In April, El Salvador began the final phase of pretrial hearings in the criminal case against the accused perpetrators of the 1981 El Mozote massacre. The massacre, which took place during the country’s civil war of 1980–1992 and killed some one thousand civilians in and around the village of El Mozote — most of them children — was carried out by the US-trained and -funded Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran military. If the judge concludes that there is sufficient evidence to move ahead with the trial, fifteen retired military officers could face prison sentences.
In his book Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador’s Dirty War, former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner cites the recollections of massacre survivor Rufina Amaya, whose blind husband and three daughters were slaughtered:
From her hiding place in the trees, she heard the soldiers’ conversation: “Lieutenant, somebody here says he won’t kill children,” said one soldier. “Who’s the son of a bitch who said that?” the lieutenant answered. “I am going to kill him.”
The day after the bloodbath began, soon-to-be Iran-Contra convict Elliott Abrams took up a post as Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs and set about denying that the massacre had ever happened. Even after the civil war ended, Abrams insisted that the Reagan administration’s legacy in the Central American nation had been one of “fabulous achievement” — this despite the loss of upward of 75,000 lives, with the vast majority of atrocities attributed to the US-backed state and allied paramilitary formations and death squads. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.