El Mozote: Revisiting the U.S.’s Role in the “Worst Massacre in Modern Latin American History”
Much like former U.S. president Donald Trump, politician and businessman Nayib Bukele won El Salvador’s 2019 presidential election on a populist “drain the swamp” platform. He promised to fight corruption and decouple his presidency from the trajectory imposed by an elite-dominated political establishment. Even as Bukele’s authoritarian actions hollow out his rhetoric through stunts like a military occupation of the nation’s Legislative Assembly in early 2020, his approval ratings have consistently remained above 75%.
However, on September 10, Bukele’s ratification of an amendment to Article 3 of the Judicial Careers Law has the potential to greatly increase domestic and international scrutiny of his presidency. This reform, passed by Bukele’s New Ideas party-controlled legislature, forced judges sixty years of age or older or with thirty years of service to retire, which amounted to a third of the country’s judges. In addition to consolidating judicial power into the executive branch, this reform forcibly retired sixty-one year old Jorge Guzmán, a judge from the small eastern municipality of San Francisco Gotera. Over the last five years, Guzmán has presided over the El Mozote case; the only major investigation into human rights abuses committed by the Salvadoran government during the civil war.
Amnesty or accountability for crimes against humanity
The Chapultepec Peace Agreement, signed on January 16, 1992, brought an end to the brutal 12-year civil war between a series of repressive U.S.-backed military dictatorships and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) left-wing rebels. Shortly thereafter, a UN Truth Commission reported that government forces and government-backed right-wing death squads committed 85% of human rights violations. Days after the release of this report, an ARENA party-dominated Salvadoran Legislative Assembly passed the 1993 Amnesty Law, which prevented the investigation, prosecution, and imprisonment of those responsible for war crimes.
The right-wing ARENA party (Nationalist Republican Alliance) was co-founded by death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson who, according to the UN Truth Commission’s “full evidence”, gave the order to assassinate Archbishop Óscar Romero, which initiated the civil war in 1980. A $200,000 public relations campaign run by U.S. PR agency McCann-Erickson “helped sell the right-wing terrorist’s brand of electoral politics” and shored up ARENA’s domination of the legislature following the 1982 elections.
Between 1980 and 1982, U.S. military aid to El Salvador increased from $6 million to $82 million. A Vietnam War-style scorched earth campaign, which spurred a mass slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in the first few years of the conflict, was almost exclusively carried out by three elite U.S.-created and trained Salvadoran battalions. On December 10, 1981, the Atlacatl Battalion, commanded by Col. Domingo Monterrosa, arrived in the village of El Mozote in the department of Morozán and brutally massacred nearly 1,000 mostly young children, women, and elderly villagers.
In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled the 1993 Amnesty Law unconstitutional, opening the door for Guzmán’s investigation into the El Mozote Massacre, a crime widely characterized as the “worst massacre in modern Latin American history”. After the previous two Salvadoran presidents Mauricio Funez and Salvador Sánchez Cerén failed to make military records available to the legal teams of victims associations, Bukele’s promise to release military archives brought renewed hope to those fighting for justice and accountability.
Unfortunately, Bukele has reneged on this promise by backing the military’s refusal to allow expert archivists sworn in by Guzmán to inspect documents at various military headquarters. Most recently, on September 20, Health Minister Francisco Alabi declared a “health cordon” due to a supposed COVID-19 outbreak in San Francisco Gotera, which denied Guzmán entry into his own jurisdiction hours before his arrival with an archivist.
Since the 1993 Amnesty Law was annulled, social movements and advocates for human rights have consistently called for investigations into war crimes committed during the civil war. Judge Guzmán’s objective probe into the El Mozote Massacre is supported by the families of the victims. As El Salvador’s weakened judiciary looks to investigate Bukele's interference in the El Mozote case, it’s worth taking a closer look at newly released information on this resurgent topic, specifically the U.S.’s role in El Mozote, as the scope of holding those accountable for war crimes could and should be widened beyond the borders of El Salvador.
U.S. cover-up of complicity in El Mozote
An April 2021 testimony by Terry Karl, a Stanford political scientist and expert on human rights violations during the Salvadoran civil war, revealed that the U.S. government hid the presence of a U.S. military advisor in Morozán during the massacre. The advisor, Sergeant Major Allen Bruce Hazelwood, was with Colonel Domingo Monterrosa when the massacre began. Hazelwood had stated in an interview that Colonel Natividad Cáceres Cabrera “began the murders” and “I won’t say that Monterrosa didn’t order it”. Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Elliott Abrams later sought to cover-up U.S. involvement in El Mozote by calling it “communist propaganda” and reaffirmed his belief that U.S. policy in El Salvador during the civil war was a “fabulous achievement.”
This extensive U.S. cover-up also involved former senior military assistant to then Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, Colin Powell. In 1983, Powell and Weinberger were part of a fact-finding mission to El Salvador that concluded that the United States should continue to train and fund the Salvadoran military. This came after the Salvadoran military, with U.S. assistance, massacred 600 civilians at El Sumpul and 1,000 civilians at El Mozote.
As a continuation of the cover-up, a proposed amendment to the FY2021 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 6395) that sought the release of Department of Defense (DoD) documents on the massacre was not included in the final bill. The U.S. Congress’s failure to include this amendment in H.R. 6395 denies proper accountability, justice, and healing to the victims.
For far too long U.S. security policy in Central America has revolved around training, funding, and arming military forces through opaque and flawed mechanisms like the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). This “security” funding is allocated to right-wing governments that adopt predatory neoliberal development models favored by western multinational corporations and the local oligarchy. In pursuit of extractive corporate capitalism, the violence and impunity of the 1980s and 1990s continues its reign in El Salvador without any self-reflection or accountability.
In addition to releasing all DoD documents on El Mozote and initiating an independent criminal investigation into U.S. involvement in the massacre, the U.S. government should completely overhaul its current foreign policy approach to Central America as detailed in a January 15 letter to president-elect Biden signed by dozens of solidarity organizations including the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).
