On the Twentieth Anniversary of the Massacre at El Mozote

By Margaret Knapke, December 2001
(First printed in Sideshow Magazine, Chicago, IL)

For years, I have been haunted by lines from the US poet, Carolyn Forche. In "Ourselves or Nothing," she admonishes:

There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like
netted fish, exactly like netted fish.

I awoke some twenty years ago to "the slaughter" occurring throughout Latin America, largely courtesy of the US government.  Slipping the "net," I apprenticed myself to the Latin American struggle through the solidarity movement in this country.

Throughout the 1980's we tried to counter the pervasive, fear-mongering rhetoric of the Carter, then Reagan, then Bush Administrations -- all intent upon waging wars against people wanting only economic and political democracy in their countries. Often I comforted myself -- when US military aid and Central American death tolls climbed despite our best efforts -- that simply bearing witness trumped despair. And so it went for many of us: dutifully poring over news accounts and human rights reports, a veritable litany of atrocity issuing especially from Central America in those years. We committed to heart numbers, names and -- whenever possible -- faces.

But all those years I was wrong about one thing. I thought that only Rufina Amaya had survived her village's ordeal. But now I know that several children (none of them Rufina's) also lived to recount the massacre at El Mozote -- a community deep in Morazan province, the so-called "Red Zone" of El Salvador. Those children are now adults, as the massacre was committed in 1981 -- a full twenty years ago this December! Through them, we know how children were killed on a hilltop called La Cruz (The Cross).

I'll spare us those brute particulars. We often hear such horrors of war rationalized as inevitable, as tragic products of confusion, uncertainty and fear. But what could be clearer and more calculated, what power differential more pronounced, than removing children from their parents (noncombatants all), killing first the parents, and then the defenseless children?  Clearly the Atlacatl Battalion, the Salvadoran Army's crack unit which conducted the massacre, had been indoctrinated well -- so well that they could look at those children and see an aspiring Red Menace. Lessons in dehumanization learned all too well.

Yet the approximately 800 farmers and children killed in El Mozote are but a tiny fraction of the 75,000 Salvadorans (mostly civilians) killed during their 12-year-long civil war. We know from the UN Truth Commission Report on El Salvador (subtitled “De la Locura a la Esperanza, From Madness to Hope”), published in 1993, that 66 Salvadoran soldiers were positively identified as having been involved in human rights abuses. Further research showed that 47 of those soldiers had been trained at the US Army School of the Americas (SOA). And among those 47 cited graduates, we find 10 soldiers cited for the atrocity at El Mozote.

But if we are to peer through Forche's cyclone fence, if we are to unravel the net that would keep us calm and captive, then we need to fully grasp that El Mozote was no aberration! Rather it was one of hundreds of villages throughout Central America subjected to a scorched earth policy. And this policy flowed logically and perhaps inevitably from what has been called Low-Intensity Conflict (LIC), a doctrine devised after the Vietnam War. LIC, or civilian-targeted warfare, has long been the core curriculum of the SOA, and has resulted in literally hundreds of its graduates  -- in addition to those 47 Salvadorans -- being cited for human rights violations.

Put simply, LIC constitutes a war against the poor -- a war using propaganda, psychological operations and commando tactics to intimidate and suppress popular movements toward economic justice and democracy. LIC training prepares Latin American soldiers to function as proxy armies that are guarantors for US corporations: soldiers help to maintain their own countries as obscenely lucrative investment climates, and keep American troops out of harm's way.

Such proxy wars are designed to be kept out of the news and out of our collective awareness -- the better to ensure complicity.  Indeed, the "low intensity" aspect of LIC refers not to the experience of the victims, but to the hiding of their victimization from US taxpayers, who pay the bill for it.

But LIC notwithstanding, the gradual recognition of extensive human rights violations has given rise to a sustained grassroots and Congressional demand that the SOA be closed. SOA Watch is the grassroots organization that first articulated that demand, under the leadership of Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois. Since 1990, "the Watch" has been quite effective at thrusting LIC into high-intensity public scrutiny. So much so that in January of 2001, in a transparent effort to deflect growing criticism, the SOA was re-named the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

School officials object to this characterization, of course: they maintain that the SOA has been "closed," and that the Institute is truly a new entity. But even insiders acknowledge that this is a public relations shell game, as the not-so-new curriculum also indicates. (Note that School officials insist upon the contrived acronym WHINSEC. Apparently the more natural acronym WHISC connotes too well the attempt to sweep an ugly, exposed history under the proverbial rug!  But I prefer that more descriptive name, and will refer to the current incarnation as SOA/WHISC.)

Today, twenty years and many thousands of lives after El Mozote, Central Americans are still trying to recover from their civil wars -- wars that many would argue have simply taken a new form, as mandated economic structural adjustment programs.  Meanwhile more militarized chapters of this LIC story are being written in southern Mexico and Colombia, where human rights violations (especially against labor and human rights activists) and degradation of the environment (especially due to the aerial fumigation of crops) continue. Again SOA/WHISC graduates are key actors.

The stated rationale for the current militarization has changed from the Cold War to the Drug War, but the core dynamic of undermining popular social movements and displacing rural populations remains the same. Certainly it is no accident that the sacred lands of targeted indigenous people in both Mexico and Colombia cover significant oil reserves!  As in Central America, the repression of the poor majority is being taken all the way to the bank.

Of course, both Low-Intensity Conflict (in general) and El Mozote (in particular) are contrary to stated US foreign policy purposes (as well as the stated purposes of SOA/WHISC). But the real purposes guiding our foreign policy have been stipulated very succinctly and candidly in some internal State Department documents. The following quote from George Kennan's Policy Planning Statement #23 (no doubt so candid because classified at the time!) illustrates the importance of distinguishing gushing rhetoric from harsh reality. Kennan, a leading State Department strategist, wrote in 1948:

...We (the US) have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming.... We should cease to talk about vague... objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts....  

The figures have changed slightly since Kennan's day, but the priorities -- not at all! Indeed, the US Space Command's pamphlet "Vision for 2020" acknowledges that "the globalization of the world economy will ... continue, with a widening between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots.'" The Space Command describes their mission as "dominat(ing) the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investments." And back on terra firma, what is the SOA/WHISC, if not a trade school in Kennan's "straight power concepts"?

Clearly, a license for repression is longstanding and deeply entrenched in our institutions -- but as policy it has a fatal flaw! For it requires two complacent citizenries: one that can be made to submit to enforced poverty and disenfranchisement; and one to foot the bill for that brutal enforcement, then look the other way. Certainly Pentagon and SOA officials have understood this vulnerability well enough to conjure up the WHISC, hoping to buy more time with more complacency, more "Let's give this School the benefit of the doubt!"

But ultimately theirs is a losing game, for the poor of Latin America cannot feed their children with submission. And even on the comfortable side of that cyclone fence, our complacency, too, must give way: it simply is not in our deeper nature to be indifferent to, much less complicit in, another's repression. Rather, as that old net that has long kept us "calm, protected" and complicit unravels around us -- we waken to a deep clarity, freedom and vigor in community that can't be bought or subdued. And not a moment too soon. For as Forche says in her concluding lines:

It is either the beginning or the end
of the world, and the choice is ourselves
or nothing.

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Resources:

Carolyn Forche's poem can be found in her book The Country Between Us, 1981, Harper and Row. See also her 1993 anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, published by W.W. Norton and Co.

Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War, 1994, Vintage Books (Random House).