El Mozote Massacre: 900 Civilians Slaughtered

Soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion moved through the village of El Mozote methodically, separating men from women and children before executing them all. Over three days beginning December 11, 1981, U.S.-trained Salvadoran armed forces killed approximately 900 civilians in what became the worst massacre in modern Latin American history. El Salvador's civil war had been raging for nearly two years, pitting the right-wing military government against leftist FMLN guerrillas. The Atlacatl Battalion, an elite rapid-deployment unit trained at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, was conducting a scorched-earth operation in the northern Morazan province. Their orders were to eliminate guerrilla support in the region. The soldiers interpreted this as authorization to kill everyone they found. Victims included hundreds of children, some of them infants. Forensic investigations decades later confirmed the accounts of survivor Rufina Amaya, who escaped by hiding behind trees as her husband and four children were murdered. The soldiers burned buildings and slaughtered livestock, leaving the village in ashes. When reporters Raymond Bonner of The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post published accounts of the massacre in January 1982, the Reagan administration and the Salvadoran government dismissed the reports as guerrilla propaganda. The U.S. continued its military aid, ultimately spending over six billion dollars supporting the Salvadoran government during the twelve-year war. The truth emerged fully only after the 1992 peace accords, when a UN Truth Commission confirmed the massacre. In 2012, El Salvador's government formally apologized. The Atlacatl Battalion was disbanded as part of the peace agreement, but no one was ever convicted for the killings.