El Mozote was neither the first nor the last mass atrocity in El Salvador’s nightmarish civil war. The rape and murder of four US churchwomen by the National Guard, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero while he held mass, the massacre of at least three hundred civilians at Sumpúl River, a similar mass killing a year later at Lempa River, the execution-style murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America — the list of horrors goes on and on, and is so long and brutal that it risks overshadowing the daily dumpings of bullet- and torture-riddled bodies of those who dared to speak out against the hard-right government on city streets and in public parks during the Salvadoran Civil War, which stretched from 1980 to 1992.
The overwhelming majority of these atrocities was carried out by the Salvadoran National Guard and the death squads to which many of their soldiers and other sympathizers belonged. Their aim was to destroy the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN in its Spanish acronym), a coalition of leftist guerrillas with strong support throughout the country; any workers, peasants, and religious workers who sympathized with them; and any other dissenters who disagreed with the program of the corrupt, right-wing government, which could not have existed or endured without US backing.
At its height, the United States was giving over $1 million a day to the Salvadoran government in various forms of training, arms, military advising, and other aid in an attempt to prevent a Sandinista-style takeover by the FMLN and its supporters. “By the late 1980s,” Walter LaFeber writes, US aid “approached 100 percent of the Salvadoran government budget.”
During the war, no suppression of democracy and egregious human rights violations by El Salvador’s government went too far for the United States, particularly under Ronald Reagan. Every murder of civilians, every rape, every execution of leftist-sympathizing clergy, every mass killing of innocents was justified by a zealous anticommunism that sought to maintain crushing levels of poverty and wealth and political power in the hands of a tiny, brutal, US-friendly elite with no popular support but the full backing of American power behind it.
The El Mozote Massacre was unique in the sheer number of innocent lives lost, and perhaps for the wanton brutality exhibited during it. It should be remembered for these reasons. But it should also be remembered because it was not unique.