Analysis Of The Massacre At El Mozote

The Massacre at El Mozote was the killing of hundreds of Salvadorans by the Atlacatl, an American-trained battalion. They Atlacatl entered the town of El Mozote and massacred estimates as high as 1,000 people, including men, women, and children. A war was being fought in El Salvador between the government army and guerrillas, with funding from the American government being sent to the El Salvadoran army. The United States is at fault for the lives lost at the town of El Mozote and those surrounding towns. The American government funded the Atlacatl, provided training and weapons to the El Salvadoran men, over-looked the massacre as if nothing had happened, and even covered up what had truly happened. The American government is completely
Men of the Atlacatl went into these cities and murdered hundreds of innocent people because they claimed that the civilians were either guerrillas or guerrilla’s sympathizers. Monterrosa who was the leader of the Atlacatl was labeled as, “that rare thing: a pure, one-hundred-percent soldier, a natural leader, a born military man with the rare quality of being able to instill loyalty in his men” (Danner, 24). Monterrosa seemed liked the right man for the job of leading the Atlacatl because of his natural born talents that he possessed. Danner commented in his novel that Monterrosa had received training from the Americans in Panama (24). He took courses from the Americans and learned about anti-Communist counter-insurgency tactics, which would become helpful to him later in his career as the leader of the Salvadoran army. The Americans are also responsible for training the Immediate Reaction Infantry Battalion, which was formed from a group of first recruits. Just training some of the men were not good enough for the American government, however. “Some officials in the Embassy and the Pentagon had wanted the
First, the United States used the inaccuracy of the amount of deaths in different accounts as evidence that the stories were in fact false. “Elliot Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, remarked to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the El Mozote case ‘is a very interesting one in a sense, because we found, for example, that the numbers, first of all, were not credible, because as Secretary Enders notes, our information was that there were only three hundred people in the canton’” (Danner, 127). Other accounts reported numbers of upwards of 1000 people had been massacred at El Mozote and other surrounding hamlets. Abrams also went on to say, “ There is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operations zone, or that the number of civilians remotely approached the seven hundred and thirty-three or nine hundred and twenty- six victims cited in the press” (Danner, 126). The government used the inconsistency to their advantage and reported that more proof would be needed in order to persuade the American government that a massacre of innocent civilians had occurred by the Atlacatl. The American government also insisted