Product Description

In December 1981 soldiers of the Salvadoran Army's select, American-trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote, where they murdered hundreds of men, women, and children, often by decapitation. Although reports of the massacre -- and photographs of its victims -- appeared in the United States, the Reagan administration quickly dismissed them as propaganda. In the end, El Mozote was forgotten. The war in El Salvador continued, with American funding.

When Mark Danner's reconstruction of these events first appeared in The New Yorker, it sent shock waves through the news media and the American foreign-policy establishment. Now Danner has expanded his report into a brilliant book, adding new material as well as the actual sources. He has produced a masterpiece of scrupulous investigative journalism that is also a testament to the forgotten victims of a neglected theater of the cold war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20443 in Books
• Published on: 1994-04-05
• Released on: 1994-04-05
• Original language: Spanish
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780679755258
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Based in large part on his extensive account published in the December 6, 1993, issue of the New Yorker , National Magazine Award winner Danner's engrossing study reconstructs events that took place some dozen years before. In December 1981, over 750 men, women and children were killed in El Mozote, El Salvador, and the surrounding hamlets. Although at the time it was covered on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Washington Post , the reports were not enough to derail Ronald Reagan's push to prove that the El Salvadoran government was "making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights." Why the government chose to ignore stories in the nation's two leading newspapers is one part of Danner's sad, well-researched book. The other is why El Mozote was attacked at all. Populated by evangelical Christians who, unlike Catholic neighbors fed on liberation theology, did not abet the rebel FMLN, the people of El Mozote believed they would be spared when the army decided to wipe out insurgents and their supporters. After several days of brutal rapes and murders, a handful of people managed to escape to the rebels, setting in motion press reports and the under-investigated, coyly couched American embassy reply that allowed the U.S. to continue its massive subsidies. Danner has disinterred an event that is an equal indictment of Salvadoran brutality and American blindness.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In October 1992, the international community was shocked to hear of the recovery from shallow graves of 25 bodies, all but two of them children, near the ruined church of Santa Catarina in the village of El Mozote, El Salvador. Shortly thereafter, another 100 corpses were discovered elsewhere in the village. After 11 years of investigation, political pressure, and intense lobbying efforts by human rights groups, civil libertarians, and concerned individuals, the truth of what really happened in 1981 in this remote Salvadoran village finally began to emerge, a flashback to the infamous My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War. The situation in El Mozote was similar: villagers caught in the political crossfire between rival groups during a brutal war, trying to remain on friendly terms with their own soldiers while fearing to alienate the opposition. Danner's well-written account, which first appeared in The New Yorker and has been expanded here, does a good job of presenting evidence based on eyewitness accounts and reveals the callousness of U.S. Central American policy (the killers were American-trained soldiers of the Salvadoran Army). Especially recommended for Latin American collections.
Philip Y. Blue, Dowling Coll. Lib., Oakdale, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Mark Danner is one of our best, most ambitious narrative journalists. He writes only on what he knows deeply, cares about passionately. His harrowing, rebuking account of an atrocious episode of the civil war in El Salvador touches on many of the central issues raised by American policies and journalistic practice in the Cold War and after. This is an admirable, necessary book."

-- Susan Sontag



"Mark Danner's account of what happened at El Mozote is a gripping story on three levels -- that of the massacre, that of the official cover-up and that of the press. It is also a brilliant piece of writing." -- Frances FitzGerald -- Review

Customer Reviews

When the army hangs four-year-olds, one ought to ask "why?"
What compelled the army to decapitate infants, hang children and wipe out an entire village of 800 civilians? Why did the U.S. support a government that massacred nuns, priests, social workers and catequists? Danner's book presents in clear and undeniable form the insanity of U.S. policy in El Salvador in the 1980's. I am a U.S. priest working in El Salvador not far from El Mozote. Every day we work with survivors of the war, and see the results of the trauma still evident. Danner's book gave me a great insight into the decisions that led to the Mozote massacre, as a keyhole to the broader conflict.

propaganda ... is sometimes true
Mark Danner has written a marvelously researched and page-turning account of one of the larger attrocities in Central America committed by U.S. trained, supervised and funded armies. After the American War in Vietnam, the U.S. made a strategic decision to pay the locals to do our fighting. In other words, a proxy war. Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, the crafty, spirited and charismatic officer who commanded the Salvadoran forces at El Mozote, trained in Panama at the U.S. training installation later moved to Ft. Benning, Georgia and named the School of the Americas. Graduates of the SOA have been implicated in the murders of thousands of civilians, Archbishop Romero and American nuns and priests.

What I found most interesting, contrary to my previous opinion, is that the Ambassador and at least several American officials in San Salvador believed something terrible had happened in El Mozote. Without access to the site - it had been recaptured by the FMLN rebels - they could prove nothing. Nevertheless, they attempted to communicate their fears to Washington. Washington decided not to believe. Instead, the New York Times recalled one of the reporters who had been to the site at FMLN invitation and had seen the bodies. The story seemed unbelievable.

The story was, of course, Communist propaganda and therefore not to be believed. Well, yes, the FMLN did broadcast the story with the intent of influencing Salvadorans and Americans. It was propaganda. It was also true.

There is a parallel in U.S. history. (There may be more than one.) During the 1920's and 30's and even later, the American and European press was rife with reports of mass murders in the Soviet Union. The press reporting these attrocities had for years been reporting and editorializing against the Soviet threat and Communist revolution, many times exaggerating or being more than a little creative. They had also supported the American-British-French invasion of the Soviet Union after WWI. Liberals regarded these sources as unreliable and untrustworthy, and continued to defend Stalin. The liberals were right, of course, just as the Reagan Administration was right: the reports were propaganda. The reports were also true.

Sometimes the enemy is right. We should take care to listen.

The failure of U.S. policy in Central America
In the early 1980s the Reagan administration engaged in all sort of efforts to convince the American people that its policies in Central America were geared towards preserving the democracy and freedom of the region's inhabitants, while at the same time preventing damage to their country's own internal security. However, Mark Danner, in his brilliant work that examines one of the darkest episodes of the conflict in Central America during that period, demonstrates that the U.S. supporters of the counterinsurgent option in countries like El Salvador, openly misled the American public as to the origins, methods, and final results of their intervention there. Throughout his well-documented effort, Danner (who himself became another unwilling victim of the Cold War - he was virtually fired from his job at the New York Times as a result of his coverage of El Mozote massacre)provides more than enough evidence that the U.S.-perfected doctrine of counterinsurgent warfare, when applied to situations such as El Salvador, can produce results of unequaled human perversity. In the name of freedom and democracy, the U.S.-trained "Atlacatl Batallion" murdered in cold blood hundreds of innocent, unarmed civilians -mostly women and children. In the meantime, Reagan and his advisors in Washington (even after convincing proof had been provided by the reporting of Danner that the massacre had indeed been carried out by U.S. allies there)cynically denied that anything had taken place. Instead, some argued that perhaps the victims of the massacre had killed themselves to embarrass the U.S and its military allies. In the end, Danner and the only survivor of the massacre - a middle aged woman - would be vindicated by history. And yet, the disturbing nature of that dark episode in the history of U.S. adventurerism in the region continues to terrify and, in a sinister way, fascinate those interested in that region. As Hanna Arendt has already stated in "Eichmann in Jerusalem", the "banality of evil" knows no boundaries. Danner's work must be read by anyone attempting to know the truth of what really happened to unsuspecting civilians in a God-forgotten Salvadoran village in a dark month of December, in 1981.