El Mozote

El Mozote is a village in the Morazán department in El Salvador. It was the site of the El Mozote massacre during the civil war in December 1981 when nearly 1,000 civilians were killed by the U.S. School of the Americas-trained Salvadoran Army unit known as the Atlacatl Battalion.

On December 10, 1981, the Atlactl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote with a plan in mind. The Battalion’s mission: to eliminate everyone in the village who stood in their way of capturing 'the Guerrilla', as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) was known. In the lapse of three days every inhabitant of the village was executed. On the fatal day of December 10, soldiers rousted the civilians from their homes and gathered them in the central plaza where they were forced to lie down on the streets. Soldiers then brutally kicked, threatened and seized jewelry and valuables along with accusing the people of belonging to the FMLN. At night fall people were ordered to proceed into their homes and were warned not to step outside or else they would be murdered. The following morning the citizens were forced outside where they were then divided into groups of men with boys and women with girls and children. Men and older boys were taken to a church and the rest were taken to vacant homes. In the church, the soldiers blind folded the men and killed them either by decapitation or shooting them at point blank range. Many of these men were tortured before being executed. At the same time women and girls were forced to walk up hillsides where they were first raped before being murdered. Then the soldiers rounded up the children in an empty home where they then released shots killing every single child in the village. After proceeding with the executions of all the inhabitants, they left obscene writing on the walls of homes prior to burning the homes and the bodies. The soldiers didn’t settle with just eliminating the inhabitants, they made sure that the animals of the deceased were killed and burned as well. The “Angels of Hell”, as the Atlactl Battlion called themselves, had completed their mission.

The civil war in El Salvador was a time of desperation and turmoil for the civilians of that small country. There were numerous complaints of human right violations but a countless number of people did not report the abuse for fear of the military’s retaliation. But it was the El Mozote Massacre that brought to light the many accusations of human right violations. The El Mozote case alone demonstrated almost all of the human right violations that were recorded during the civil war. Due to almost 1000 citizens being killed in a span of three days, the El Mozote Massacre came to be known as the most notorious case of human right violation in the history of El Salvador.

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