Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 19, 1993 TAG: 9303190165
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: EL MOZOTE, EL SALVADOR LENGTH: Medium
MASSACRE'S SURVIVOR RECALLS VICTIMS' CRIES
Tears still well in Rufina Amaya's eyes as she recalls the night the American-trained soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion entered this mountain village and virtually wiped it off the map.It was Dec. 10, 1981. Amaya is one of two known survivors.
"They killed a few of us that night, but it was on the 11th, the next morning, that the real massacre took place," she said in the nearby village of Segundo Montes, where she works with a Christian women's group.
"They closed us up in houses and in the morning they brought people out in groups to be killed," she said. "First the fathers, then the mothers, then the children."
Amaya crawled away and hid among some pineapple plants. She lost 21 family members, among them her husband and four children, the youngest 8 months old.
"From where I was hiding I could hear them cry and scream," she said, wiping an eye with a dusty apron.
A report released Monday by the United Nations blamed the Atlacatl Battalion, trained that year in the United States, and its leader, Col. Domingo Monterrosa.
Anywhere from a few hundred to 1,000 people were slain at El Mozote and four nearby hamlets during the offensive in the rebel-held hills of northeastern El Salvador.
The commission that investigated the killing as part of the agreement that ended El Salvador's 12-year civil war suggested an American coverup at El Mozote. After a U.S. Embassy investigation at the time, the State Department said there was no evidence of a massacre.
At the time, Congress was edgy about funding the Salvadoran government because of mounting reports of atrocities. The Reagan administration was eager to help the government fight guerrillas, and didn't want reports of abuses to get in the way of its effort.
The Atlacatl Battalion has been disbanded. Monterrosa was killed not far from El Mozote in 1984, when a rebel bomb smuggled onto his helicopter blew it out of the sky.