Mark Danner Publications: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Bonner and Meiselas, and Guillermoprieto, describe the trip in the same way: hiking all night through the moonlit mountains, and at dawn coming upon the first guerrilla camp -- a scattering of tents, under pine trees, that held twenty-five or thirty people. By dawn on the third day -- January 6th -- Bonner and Meiselas had reached the area of El Mozote. "There were bodies and parts of bodies," Meiselas said. "We saw about twenty-five houses destroyed around Arambala and El Mozote. My strongest memory was this grouping of evangelicals, fourteen of them, who had come together thinking their faith would protect them. They were strewn across the earth next to a cornfield, and you could see on their faces the horror of what had happened to them."
At a burial near El Zapotal, they were introduced to Rufina Amaya, and Bonner interviewed her at length. A few days later, the guerrillas gave him a handwritten list, which they said contained the names of those who had died at El Mozote and in the surrounding hamlets. "I did the tally, came up with the number seven hundred, tried to get the number of men, women, and children, got a sample of names," Bonner said.
A few days later, Bonner and Meiselas began the hike back to Honduras. At the middle camp, they met a battered Guillermoprieto, one of whose legs was swollen from an accident involving a rock and a mule. At just about the time Bonner reached Mexico City and began to file his stories, Guillermoprieto was nearing El Mozote.
"We started smelling it from Arambala," she said. "These kids started leading me down paths and pointing to houses and saying again and again, 'Aquí hay muertos, aquí hay muertos.' The most traumatizing thing was looking at these little houses where whole families had been blown away -- these recognizable human beings, in their little dresses, just lying there mummifying in the sun. We kept walking, got to El Mozote. We walked down these charming and beautiful roads, then to the center of town, where there was this kind of rubbly place" -- the sacristy -- "and, in it, a stupefying number of bones. There was a charred wooden beam lying on top of the bodies, and there were bones sticking up, and pieces of flesh. You could see vertebrae and femurs sticking out. No attempt had been made to bury the bodies."
In some shock, she was led to La Guacamaya. "Everyone there had lost someone in his family -- everyone -- and everyone was in a state of controlled hysteria."
The great exodus that had begun with the offensive in mid-December was still under way. "It was that massacre, the most horrible, that really caused the glass of water to overflow," Licho told me. "People flowed out of the zone, either toward Honduras or south toward Gotera or into the guerrillas. A lot of people joined us as combatants then."
At the urging of Jonás, the guerrilla commander, Guillermoprieto saw Rufina the next day. Later, she spoke to two young men who had seen their families murdered in La Joya. Then, thinking of Bonner and his head start, she scribbled her story in her notebook, folded up the pages, and hid them in a plastic film cannister. She found a guerrilla courier and persuaded him, with some difficulty, to carry the precious cargo to Tegucigalpa and deliver it to a colleague, who could telephone the story in to the Post.
On January 26th, the day Guillermoprieto got back to Tegucigalpa, the Times ran Bonner's first story from Morazán, headlined "with salvador's rebels in combat zone." Guillermoprieto had already been on the telephone to the Post's foreign editor, and they managed to get her El Mozote story, along with a Meiselas photograph of the rubble of the sacristy, onto the front page of the first edition of the next day's paper -- eighteen hundred words, headlined "salvadoran peasants describe mass killing; woman tells of children's death." Editors in the Times' Washington bureau, seeing the piece in the Post's early edition, telephoned New York, where Bonner's El Mozote story had been awaiting editing at the foreign desk. Craig Whitney, then the deputy foreign editor, and the deskmen managed to rush Bonner's slightly shorter article, headlined "massacre of hundreds reported in salvador village," into the paper's late edition. Six weeks after the massacre, El Mozote had made it onto the front pages of America's two most important newspapers.
The following day, Ronald Reagan sent to Congress the Administration's certification that the government of El Salvador was "making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights."
Two days later, on January 30th, Todd Greentree drove out to Ilopango Airport, climbed into a Salvadoran Army Alouette helicopter, and in a few minutes was sweeping over green volcanic landscape toward the mountains of Morazán. At his side was Major John McKay, of the defense attaché's office. A one-eyed marine (he had been wounded in Vietnam), McKay was known to have the best contacts among the Salvadoran officers of any American in the country. The two men were headed for El Mozote to have a look for themselves.
It was not the most propitious time. The Army was tense; three days before, guerrilla commandos had stormed Ilopango in a daring raid and had succeeded in destroying a large part of El Salvador's Air Force as it sat on the tarmac. The raid -- which the guerrillas named Operation Martyrs of Heroic Morazán, in honor of those killed in December -- would not look good in Washington. The congressional debate loomed large in the minds of those in the United States Embassy. "It was in the middle of a phenomenally packed, intense period down there," Greentree recently told me by telephone. "We had the investigation of the murders of the nuns, we had the Constituent Assembly elections coming up, and, of course, we had the certification" -- which only intensified the pressure from "the political microscope in the States," as Greentree called it. "The primary policy objective at the time was to get the certification through," he said, and the spectacular reports of the massacre threatened the certification. "From the Embassy's point of view, the guerrillas were trying to make us look as bad as possible. They wanted to shut the whole thing down."
The Americans landed at the brigade command in San Miguel to refuel and to receive their first briefing. "The brigade commander was expecting us," Greentree said. "In San Miguel, that was Flores" -- Colonel Jaime Ernesto Flores Grijalba, the over-all commander of Operation Rescue. Also present, Greentree believes -- he is not absolutely certain -- was Domingo Monterrosa. The officers gave the Americans "a sort of after-action report, saying which units were where," Greentree said. "As I recall, the Atlacatl was the main combat unit, and they talked about this hammer-and-anvil nonsense. We were dismayed, because the Atlacatl was supposed to have developed new tactics, but now they were back to the same old shit -- you know, insert a blocking force and then carry out a sweep." The message about El Mozote -- the version that the Salvadoran Army had presumably already provided the defense attaché's office -- was, in effect, that the Army had fought hard to dislodge a large company of guerrillas from the town, and though perhaps a few civilians had been killed in the crossfire, soldiers certainly had not carried out a massacre.
Colonel Flores was not particularly happy to see the Americans, and it was clear that his attitude was shared by the other officers they encountered that day. As McKay -- who is now a colonel attached to nato headquarters in Brussels, and was given permission to speak publicly about the events at El Mozote by the Defense Department -- told me, "In general, we had very little coöperation when we went to Morazán."
They left San Miguel and flew over the Torola toward El Mozote. "You could see there had been a combat sweep through the area," Greentree said. "You could tell El Mozote had been pretty much destroyed. Roofs were collapsed, buildings were destroyed, and the place was pretty much abandoned."
As they flew over El Mozote, Greentree went on, he could see signs of battle. "There was an escarpment close to the town, an obvious line of defense, and you could see trench lines there. There were definitely fortifications in the vicinity." When I pressed him for details, he said that the fortifications might have been closer to Arambala, a mile or so away.
They made several passes at a couple of hundred feet, then circled around for a better look. "As we lost altitude and got within range, we got shot at," Greentree said. "That was pretty standard stuff out there. It was definitely not a landing situation."
They headed to Gotera, touched down at the barracks, and received another briefing. "The purpose of the briefing was to impress on us that this was a war zone out there," said Bleakley, the deputy chief of mission, who had come to Gotera on another helicopter and met Greentree and McKay there. The officers' point was that "not only were they not out there killing civilians but they were fighting for their lives in that very dangerous war zone to protect the civilians from guerrilla atrocities."
The Americans said they'd like to have a look, talk to some people in and around the town. "It was extremely tense," McKay told me. "The Army was clearly not happy with our presence there."
Accompanied by a squad of soldiers, McKay, Greentree, and Bleakley set off for the refugee camp outside Gotera. "We literally went up and down the streets, saying, 'Hey, do you know anyone from El Mozote?' " Bleakley said. "The impression you got from people was that this was a conflict zone, that the people still up there were camp followers, you know, involved in the conflict."
And yet, as McKay acknowledged, the presence of the soldiers made the task of conducting what would, in any case, have been difficult interviews almost impossible. "You had a bunch of very intimidated, scared people, and now the Army presence further intimidated them," McKay said. "I mean, the Atlacatl had supposedly done something horrible, and now these gringos show up under this pretense of investigating it, but in the presence of these soldiers. It was probably the worst thing you could do. I mean, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know what the Army people were there for."
Greentree managed to speak to a number of people -- including a mayor from one of the towns near El Mozote and several peasants who had lived near the hamlet -- out of the soldiers' hearing. "McKay would work the military and keep them distracted while I went out and around and talked to people," Greentree said.
The three Americans agreed that the information they gathered in the refugee camp was not explicit. As Greentree put it, "I did not get any direct eyewitness accounts of what had taken place, of the type that Ray Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto reported. It was more sort of the way people were talking and the way the kids around were still looking as if they'd been through hell, and people saying, 'Yes, my wife was killed' -- that sort of thing."
Sometime during these interviews, he and McKay became convinced that something had happened in El Mozote. "You could observe and feel this tremendous fear," McKay said. "I was in Vietnam, and I recognized the ambience. The fear was overriding, and we sensed it."
"People were freaked out and pretty scared about talking, and stuff," Greentree said. Nonetheless, the interviews in the refugee camp "convinced me that there probably had been a massacre, that they had lined people up and shot them."
Bleakley, however (who, as deputy chief of mission, was the senior officer of the three), told me that though "it was clear people had been killed, some of them civilians, what we couldn't answer was the fundamental question -- you know, the difference between subduing a town and pulling out the civilians, My Lai style, and massacring them."
Still, Greentree said, "each person I talked to confirmed the impression that something bad had happened, but nobody was willing to go ahead and give the exact story." He drew this conclusion "from things they said, their general manner -- and their general unwillingness to talk. And that includes the soldiers as well. I mean, you talk to a soldier who thinks he's taken part in some heroic operation -- and a Latin soldier, I mean -- you can't get him to shut up. But these soldiers would say nothing. There was something there."
Travelling with the squad of soldiers, McKay and Greentree left the refugee camp (Bleakley, who had business in the camp, stayed at Gotera), climbed into a military jeep, and headed up the black road. "We went to five villages," McKay said, including Jocoaitique, within a few miles of El Mozote. "We talked to a priest who gave us oblique information that something horrible had happened, and that it was committed by the Army."
Now the two men, accompanied by the soldiers, set out for El Mozote to see for themselves. "Between five and seven clicks south of Jocoaitique, we were going to turn off the road toward the hamlet and head there cross-country," McKay said. But the soldiers had begun to grow quiet. "There began to be complaints. They were already sensitive about the civilian with me. Now they were getting more and more sullen. You know, they'd look at the ground, mumble something about being out of radio contact." Finally, the group reached the place where they'd have to leave the black road for El Mozote. At that point, the soldiers just stopped. "The sergeant said, 'We're not going any farther, we're not going to help you.' It was made very clear that we would get no more coöperation."
They had come very close to El Mozote. In less than an hour, they could have seen for themselves the burned buildings, the ruined sacristy, and the bodies. But, with the soldiers' refusal to go on, the Americans faced the choice of heading on across open country -- guerrilla-controlled country -- without protection or turning back. "You want to know what made me decide?" McKay said. "Well, I'd been on that helicopter over there, and we'd received fire, and, the month before, the guerrillas had wiped out a whole company up there. What made me decide -- me, the big tough marine? I was scared shitless."
The choice was clear. The Americans, with their soldier escort, turned around and trooped back to Gotera, and from there the helicopter carried them back to the capital. The investigation was over.
At the Embassy, Greentree sat down and began to write, and by the following day, after consultations with Bleakley and review by others in the Embassy, including Ambassador Hinton, a lengthy cable, over the Ambassador's name, was dispatched to Washington -- a cable that provided the basis for what Assistant Secretary of State Enders told Congress two days later. This cable, which was originally obtained in 1983 by a Washington research group called the National Security Archives under a Freedom of Information Act request, is a remarkable document. Its opening paragraph -- the all-important "summary" that heads diplomatic cables -- reads (with emphasis added) as follows:
Embassy investigation of reported massacre at El Mozote including visit to the area by assistant [defense attaché] and [Embassy officer] concludes following: Although it is not possible to prove or disprove excesses of violence against the civilian population of El Mozote by Government troops, it is certain that the guerrilla forces who established defensive positions in El Mozote did nothing to remove them from the path of battle which they were aware was coming and had prepared for, nor is there any evidence that those who remained attempted to leave. Civilians did die during Operación Rescate but no evidence could be found to confirm that Government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone, nor that the number of civilians killed even remotely approached number being cited in other reports circulating internationally. We are still pursuing question as to which Army units were present in El Mozote. End Summary.
In the entire summary, only one point is considered solid enough to be dubbed "certain" -- that "the guerrilla forces who established defensive positions in El Mozote did nothing to remove [civilians] from the path of battle." And yet, as Greentree conceded in our conversation, the descriptions of fighting in El Mozote, and of the "defensive positions" there, came largely, if not exclusively, from the Army briefings. "The information that we had presented to us as concrete was, of course, from the Army side, about the conduct of the combat operation," he said. The slender version of what happened in El Mozote seems to be a mixture of Army briefings and, at best, inferences by Greentree and Bleakley.