El Mozote Persuasive Analysis

Register to read the introduction… Soldiers were overheard conveying some degree of humanity in that they did not want kill children. But, as was said by the other solider "We have orders to finish everyone and we have to complete our orders. That is it"(Donner 75). There were perhaps thirty children that were being killed in a variety of inhumane ways. Donner recounts an interview with a man named Chepe Mozote, that he saw the soldiers. "they slit some of the kids throats, and many they hanged from a tree." He luckily got away, but the rest of the children did not fare as well. There were disagreements among the soldiers as to what to do with the children in the schoolhouse. Finally, they strafed the schoolhouse with bullets from their American automatic weapons and burned the schoolhouse and everything inside of it. So ended the massacre at El Mozote, everything dead and decimated, with corpses strewn about the town. They were some survivors. Rufina Amaya recounted a unbelievable story about how she was able to escape from the soldiers, in a crab tree (Donner 73). She was forced to watch as the soldiers were murdering her children, and she could not even cry. Finally, she scurried away under brush as the killing had stopped, and the soldiers had lost interest. Rufina Amaya first told her story to Raymond Bonner, at The New York Times bureau in Mexico City. The story provoked much interest, but unfortunately no one …show more content…
Records were not accurately kept, and the area remained very war torn for a long period of time after the massacre at El Mozote. The United State's account of the events at El Mozote start by accounting the massacre "Although it is not possible to prove or disprove excesses of violence against the civilians population of El Mozote by Government troops, it is certain that the guerrilla forces did nothing to remove them from the path of battle" (Donner 111). This at least recognizes that they do not know the exact details of the massacre, but they do realize that one occurred. Subsequent interviews by United States Ambassador and the war-monger Domingo Monterossa seemed to have changed the early reports. After embassy officers were sent to the site of El Mozote, they came back and the Assistant secretary Thomas O. Enders said before the House subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, "It is clear from the report that there has been a confrontation between the guerrillas occupying Mozote and attacking government forces. There is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operations zone"(Donner 126). This is very different than their initial