The Massacre At El Mozote Analysis

At the heart of Mark Danner's graphic and eye-opening historical novel, The Massacre at El Mozote, is an ideological battle between communism and capitalism. By backing the right-wing El Salvadoran government and military, the United States became an active and willing participant in one of the bloodiest single massacres in Central American history. The massacres at El Mozote, La Joya, La Guacamaya and Arambala killed nearly 1,000 peasants. The group most responsible for these atrocities was the feared Atlacatl Battalion, trained and funded by the U.S government. The government found themselves in what appeared to be an increasingly vulnerable position in this region during the Cold War. With the victory of the leftist Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua, the United States' fear of communist expansion (akin to that of Vietnam in the Indochina region in the 1960s) weighed heavily on their collective minds. This irrational and misinformed fear manifested itself into a complicitness that dictated a 'by any means necessary' approach to the limpieza (cleaning) of the communist scourge, even if that meant trouncing national and international human rights statutes. Even more troubling was the governmental coverup of the massacres by various members of the American and …show more content…
Because of this, tens of thousands of El Salvadorans lost their lives in a bloody and vicious civil war that was partially funded by the United States. The massacre at El Mozote was one of if not the most horrific examples of government/military overreach, its lasting painful memories becoming compounded by the fervent denial of wrongdoing by both governments and the subsequent silencing of American journalists who risked their own lives to report on the massacre from the front