Massacre’s Survivors Are Seeking Justice
EL MOZOTE, El Salvador — After the soldiers left, the survivors crept out from the ravines and the caves where they had hidden from the slaughter to see a land laid to waste. Some tried to quickly bury the bodies of their mothers and their children. Then they fled.
For decades, these witnesses grieved in silence over the massacre in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote and nearby hamlets. But after a recent court decision, they have begun to speak out publicly, describing the four days in December 1981 when Salvadoran military units, trained and equipped by the United States, killed 978 people in the largest single massacre in recent Latin American history.
“Miraculously, God spared us so that we could tell what happened,” said Dorila Márquez, 61, sitting on the terrace of the rebuilt house she fled when she was 25.
Survivors had faint hope they would ever see justice. But a provincial judge has reopened a long- dormant trial over the massacre at El Mozote, ordering the retired military commanders to hear charges of war crimes.
“Why did they do it, why did they have to kill those children?” Ms. Márquez asked .
In 1981, during Washington’s bat- tle against communism, President Ronald Reagan sent military instructors to El Salvador, whose army was fighting the leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or the F.M.L.N.
Beginning on December 11, soldiers executed everyone in El Mozote. They went on to La Joya and other communities, shooting residents and burning their homes.
After the government and the F. M. L. N. signed peace accords in 1992, the national assembly in El Salvador granted amnesty for crimes committed during the war. Impunity for the atrocities carried out — as many as 85,000 civilians were killed or disappeared — was now enshrined in law.
That ended two years ago, when the Salvadoran Supreme Court overturned the amnesty. Lawyers for the survivors asked a provincial judge to reopen a trial that had begun in 1990, and he agreed.
In La Joya, soldiers killed 24 relatives of Rosario López. When the shooting started, Ms. López retreated to a hillside to hide with her three children and her husband, José de los Angeles Mejía, now 72.
Mr. Mejía came down the mountain five days later. He found the body of one of his wife’s sisters, her dress hiked up, her underwear tossed on a rock. The bodies of children were stacked in a pile, their faces unrecognizable. “I said to myself: What barbarity!” he recalled.
As the trial has slowly progressed, the evidence has yet to show why the soldiers killed civilians so relentlessly, and who had ordered them to do so.
Eighteen elderly men are facing preliminary charges of murder, aggravated rape and terrorism — accused of being the architects and executors of the assault that, for decades, the Salvadoran military denied had even happened.
Lizandro Quintanilla, a defense lawyer representing one of the accused, retired General Walter Salazar, said there are still questions about what occurred in El Mozote and that it was impossible to link exhumed remains to the commanders facing trial.
“It isn’t a history from which we can infer any responsibility,” Mr. Quintanilla said, “to my client or the accused.”
Ms. Márquez, though, is determined to find justice.
She spoke of the men who had destroyed her village. “They will face God — but they also have to respect the law,” Ms. Márquez said. “What is the law if you don’t apply it?”