Forty years ago, on December 11, 1981, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history commenced in El Salvador, in the village of El Mozote and its environs.
Some 1,000 civilians, most of them women and children, were slaughtered over a period of several days by the Salvadoran military’s elite Atlacatl Battalion, which had been trained, funded, and equipped by the United States.
A Jacobin Magazine tribute published on the 35th anniversary of the massacre recalls some of the gruesome scenes:
“The soldiers entered the house and began slashing the children with machetes, breaking their skulls with their rifles and choking them to death. The youngest children were crammed into the church’s convent, where the soldiers unloaded their rifles into them.”
The bloodbath took place in the context of El Salvador’s civil war of 1980-92, which ultimately killed more than 75,000 people – with the vast majority of atrocities perpetrated by the right-wing state in collaboration with paramilitary outfits and death squads. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.