Virginia Judge Rejects Deportation of Salvadoran Colonel Tied to El Mozote Massacre

[Judi Lynn]

1. El Salvador: Groundbreaking Insights into U.S. Cover-Up of El Mozote Massacre

29 April 2021 by El Faro

- click for image of The Atlacatl Battalion during its 1992 disbandment. Photo: Giuseppe Dezza -

https://tinyurl.com/2pn9axdv

A United States military advisor, Sergeant Major Allen Bruce Hazelwood, was on location, and on duty, in December of 1981 as Salvadoran soldiers carried out the El Mozote massacre, slaughtering almost a thousand civilians.

This groundbreaking revelation was the big takeaway from the expert testimony of Stanford University political scientist Terry Karl during pretrial hearings in El Salvador on Monday, April 26. The news of Hazelwood’s presence — along with Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, commander of the Atlacatl Battalion — at the scene of the massacre offers new insight into the extent of the U.S. role, as well as what Karl calls a “sophisticated cover-up” on the part of the Reagan administration and Salvadoran civil-military junta.

It also rekindles the debate about the United States responsibility in the Salvadoran armed conflict, as well as the need for both governments to fully declassify internal documents on the massacre and other war crimes, which they have withheld for four decades.

“Had [Hazelwood’s presence at El Mozote] come to light at the time, it would have meant cutting off United States aid,” said Karl. She added: “The participation of an advisor in wartime activities is against our laws, and it was illegal at the time.”

The El Mozote massacre was the deadliest war crime of the Salvadoran civil war. Between December 11 and 13 of 1981, the Salvadoran Army deployed almost an entire elite battalion to El Mozote and six nearby villages in the Morazán department, killing 978 unarmed civilians. Most of them, 533, were children. 477 of these were under 12 years old, and 248 under six.
For years the governments of El Salvador and the United States denied that the massacre had occurred. Later, they questioned the identities of the victims in suggesting they were guerrillas. The two journalists who simultaneously revealed the massacre, in the New York Times and Washington Post, were Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto, who then faced swift backlash for their work. By 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights pronounced the Salvadoran state guilty of the crime.

More:
https://www.cadtm.org/El-Salvador-Groundbreaking-Insights-into-U-S-Cover-Up-of-El-Mozote-Massacre

~ ~ ~



~ ~ ~

El Mozote: 40 years after the worst military massacre in the Americas, victims still calling for justice

Despite decades of institutional silence, a judge continues to fight to bring to trial those responsible for killing nearly 1,000 peasants in El Salvador in December 1981

- click for image -

https://tinyurl.com/336rb88n


CARLOS S. MALDONADO
Mexico - DEC 16, 2021 - 11:24 EST

The day they arrived, the troops promised to deliver food supplies to this desperately poor region of El Salvador. Instead, they gathered the villagers onto an area of a wasteland and massacred them. Between December 10 and 12, 1981, the screams mixed with the howls of dogs near El Mozote.

Amadeo Martínez Sánchez, 49, lost 25 family members. His mother and three siblings aged one, five and seven, were among those who had their lives cut short at the hands of soldiers from the Atlácatl battalion of the Salvadoran army, many of whom had trained at the notorious School of the Americas (some of whose graduates were also involved in another high-profile killing in El Salvador, the assassination of six Jesuit priests in 1989). “When we were able to get close we saw that the pigs were eating the corpses, the chickens were pecking at them, so we put the remains in hammocks and blankets and buried them all in a pit,” recalls Martínez.

Of all the horrors that El Salvador has suffered, the El Mozote massacre is perhaps the most terrible of all: at least 986 people were killed (552 children and 434 adults, including 12 pregnant women) in three days of bloodletting. Forty years have passed and neither Martínez nor the rest of the survivors have received justice or reparations. “We are very disappointed,” he says, resurfacing memories of his nine-year-old self witnessing the worst massacre ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

Masacre El Mozote

- click for image -

https://tinyurl.com/3f2tkjky

Coffins with the remains of two of the victims of El Mozote, at a burial service in December 2016.
JOSE CABEZAS
Amadeo Martínez was preparing to attend a mass organized as a tribute to the victims, along with his neighbors. The mass is held yearly in La Joya, a hamlet set across the gentle mountains of the eastern part of El Salvador, where there is a humble shrine made from sticks and corrugated iron sheets. “Nobody wanted to help us,” he remembers. In order to erect the monument for the victims, he had to donate the land himself.

On December 9, 1981, his father José Santos Sánchez arrived at home looking upset. He said he had heard rumors that the military would soon deploy to the area, and urged his wife María Inés Martínez to leave the house. El Salvador was bleeding out from a civil war between the Army and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas that would ultimately leave at least 75,000 victims. The military had orders to wipe out alleged “communists” trying to seize power in the country, and peasants were among the main targets. Many were accused of providing protection to the insurgency, which had a strong presence in the area.

Amadeo Martínez’s family left their home in La Joya and went to another nearby hamlet. A neighbor, Jacinto Sánchez, gave them shelter, but on the condition that only Amadeo’s parents and younger siblings would sleep in his house. He and his older brother had to stay outside. In the early hours of December 10 they tried to move on again, but his mother objected: she wanted to return home, claiming that they had nothing to hide. She stayed behind with her younger children, while the older siblings and the father went into hiding.

More:
https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-12-16/el-mozote-40-years-after-the-worst-military-massacre-in-the-americas-victims-still-calling-for-justice.html