Massacre At El Mozote Summary

Mark Danner, an editor for the New York Times magazine, and author of The Massacre at El Mozote narrates a horrifying crime against civilization committed by a branch of the Salvadorian army. Danner gives numerous points of views and names numerous eyewitnesses to piece together something that has been hidden by the government at the time. In December, of 1981, news reports were leaked to major newspapers in the United States about an atrocity committed and a total massacre of a village in El Salvador, known as El Mozote. A total of 75,000 civilian lives were taken by the governmental forces of El Salvador, Where state agents, including the military and paramilitary organizations, were responsible for 85% of the killings, and FMLN responsible
It is here where the battles between peasants versus planters, Europeans versus natives that violence erupted throughout El Salvador’s troubled history. Starting in 1932, labor leader Agustin Farabundo Marti lead a peasant revolt against ruling dictatorship and fourteen families, but, within a few weeks, the revolt was crushed in an enormous military retaliation called la matanza (Murphy 4/4/17), where an estimated 30,000 civilians were murdered, with the majority of whom were indigenous people. The Salvadoran military would rule the government for decades to come. Years later, the fight between the political left and right never ended, in the 1960s-1970s the left winged guerillas and the right-wing paramilitary death squads quarreled in a deadly spiral of political violence. El Mozote was a town that was seen as a last resort for escaping civilians, it was supposed to be a safe harbor, as the rebels and army would be doing