Shedding Light on Humanity's Dark Side

[MountainLaurel]

A tribute to a brave woman who spoke truth to power.

Rufina Amaya, the woman who was often identified as the last, or only, survivor of the massacre at the village of El Mozote, died last week. She was not, strictly speaking, the only survivor of that monstrous event, but she appears to have been the only one who emerged with her wits about her, a clear memory of what took place, and the will to describe how hundreds of people, including her husband and four of her children, were systematically butchered on Dec. 11, 1981, in an impoverished corner of El Salvador.

The massacre took place in the early days of the United States' involvement in El Salvador. In that conflict, radical leftist guerrillas tried to overthrow a ruling establishment utterly loathed by the population at large for its corruption and human rights atrocities. The Reagan administration intervened to train and equip the Salvadoran army, and to shore up the government against what it feared would become a red tide of communism lapping at the very borders of the Rio Grande.

The news articles describing a rampage of murder by the army in a place called El Mozote were written by me and by my friend and colleague Ray Bonner. In early January of 1982, Bonner, who was working for the New York Times, told me that he and the photographer Susan Meiselas had been invited by the guerrilla leadership to tour the rugged province of Moraz?n, an area of El Salvador bordering on Honduras where the guerrillas held sway, and which reporters had long been eager to visit. After frantic and pleading calls to my own guerrilla media contacts in Mexico City, a trip was arranged for me as well. The Washington Post, for which I was a stringer at the time, approved the trip. We did not suspect that I was being allowed into guerrilla territory to report on a massacre.

Traveling only by night and on foot through government-controlled territory, I reached the guerrilla-held region of El Mozote as Bonner and Meiselas were on their way out. My camera had been damaged during a river crossing and so the next day I saw, but could not photograph, a ruined chapel and three adjoining adobe houses where the charred remains of dozens of victims--it was impossible to tell how many--lay half-hidden among the rubble. Along the paths connecting El Mozote to smaller hamlets, parched corpses lay in the baking sun. There were bodies in the abandoned cornfields, in one-room houses where a pedal-operated sewing machine was a sign of great wealth, in the citrus groves where birds still chirped. There were, in fact, bodies everywhere--children, men, women, draft animals -- and the air reeked.

snip

I bring this up simply to point out how even powerful and courageous news institutions can be intimidated by the White House. The Reagan administration continued to certify that the army was indeed improving its human rights performance.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/13/AR2007031301826.html