The Massacre at El Mozote

“Nearby, in the long-depopulated villages, you can see stirrings of life: even in Arambala, a mile or so away [...] But follow the stony dirt track [...] and in a few minutes you enter a large clearing, and here all is quiet. No one has returned to El Mozote.”

In this passage, the specific sensory details Danner uses to describe the experience of entering the area around El Mozote, along with the use of second person, invite the reader to experience this place in a way that gives them some connection to it, no matter their background. Danner also quickly sets up a contrast between the surrounding areas and El Mozote itself. The former, as we will later find out, had its share of tragedies and hardships, and yet El Mozote is presented as so much worse, foreshadowing the massacre.

“[...] the United States had no choice but to go on supporting a ‘friendly’ regime, however disreputable it might seem, because the alternative—the possibility of another Communist victory in the region—was clearly worse [...]”

The United States’ position seems to be that it is better to take the lesser of two evils, the worse being a communist government in Central America. To avoid this, the US will go to extraordinary lengths, and ignore the accounts and much of the evidence suggesting a great injustice has taken place. as we’ll see in Chapters 6 and 7.

“That in the United States it came to be known, that it was exposed to the light and then allowed to fall back into the dark, makes the story of El Mozote—how it came to happen and how it came to be denied—a central parable of the Cold War.”

The final line of the first chapter, this passage essentially sums up Danner’s purpose within the pages that follow. This is his thesis statement, laying out the way in which the United States, during this time period, was willing to do whatever it took to not let communism prevail.