An Angel Passes By: Silence and Memories at the Massacre of El Mozote

October 13, 1992

Patri, Luis, and Mimi left this morning for Morazán in the helicopter of the United Nations. I am going to Morazán in one of the vehicles of onusal (The United Nations Mission in El Salvador). The driver who comes to pick me up has never been there. He has a map and clear directions on how to get to Morazán. He is not familiar with the investigation. He wants to know. I tell him what I know about the massacre. The four hours of the trip from San Salvador to Morazán go fast as I tell him what I read in the official report given by the only survivor of the massacre, Rufina Amaya Márquez.

El Mozote was a community located in the north of Morazán. It was a community of people who did not sympathize with the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front). They were trying to keep themselves neutral, apart from the guerrilla as much as from the army. Rufina says that in the morning of December 11, 1981, soldiers from the Atlacatl Battalion arrived in El Mozote. They divided the men from women and separated the younger women from the older, the children from the teenagers. The men and the teenagers were taken into the church of the hamlet. Rufina was taken into a house located directly across from the church, on the other side of the square. It was the house of Alfredo Márquez. She saw the men being taken out of the church and beheaded with machetes. Rufina saw her husband, Domingo Claros, trying to escape. He was shot down by the soldiers, and when he was gasping on the ground, the soldiers jerked his head back and beheaded him with a single blow of a machete.

Everyone was being executed at El Mozote. Rufina heard the voices of the younger women and girls taken to El Cerro de la Cruz, a hill behind the church where they were being raped and murdered. Rufina was in the last group of women taken to the house to be executed. She was still with her four children. Maria Isabel was only eight months old. Rufina was carrying her when a soldier pushed her out of the house. As she stepped out, one of the soldiers grabbed the baby. Rufina struggled to keep her daughter. The soldier took the baby and pushed Rufina to the ground. All the women were screaming, begging not to be killed, and all the children were crying. In that confusion of desperate people, Rufina managed to hide behind a bush and to stay separate from the group. She remained in hiding for two more days. She survived. She is the only survivor of the massacre at El Mozote. Rufina has a remarkably detailed memory of all that she witnessed while she was in the house.

In her testimony, Rufina describes the moment in which she heard her children screaming and calling her. Rufina desperately wanted to throw herself into the madness of the massacre and die. Die with everyone else. She knew she would be the only one who could tell what had happened at El Mozote. It was that certainty that stopped her from screaming and being swallowed by the rivers of blood running everywhere. She was fearless. She remained in hiding with only one mission: to tell the world what had happened at El Mozote.

The driver seems moved. He is from Norway. He says those things don't happen in Norway. "What things?" I ask. "Massacres. There are no massacres in Norway. Are there massacres in Argentina?" he asks, as if he is asking if there are apples in Argentina. "Yes," I say, "in Argentina there are massacres." He asks me if I am scared when working in an exhumation surrounded by so much death. He makes me think. Scared I am not. What I feel is more complex. I am frightened, but I do not want to run away. I am actually looking forward to the exhumation. It is going...