Volume 41, Number 13 · July 14, 1994
'Something Horrible' in El Salvador
By Joan Didion
The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War
by Mark Danner
Vintage, 304 pp., $12.00 (paper)
In December of 1981 in El Salvador, twenty-one months after the murder of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in San Salvador and twelve months after the murder of the four American Maryknoll women outside San Salvador and eleven months after the murder of the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency and two of his American aides at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador, which is to say at a time when the government of the United States had already demonstrated the ability to tolerate grave insults to its Central American policy, certain events occurred in certain remote villages north of the Torola river in Morazán province. In what has since become the most familiar of those villages, El Mozote, the events in question began late on a Thursday afternoon, December 10, a time when the village was crowded with refugees from areas believed less safe, and were concluded at dawn on Saturday.
Review, 6318 words
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