Where is el mozote

The testimony is likely to touch on the U. This is a critical juncture, where the court and the public will be able to hear from an internationally recognized expert about the case, and where the officers involved and the Salvadoran military will be under intense scrutiny.

The judge in the case, Jorge Guzman, has stood up to political pressure to end the proceedings. For those who have sought justice in this case, and those who believe a functioning judicial system is one of the prerequisites for a democratic society, this is a moment of hope. The United States, which has invested in strengthening the judicial system in El Salvador, and has, under the Biden Administration, seen the rule of law as a key issue in the region, should closely monitor this case, and support efforts to move it forward to a resolution.

Argueta 26 Apr News. Five reasons why the elections in Nicaragua do not guarantee human rights U. Those contacts had helped her set up the aborted trip in December. Three days after Bonner telephoned, she received word from the guerrillas that they would allow her, too, into their territory. Neither correspondent had much news experience in those days.

He had set out for Latin America and, as he puts it, "started bumming around. The Times soon found itself short-handed in Central America because its veteran Mexico City correspondent Alan Riding had received death threats from right-wing extremists in both El Salvador and Guatemala.

Bonner, asked to string in those two countries, arrived in San Salvador just before Salvadoran National Guardsmen executed four American nuns near the airport in early December He was assigned to the metro staff in New York but spent most of the year on loan to the foreign desk, heading in and out of Central America. Guillermoprieto, then 32, was not yet a staff reporter for any publication.

During the past two and a half years, she had worked as a stringer for a London newsletter, the Guardian and, since mid, The Washington Post. Operating out of Mexico City, where she was born and raised, Guillermoprieto was bilingual, able to speak and write both English and Spanish fluently. The editors had no hesitation about approving the trips into rebel territory. Be careful, et cetera, et cetera.

Bonner, in fact, had long ago shrugged off the fears of working in the city of San Salvador. Despite the obvious hatred of him by right wing extremists, he would jog by himself every morning. They killed four nuns. Why do I say that? Like Alan Riding of the Times, Guillermoprieto no longer traveled to San Salvador because of right-wing death threats. But she does not even recall discussing safety when she talked about the impending trip to guerrilla territory with Jim Hoagland, the assistant managing editor for foreign news, and Karen De Young, the foreign editor.

Though she might find herself in extreme dangers, she understood that these were "the rules of the game. The Rev. William L. Ambassador Deane Hinton for "confirmation or otherwise" of the reports of a massacre.

The message never reached Bonner. Their instructions were to go to a designated coffee shop and look for a contact carrying a Time Magazine. They did not find him in the coffee shop but wandering on the road nearby. The contact led them by car on January 3 rd to a mountainous area near the border of El Salvador. I flashed back so many years earlier, to when I had been in Vietnam and how patrols were ambushed at night.

Guillermoprieto checked in at the Maya Hotel a few days later. While waiting two days for an escort, she walked up and down the hills of Tegucigalpa in what she now calls "a desperate attempt to get into shape.

Fording the wide river in her bikini underwear bottom, she slipped, ruining her camera and damaging her pack. After three nights of walking, she came to a rebel camp where Bonner and Meiselas were waiting to take the route back to Honduras. On her first day in rebel territory, the guerrillas led her to El Mozote and nearby villages. Guillermoprieto came upon awful sights that had shocked Bonner and Meiselas a few days earlier. The "sickly sweet smell of decomposing bodies" pressed the air.

The two American journalists and the American photographer saw dozens of bodies beneath the rubble of the village and lying in nearby fields. The village church was in ruins. An array of bones lay in the burned sacristy. Skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column and countless other pieces of bone poked out of ruble. They found charred bones in two of the burned houses of the village. In a nearby refugee camp, Guillermoprieto, like Bonner, interviewed Rufina Amaya, the sole survivor of the El Mozote massacre.

Guillermoprieto also interviewed two survivors from attacks on other villages. Aside from these eyewitnesses she interviewed a dozen other civilians who told her that their relatives had been killed by the Salvadoran soldiers. In all, Bonner said he interviewed thirteen peasants who told him that Salvadoran soldiers had killed their relatives. Both Bonner and Guillermoprieto were allowed to interview the civilians without the presence of guerrillas. The rebel soldiers also gave the reporters their version of events, and Guillermoprieto said that an American working in the area also described what he believed had taken place.

Bonner said that he, too, had met an American, whom he identified as Joe David Sanderson. According to Bonner, Sanderson was killed in combat a few months later. Bonner also received a list from some villagers with the names of peasants killed by the Salvadoran army. Bonner was told that the survivors had compiled the list.

From their separate interviews and observations, Bonner and Guillermoprieto, who did not consult each other afterwards, put together more or less the same basic account of what had happened:. The Atlacatl was an elite, man battalion trained in counterinsurgency and rapid deployment by U.

Special Forces military advisors. The Atlacatl, commanded by Lt. The Atlacatl soldiers marched into the village of El Mozote in the late afternoon of December The village had fifteen to twenty mud brick homes around a square with a church and a small building that served as a kind of sacristy.

The villagers did not regard themselves as rebel supporters, and some government soldiers had assured a local businessman that no villager would be harmed if all remained in their homes.

The Atlacatl soldiers, however, pounded on the homes and forced everyone to come out and lie down on the square in the darkness. After an hour and a half, the villagers were allowed to go back into their homes. But before dawn the next day, the soldiers forced everyone back into the square.

After a few hours of standing, the soldiers separated the men from the women and children and herded the men into the church. The women and children were put into a single home. The soldiers beat and interrogated the men and then led them blindfolded from the church in small groups.

At noon, the soldiers pulled young girls and women out of the house and took them to the hills outside the village, raping and killing them. The soldiers returned for the older women, marching them in small groups to another house where soldiers waited to shoot them.

After peace between the FMLN and the Salvadoran regime was finally negotiated in , the United Nations organized a Truth Commission for El Salvador to investigate human rights abuses that occurred during the civil war—and in particular, the massacre at El Mozote—thus commencing the arduous process of trials and investigations that has continued until today.

In , based on forensic evidence collected at the site of the massacre by Argentine investigators, the Organization of American States opened its own investigation in order to discern whether orders for the slaughter at El Mozote had originated from the Salvadoran high command. In , the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights filed a case against the government of El Salvador, resulting in its issuance of a formal acknowledgment and apology for its role in the massacre.

One year later, in , the Inter-American Human Rights Court ordered the Salvadoran government to conduct its own investigation into the massacre, urging that all implicated parties be held responsible for their actions in and over the course of ensuing cover-ups.