traitors. And, as it happened, the officers and men of the Atlacatl had a special reason not only to hate Mena Sandoval but to remember with the greatest distaste the town of Arambala and also the hamlet of El Mozote, just down the road.
It was near Arambala, eight months earlier, that the first unit of the brash new Atlacatl had ventured forth to show the guerrillas, and the rest of the Army, what it was made of; and it was there that, to the embarrassment of its officers and men, the highly touted new unit suffered a humiliating defeat -- in large part because Captain Mena Sandoval had had the foresight to steal an Army radio when he came over to the guerrillas. Thanks to the radio and Mena Sandoval's knowledge of the enemy's codes, the rebels were able to keep one crucial step ahead of their opponents. "We defended one line on the outskirts of El Mozote, which the enemy was unable to take for many days," Mena Sandoval writes in his memoirs. "Their cost in casualties kept growing, as did our morale. It had been twelve days of combat and we had almost no casualties."
Finally, after twenty-two days of intense fighting, the guerrillas slipped away across the black road under cover of night. As for the Atlacatl, news of its poor performance spread quickly through the Army. Soon officers and soldiers began passing on a little joke. The Atlacatl's designation as a biri, they said, stood not for Immediate Reaction Infantry Battalion, as everyone had thought, but for Immediate Retreat Infantry Battalion. This kind of needling would likely have assured that, eight months later, many officers and soldiers in the Atlacatl would have retained vivid memories of Arambala and El Mozote.
Now, after the initial engagement on Wednesday, according to the guide, "we heard by radio that the other company killed people there." Under the gaze of Major Cáceres, who was then with the First Company, the troops entered the town of Arambala, brought out the people who had remained there, and assembled them in the plaza. They led the women and children to the church and locked them inside. Then the troops ordered the men to lie face down on the ground, whereupon they bound them, blindfolded them, and began to beat them, demanding information about the guerrillas. A number of men -- the guide believes as many as twenty (and his estimate agrees with the figure given in a detailed analysis of the operation in and around El Mozote by Tutela Legal, the San Salvador Archbishopric's human-rights office, in November, 1991), though other estimates range as low as three -- were taken from the assembly, led away, and executed.
In Arambala, the officers still relied on their lists to select who would die. However, by the following afternoon, Thursday, the lists had run out, and at some point -- perhaps that day, perhaps late the day before -- the officers made a decision about the direction the operation was to take. For, despite Rufina Amaya's bitter conviction that there had been a "betrayal," that the officer who had spoken to Marcos Díaz as he left Gotera had taken part in a nefarious plot to make sure that the people of El Mozote stayed in their homes to await the fate that had been planned for them, an equally likely explanation -- and, in a way, a more horrible one -- is that the officer was in fact trying to do his friend Díaz and the people of the hamlet a favor, for at that point nothing whatever may have been planned for them.
Whenever the officers made the decision, it is clear that by the time they reached El Mozote they had ordered a change in tactics. "They had lists from Perquín south to Arambala," the guide told me. "But farther down, there were no lists. Farther down, they killed everything down to the ground. Farther down was scorched earth."
Just after midnight on Wednesday, as the men of the Atlacatl settled down to sleep, a long column wound its way out of La Guacamaya and snaked slowly through the ravines and gullies, heading west toward the black road. The guerrillas and their entourage travelled quietly: the only sound in the tense darkness was that of hundreds of moving feet. The fighters came first, lugging their rifles and ammunition and whatever other supplies they could manage. Then came the civilian followers, loaded down with their bundles of clothing and sacks of tortillas and coffee, and nervously hushing their children. And at the rear came the men and women of Radio Venceremos, bent under the weight of the transmitter and the generator and the other equipment that formed the station's heart.
In the end, it was these burdens which betrayed them: the weight slowed them, so that, as they finally came within sight of the black road, struggling along in increasing panic, the darkness thinned and faded, dawn broke behind them, and they could see, as they gazed upward from their hiding place -- a ravine full of prickly maguey -- the men of the Atlacatl rising and stretching there on the highway. One soldier was swirling his poncho around him to free it of moisture, and the first rays of sunlight glinted off the droplets. The guerrillas had been caught, but turning back was out of the question; there was nothing for it but to run.
"Advance!" Jonás ordered. No one moved. "Advance, I say!"
A handful of guerrillas broke from their cover, zigzagging in a wild, desperate sprint toward the road, staggering under the weight of their equipment. A moment passed before they heard the shouts of the soldiers, and a moment more before the bullets started to come. They took cover and returned fire, then again ran, took cover, and fired; but they were badly exposed, and by the time they had managed to cross a hundred and fifty yards of open country three men had been hit. One of them, Toni, had been carrying the transmitter, and as he collapsed his precious burden slipped from his back and tumbled down, end over end, into another ravine. His comrades gathered around him. Toni was dying; the bullets kept coming; there could be no question of retrieving the transmitter. Monterrosa would have his war prize.
Late that Thursday afternoon, the men of the Atlacatl trudged into El Mozote. They found the streets deserted. For the last two days, the thud of the mortars, the firecracker staccato of the small arms, and the roar of the aircraft had been coming steadily closer, and that morning helicopters and planes of the Salvadoran Air Force had strafed and bombed the area around the hamlet, terrifying the inhabitants. "Everything was closer every day, louder every day," Rufina Amaya told me, "and finally, by that day, the people were hiding in their houses."
The strafing ceased not long before the men of the Atlacatl entered the hamlet, dragging with them civilians they had found hiding along the way. Tired and impatient, the soldiers swarmed about the houses of El Mozote and pounded on the doors with the butts of their M16s. "Salgan!" they shouted angrily. "Get out here! Get out here now!"
Hesitantly, the people came out into the twilight, frightened, bewildered, unsure of what was happening. The soldiers, cursing and yelling, pulled them forward, hustled them along with the butts of their rifles, herded everyone into the center of the street. Rufina and her husband, Domingo Claros, emerged with their four children: he was carrying three-year-old Marta Lilián and leading Cristino, nine years old, while Rufina had five-year-old María Dolores by the hand and carried at her breast María Isabel, eight months old. "They told us all to lie down in the street, boca abajo" -- literally, "mouth down" -- "and they began pushing some of us down," Rufina says. "As my husband was setting the little girl down, a soldier pushed him to the ground. The girl started to cry. By then, all the children were crying."
The entire town lay like that, perhaps four hundred people face down in the dirt, as darkness fell. Between the wailing of at least a hundred children and the shouting of the soldiers -- hundreds had entered the hamlet by now -- the din must have been unbearable. The soldiers marched up and down the lines of people, kicking one here and there, striking another with a rifle butt, and all the while keeping up a steady rain of shouted insults and demands. As Rufina tells it, a soldier would stop next to a man or a woman, kick the prone body, and bark out a question: Who were the guerrillas? Where were they? Where did they hide their guns? The men and women of El Mozote insisted that there were no guerrillas there, that they knew nothing of guerrillas or weapons. "If you want to find guerrillas," one woman shouted tearfully, raising her head from the ground, "go out there" -- she waved toward the hills -- "outside town. But here, here we're not guerrillas."
This only made the soldiers angrier. "All you sons of bitches are collaborators," an officer said. "You're going to have to pay for those bastards."
At one point, as Rufina tells it, the wealthy and influential Marcos Díaz, lying in the street beside his wife and their sons and daughters, raised his head. "Wait!" he pleaded. "They promised me nothing would happen to the people here. The officer told me so."
At that, the Atlacatl officer laughed and said, "No, motherfucker, you all have to pay. Now, get your face back in the ground." And he raised his black boot and pushed Marcos Díaz's head down into the dirt.