As Mark Danner wrote in The New Yorker more than a decade later, “That in the United States 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.” Yet even after the massacre received prominent coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the Reagan administration decided to continue military aid to the Salvadoran government. According to the journalist Raymond Bonner, writing in this magazine, the United Nations Truth Commission found that “more than 85 percent of the killings, kidnappings, and torture had been the work of government forces, which included paramilitaries, death squads, and army units trained by the United States.” One such unit was the Atlacatl Battalion, which in early December of 1981 brutally tortured, raped, and murdered nearly 1,000 people in and around the village of El Mozote. The United States saw the conflict only through the prism of the Cold War and sent economic and military aid to the government, resulting in the loss of 75,000 Salvadoran lives and horrifying human rights abuses. Over time, the peasants and rebels who had been organizing against the regime banded together to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In fact, they have no sense of the victims at all.Įl Salvador was ruled by a repressive military dictatorship for 50 years. If Abrams had been associated with some of these crimes and nevertheless thrived in Washington, then that should not operate as a defense of him but as an indictment of us.” Even in an era of failed interventions in foreign countries and a devastating migrant crisis emerging from Central America on our own border, many Americans still have little collective memory of the civil war in El Salvador or those responsible for it, let alone the ability or motivation to see the war from the victims’ point of view. As Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in The New Yorker, Omar was saying to Abrams and the rest of the world that “the overseas crimes of America’s recent past would now be interrogated from a victim’s point of view. What seemed to shock many was Omar’s perspective-and her memory.
And in any case, Democrats have been responsible for many similar foreign policy evasions. Many politicians and pundits rushed to defend him, mostly (but not always) Republicans. What You Have Heard Is True : A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
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