No one in El Salvador told the truth about the massacre. The news was first picked up by a clandestine guerrilla radio, Radio Venceremos, but it did not make the mainstream media. La Prensa Gráfica, a major print outlet, reported on the Mozote operation with a picture of kids greeting troops. They said that the population had happily received the army’s entrance to recover territories that were under “terrorists” control. Neighboring countries, also under military regimes, didn’t report on El Mozote either.
It was in this context of a general media blackout—of state-sanctioned denial—that survivors went to the court in 1990. Their path through the legal system was as intricate as the henequen plantations under which many had hid. In 1977, a legal aid office, Socorro Juridico, had been opened in the Catholic Church by Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador whose assassination in 1980 marked for some the start of the civil war. Romero was a human right’s leader and the country’s foremost voice against social injustice and repression; a symbol of liberation theology, which tried to bring the church closer to the poor and oppressed, he was made a Catholic Saint in 2018. Socorro Juridico, which was renamed Tutela Legal in 1982, started gathering survivors’ testimonies soon after the massacre. Victims left the El Mozote area and scattered over the country and into refugee camps in Honduras. As survivors came back to El Mozote, Tutela Legal stepped up their investigations and got enough victims on board to present the case in October 1990.
The military then still had a strong grip on the country’s institution. The Attorney General’s office and the Supreme Court was filled with military allies. The president of the Court opposed the investigation in El Mozote, claiming that “only dead guerillas were buried” there. But after more persistence from Tutela Legal, the excavations began in El Mozote’s main square in October 1992, and the earth unveiled the truth: thousands of bones were dug up; more than two hundred of them were of children. Yet in 1993, six days after an UN Truth Commission on the war was published, the Legislative Assembly passed a broad amnesty law. There would be no trial in El Mozote.