The memorial of the massacre at El Mozote, with the names of the individuals whose bodies were able to be identified.
This weekend I took a trip to El Mozote, a small town in north-eastern El Salvador in the department of Morazán. Morazán was the home to Radio Venceremos (the guerilla radio station) and a large portion of the armed resistance during the war, and El Mozote is the site of the largest single documented massacre in El Salvador’s history. In December of 1981, the Salvadoran military came into the mountains of Morazán and told the surrounding villagers that anyone who didn’t come to El Mozote would be considered part of the communist movement and be killed, but if they came to El Mozote they would be safe. According to military documents discovered after the war, and according to the UN Truth Commission (1993), somewhere around 1000 campesions were divided into groups (men, women, and children) and killed in a roughly 1-2 day period. This was part of “scorched earth” warfare, where they intended to kill not just people connected to leftist groups but “anyone who may one day decide to vote for the left” (quote from our guide, discussed below) without leaving any witnesses. Some of the details in the next paragraph may be upsetting.
One woman, Rufina Amaya, snuck out of the women’s line during a hectic period and escaped to tell the story. Women in their teens and 20s were lined up and lead to a house where most of them were raped and all were killed. Rufina was able to sneak out of line about 20 yards from the house (which we also visited, but is no longer standing). When the UN Investigators came more than 10 years later, she was able to show them exactly where the mass graves were and which were filled with woman, men, or children, a detail that was instrumental in the El Mozote case when it finally entered the Inter American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) years later (although no one has been prosecuted for what happened there). Rufina continued to live in and around El Mozote up until her death a few years ago, leading weekly and often daily trips through the town to tell her story and show interested people the path that she took to escape her certain death. The Salvadoran and US governments denied the massacre for many years, but after multiple exhumations and years of forensic anthropology by international teams, Rufina’s story was proven and there is no longer any question to the validity of what happened in this small, beautiful town. Without going into too many details, it was very emotionally intense, especially visiting the rose garden that sits on top of the children’s mass grave. All the children, and some of their mothers, were put in the cathedral and killed together. The cathedral was destroyed and lit on fire by the military when they left, but a new one stands in its place with murals, the rose garden, and a small monument on top of the grave.
This memorial marks the spot where the bodies of 146 people were found, 140 of them were children under 12 years old. After being identified they were all reburied there, and it is now a rose garden.
Before Rufina Amaya’s death, a small group of woman from the area formed a group dedicated to keeping her story alive and leading future visitors in the same way that Rufina did for many years. We were led by a woman who grew up in El Mozote but happened to be living away from it for six months when the massacre happened. Her sister and her were two of the first people to arrive on the scene after the massacre, and they lost their entire family (several siblings, both parents, grandparents, etc.). She walked us from the main monument (pictured above) through the reconstructed cathedral, rose garden, the plaza where the people were originally gathered, through the town to the house where the women were killed, and down the path that Rufina Maya used to escape.
It is hard to say what it felt like to visit this place, and despite the heaviness I am very glad I had the experience. As an international studies student (or even just as someone who reads the newspaper) I know that things like this have happened all over the world and presumably are still happening in some places. But I have never visited a mass grave, and it has only existed to me on paper or in a movie; it existed as a reality but as a distant reality, one that I understood intellectually but not emotionally. The wounds of El Mozote and the war in general run so deep here and have far reaching social, cultural, political, and legal implications for Salvadorans and the region in general. I came here thinking about politics and human rights law, but I have spent more time learning about a tragic history that many want to move past but even more can’t forget even if they wanted to. Add to all that the US involvement (training, funding, and more) in the war and it continues to be an intense experience.
Being led down the path where Rufina Amaya escaped the El Mozote Massacre.
Other News:
Last week I had a meeting at the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores (basically the Salvadoran state department) where we discussed immigration and international human rights concerns with one of the highest ranking diplomats, and today (7/4) I started taking a daily seminar on Human Rights at the Procuraduria de Derechos Humanos (the PDDH is the government´s highest human rights authority, and it also has a small HR school inside of it. see http://www.pddh.gob.sv/). The seminar is 4 hours a day each day this week, and next week I am going to be involved in a smaller seminar taught by a local HR lawyer who represents various NGOs and has worked at the IACHR.
Summer Adventures in Law 