El Mazote and Perquin

Last weekend I visited the historical towns of Perquin and El Mazote. El Mazote in particular is not a trip for the faint of heart, offering El Salvador’s equivalent of the Holocaust Museum with its “Nunca Mas” (“Never Again”) message. While El Salvador is littered with sites where such massacres took place, El Mazote is infamous in El Salvador and across Latin America for the totality of the “cleansing” that took place on December 11, 1981.

On December 10th of that 1981, members of the U.S. trained infantry battalion “Atacatl” came to the town as part of "Operation Rescue", whose mission (from Wikipedia) was to “eliminate the rebel presence in a small region of northern Morazán where the FMLN had a camp and a training center.” Community members were ordered to stay in their homes until the next day, when they were rounded up and brought to the village’s small town square. Men were separated from the women, and children from their parents; all were taken to the church, the convent, or to various homes. The women and girls were raped, the men tortured, and the children either run through with bayonets or shot. Every person in the community (save for a few who escaped) was executed – over 750 people in total (estimates vary), over 400 of them children. Then all the buildings and bodies were burned.

The principal memorial is located in the town square. Behind a sculpture of a family, the names of those killed in El Mazote (in addition to names of other martyrs during the civil war) adorn a wall of simple adobe-colored panels. Like the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, the main focus is the names of those that perished.

El Mazote Memorial

The rebuilt church takes a similar approach, but with much more color. Above the names of the children killed and their ages, the walls are brightly decorated to represent childhoods never completed. Next to the church, a garden has been planted on the site where bones of over 100 children were found in the months after the massacre. The stones in the garden are still stained with blood and ashes.

Children's Memorial Garden

Children's Memorial

Children's Names and Ages

Names and Ages

Incredibly, a few individuals survived. One woman, Rufina Amaya, lived to tell the tale to two American journalists who visited the Morazán region soon after the massacre. She had managed to sneak away and hide in a tree nearby where she witnessed many of the atrocities, including the murder of her own children. She stole away to the hills and was found days later, dazed, traumatized and guilt-ridden. Although her account of the events in El Mazote were disputed aggressively by the Reagan Administration and by the El Salvadoran government, a 1992 investigation by the United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador confirmed her account of the events. Today, Rufina is buried in the town square next to the main memorial.

Rufina's Grave

Here’s an interesting article from the Washington Post in 2007 with an interview of a soldier in the El Mazote massacre who has since renounced the government’s actions and is now mayor of the town of San Miguel.

Perquin is home to a museum on the history of the civil war. It is privately owned and considers itself apolitical, though sometimes folks on both sides disagree. One of its main attractions is Lt. Colonel Monterrosa’s destroyed helicopter, shot down by the FMLN. Monterrosa was the author of the El Mozote massacre.

Monterrosa's Helicopter

We also did some hiking in the area, including a quick jaunt up to the top of Mount Perquin, which included bomb crater and trench sitings, left over from the civil war. Perquin was the stronghold of the FMLN and the hidden location of the famous Radio Vencerremos ("We will be victorious").