By Mark Danner
December 06, 1993

In a remote corner of El Salvador, investigators uncovered the remains of a horrible crime — a crime that Washington had long denied. The villagers of El Mozote had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of the Salvadoran Army's anti-Communist crusade. The story of the massacre at El Mozote — how it came about, and hy it had to be denied — stands as a central parable of the Cold War.

But follow the stony dirt track, which turns and twists through the woodland, and in a few minutes you enter a large clearing, and here all is quiet. No one has returned to El Mozote. Empty as it is, shot through with sunlight, the place remains — as a young guerrilla who had patrolled here during the war told me with a shiver — espantoso: spooky, scary, dreadful. After a moment's gaze, half a dozen battered structures — roofless, doorless, windowless, half engulfed by underbrush — resolve themselves into a semblance of pattern: four ruins off to the right must have marked the main street, and a fifth the beginning of a side lane, while an open area opposite looks to have been a common, though no church can be seen — only a ragged knoll, a sort of earthen platform nearly invisible beneath a great tangle of weeds and brush.

Into this quiet clearing, in mid-October last year, a convoy of four-wheel drives and pickup trucks rumbled, disgorging into the center of El Mozote a score of outsiders. Some of these men and women — most of them young, and casually dressed in T-shirts and jeans and work pants — began dumping out into the dust a glinting clutter of machetes, picks, and hoes. Others gathered around the hillock, consulted clipboards and notebooks and maps, poked around in the man-high brush. Finally, they took up machetes and began to hack at the weeds, being careful not to pull any, lest the movement of the roots disturb what lay beneath. Chopping and hacking in the morning sun, they uncovered, bit by bit, a mass of red-brown soil, and before long they had revealed an earthen mound protruding several feet from the ground, like a lopsided bluff, and barely contained at its base by a low stone wall.

"No les dije?" she asked. ("Didn't I tell you?") "Si sólo se oía aquella gran gritazón." ("All you could hear was that enormous screaming.")

For eleven years, Rufina Amaya Mírquez had served the world as the most eloquent witness of what had happened at El Mozote, but though she had told her story again and again, much of the world had refused to believe her. In the polarized and brutal world of wartime El Salvador, the newspapers and radio stations simply ignored what Rufina had to say, as they habitually ignored unpalatable accounts of how the government was prosecuting the war against the leftist rebels.

In the United States, however, Rufina's account of what had happened at El Mozote appeared on the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, at the very moment when members of Congress were bitterly debating whether they should cut off aid to a Salvadoran regime so desperate that it had apparently resorted to the most savage methods of war. El Mozote seemed to epitomize those methods, and in Washington the story heralded what became perhaps the classic debate of the late Cold War: between those who argued that, given the geopolitical stakes in Central America, 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, and those who insisted that the country must be willing to wash its hands of what had become a morally corrupting struggle. Rufina's story came to Washington just when the country's paramount Cold War national-security concerns were clashing — as loudly and unambiguously as they ever would during four decades — with its professed high-minded respect for human rights.

In the United States, the free press was not to be denied: El Mozote was reported; Rufina's story was told; the angry debate in Congress intensified. But then the Republican Administration, burdened as it was with the heavy duties of national security, denied that any credible evidence existed that a massacre had taken place; and the Democratic Congress, after denouncing, yet again, the murderous abuses of the Salvadoran regime, in the end accepted the Administration's "certification" that its ally was nonetheless making a "significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights." The flow of aid went on, and soon increased.

By early 1992, when a peace agreement between the government and the guerrillas was finally signed, Americans had spent more than four billion dollars funding a civil war that had lasted twelve years and left seventy-five thousand Salvadorans dead. By then, of course, the bitter fight over El Mozote had largely been forgotten; Washington had turned its gaze to other places and other things. For most Americans, El Salvador had long since slipped back into obscurity. But El Mozote may well have been the largest massacre in modern Latin-American history. 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.

In the weeks that followed the discovery of the skulls of the children, as each day's work at El Mozote yielded up a fresh harvest, the initial numbers came to seem small. But in San Salvador, five hours by road to the west, where President Alfredo Cristiani and the generals and the guerrillas-turned-politicians were struggling with one another about how to put in place, or not put in place, a purge of the officer corps, which was proving to be the most difficult provision of the ten-month-old peace accord — struggling, that is, over what kind of "reconciliation" would come to pass in El Salvador after more than a decade of savage war — the first skulls of the children were enough to provoke a poisonous controversy. Those twenty-three skulls, and the nearly one hundred more that were uncovered in the succeeding days, were accommodated by the nascent Salvadoran body politic in two ways. Members of human-rights groups (those members, that is, who had survived the war), along with the politicians of the left (many of whom had been guerrillas shortly before), hailed the discovery as definitive evidence that a matanza — a great killing — had taken place in Morazán, and that what they had been saying for eleven years had at last been proved true. Members of the government, on the other hand, and various military officers found themselves forced to concede that something had indeed happened in Morazán, but they insisted that the situation was more complicated than it appeared. Dr. Juan Mateu Llort, the director of El Salvador's Institute of Forensic Medicine, declared that the skulls themselves proved nothing, for "there were an abundance of armed children in the guerrillas." El Diario de Hoy, an influential right-wing daily, published a reconstruction according to which guerrillas had "barricaded themselves in what seemed to have been a religious center and from there opened fire on the troops, making the deaths of children, women and old people possible." President Cristiani's government, already under attack for stalling in the dismissal of senior officers, maintained its position that no records existed of any Army operation in Morazán in early December of 1981.

And yet on the ninth day of that month any reader of La Prensa Gráfica, one of San Salvador's major dailies, could have learned that "all the highways with access to Gotera and the other towns in the Department of Morazán are under strict military control ... No vehicles or individuals are permitted to enter the zones of conflict in order to avoid accidents or misunderstandings ... Neither was the entry of journalists or individuals permitted." The Department of Morazán had been sealed off from the rest of the country. Four thousand men, drawn from the security forces — the National Guard and the Treasury Police — and from regular units of the Salvadoran Army, were hard at work. The area north of the Torola River, the heart of the red zone, was alive with the thud of mortars, the clatter of small-arms fire, and the intermittent roar of helicopters. Two days before, Operaci?n Rescate — Operation Rescue — had begun.

Many of the towns and villages were already empty; during and after Army operations of the previous spring and fall, thousands of peasants had left their homes and begun a long trek over the mountains to the Honduran border and refugee camps beyond. Of those who remained, many made it a practice, at the first sign of any Army approach, to leave their villages and hide in the caves and ravines and gullies that honeycombed the mountainous region. But El Mozote was crowded; in the days before Operation Rescue, people from the outlying areas had flooded into the hamlet.

"Many people were passing by the house, saying, 'Come on, let's go to El Mozote,' " an old peasant named Sebastiano Luna told me as he stood behind the yellow tape, watching the experts bent low over the brown earth of the sacristy of Santa Catarina. Between their feet lay an expanse of dark rubble, a miniature landscape of hills and ridges and valleys in every shade of brown. It took a moment or two to distinguish, among the dirty-brown hillocks, the skulls and parts of skulls, each marked with a bit of red tape and a number; and, beneath the skulls and skull fragments and the earthen rubble, scores of small brown bundles, heaped one on top of another, twisted together, the material so impregnated with blood and soil that it could no longer be recognized as clothing.

Amid the rubble in the northeast corner of the tiny room that had been called el convento (though it was really a kind of combined sacristy and parish house, in which an itinerant priest, when he visited the hamlet, would vest himself, and sometimes, perhaps, stay the night), a dark-haired young woman in denim overalls was kneeling. She slowly drew a small bundle toward her — it had beenlabelled No. 59 — and began, with almost agonizing gentleness, extracting the brown bits and placing them on a sheet of cardboard. "Left tibia, fragments only," she sang out in a low monotone. "Vertebrae, one, two, three ... six of them ... Tibia, left, I think ... Metacarpals ..."

Now she disentangled the bits of ruined fabric: "Belt of brown leather, metal buckle ... Pants, light in color, with patches of blue and green color in the posterior part ... In the pants pocket ... ah ... um ..." The strong voice took an odd slide downward and stopped. Over her shoulder, I saw her staring at something in her palm, then heard her swear in a low voice: "Hijo de puta!" She turned and opened her hand to reveal a tiny figure: a little horse of bright-orange plastic. No. 59 had been a lucky child, had had a family prosperous enough to provide a lucky toy.

After a moment, the anthropologist Mercedes Doretti said, "Ordinarily, we could use this for identification. I mean, even after eleven years, any mother would recognize this as her kid's, you know?" She looked back at No. 59 and then at the brown rubble. "But here, here they killed all the mothers, too."

Behind the yellow tape, Sebastiano Luna and his wife, Alba Ignacia del Cid, stood silent amid a knot of peasants, watching. They had walked from their small house, several miles outside El Mozote, where the dirt track joins the black road. Eleven years before, in early December, scores of people were passing by their house, pulling their children along by the hand, laboring under the weight of their belongings. "Come with us!" they had called out to the old couple. "Come with us to El Mozote!"

The afternoon before, the people of El Mozote had gathered, some fifty yards from the church, in front of the general store of Marcos Díaz, the richest man in town. He had summoned the townspeople, neighbors and customers all, and when they had assembled — perhaps a couple of hundred of them, the men in caps and straw hats and the women in bright-colored skirts, holding children in their arms — Marcos Díaz addressed them from his doorway. He had just come up the mountain from his regular buying trip to San Miguel, he said, and as he was waiting at the checkpoint in Gotera, at the entrance to the red zone, an officer in the town had greeted him — Marcos Díaz, an important man, had friends among the officers — and then pulled him aside for a little talk. Díaz would do well to stock up, the officer said, for soon the Army would launch a large operation in Morazán, and "nothing and no one" would be permitted to enter or leave the zone. But his friend Díaz needn't worry, the officer assured him. The people of El Mozote would have no problems — provided they stayed where they were.

In the street that day, these words of Marcos Díaz's set off a debate. Some townspeople wanted to head for the mountains immediately, for the war had lately been coming closer to the hamlet; only the week before, a plane had dropped two bombs near El Mozote, damaging its one-room school, and though no one had been hurt, the people had been terrified. "A lot of people wanted to leave — there was a lot of fear," Rufina Amaya said when I visited her a year ago. "And a few people did leave. My godfather left, with his family. My children were crying. They said, 'Mama, let's go.' " But Marcos Díaz, a man of influence, had put his prestige on the line, and he insisted that his neighbors would be safe only if they stayed in their homes — that if they left the hamlet they and their families risked being caught up in the operation. "That was the lie," Rufina Amaya told me. "That was the betrayal. Otherwise, people would have left." In the end, Marcos Díaz's prestige decided the issue. Though the debate went on that afternoon and into the following morning, most of the people of El Mozote finally accepted his assurances.

They had seen soldiers before, after all; soldiers often passed through on patrol and sometimes bought supplies in El Mozote. Only the month before, soldiers had come during an operation and occupied El Chingo and La Cruz, two hills overlooking the town, and though the people of El Mozote could hear mortars and scattered shooting in the distance, the soldiers had not bothered them. In the crazy-quilt map of northern Morazán in 1981, where villages "belonged" to the government or to the guerrillas or to neither or both, where the officers saw the towns and hamlets in varying shades of pink and red, El Mozote had not been known as a guerrilla town. "The Army spent a lot of time around here," Rufina told me. "We all sold them food. If the soldiers were looking to find guerrillas, that was fine with us, because we didn't have anything to do with them. And the guerrillas knew about our relations with the Army."



The guerrillas knew, the soldiers knew: northern Morazán during the early eighties was a very small world, in which identity, or the perception of identity, often meant the difference between living and dying. That El Mozote in late 1981 was not a guerrilla town is a fact central to Rufina's story and lies at the heart of the mystery of what happened there; and though it is a fact — one that almost everyone from the zone affirms — it seems to have nonetheless been a slightly more complicated fact than Rufina makes out. As in many other communities in northern Morazán, the people of El Mozote were struggling to keep their balance in the middle of the perilously shifting ground of a brutal war — were working hard to remain on friendly terms with the soldiers while fearing to alienate the guerrillas. Joaqu?n Villalobos, who was the leading comandante of the People's Revolutionary Army (or E.R.P.), the dominant guerrilla group in Morazán, told me flatly during an interview last year in his headquarters in San Salvador that the people of El Mozote "would not support us" — only to concede twenty minutes later that his fighters had, at least on some occasions, bought supplies in the hamlet. "They had the lowest level of relationship with us — only the very slightest commercial one," Villalobos said. Licho, a rebel commander who had grown up in Jocoaitique, a few miles from El Mozote, acknowledged to me during an interview in Perqu?n that in the late seventies "some from El Mozote had been our supporters," but that long before 1981 these supporters "had come along with us, they were with us." He added quickly, "The people who were still in El Mozote were afraid of us."

But the reason, apparently, was not only their fear — the frank terror that many villagers in the zone felt about exposing themselves to Army retribution — but their ideology. The guerrillas' support in Morazán had grown largely in soil made fertile by the work of Catholic liberation theology, but El Mozote had been uniquely unreceptive to such blandishments, for the hamlet was a stronghold of the Protestant evangelical movement. People had begun to convert as early as the mid-sixties, and by 1980 it is likely that half or more of the people in El Mozote considered themselves born-again Christians; the evangelicals had their own chapel and their own pastor, and they were known — as were born-again Christians throughout Central America — for their anti-Communism. "Everyone knew there were many evangelicals in El Mozote, and these people wouldn't support us," Licho told me. "Sometimes they sold us things, yes, but they didn't want anything to do with us."

So, unlike many other hamlets of Morazán, El Mozote was a place where the guerrillas had learned not to look for recruits; instead, a delicate coexistence had been forged — an unstated agreement by both parties to look the other way. The guerrillas passed by El Mozote only at night, and when they did, Rufina says, "the people would hear the dogs barking and they'd be afraid." She remembers seeing guerrillas only once in daylight: a few ragged young people, unarmed and wearing civilian clothes, had come into the hamlet and tried to hold a meeting in the tiny church of Santa Catarina. Rufina didn't attend, nor did most of the other townspeople. "I remember people saying, 'Don't get involved. Let's just live and work and not get involved.' People just didn't want anything to do with it. I had four children to look after. You're worrying about feeding your family, and you try not to pay attention to these other things."

And so when Marcos Díaz brought his news from Gotera, when he conveyed the strong words of the officer and presented the choice as one of leaving the town and risking "getting involved" in the operation or of staying put and remaining safe, there was never much doubt about what the people of El Mozote would in the end decide. That very afternoon, at Marcos Díaz's urging, people began fanning out from the hamlet into the outlying districts to spread the word that one and all should come to El Mozote, and quickly, for only there would they be protected. Marcos Díaz helped matters along by letting it be known that he would offer on credit as much food and other supplies as the newcomers needed. Peasants poured into the hamlet, occupying every bit of space. "All the rooms in Marcos Díaz's house were filled with people," Rufina recalls. "Every house had people staying there from outside." Even the common in front of the church was crowded with people, for the few houses could not accommodate them all.

" 'Come to El Mozote' — that's what everyone was saying," the old peasant Sebastiano Luna told me. He and Alba Ignacia del Cid had stood in front of their house, had watched the people pass. But they had decided not to go. "I had half an idea something bad might happen," Sebastiano said. "So I told her" — nodding to his wife — " 'You, you go if you want to. I'm staying.' " "And I," said Alba, "I said, 'No, no, I won't go without you, because they'll ask me where my husband is. They'll say he's not here because he's a guerrilla and then they'll kill me. Either we both go or we both stay.' " So Sebastiano and Alba hid in the mountains above their house. They saw soldiers pass by, and saw a helicopter hover and descend. And later they saw thick columns of smoke rising from El Mozote, and smelled the odor of what seemed like tons of roasting meat.

Four miles south of El Mozote, outside the hamlet of La Guacamaya, the guerrillas of the People's Revolutionary Army also awaited the soldiers. From their agents in the capital, they knew that large shipments of American munitions had been arriving at Ilopango Airport, and that truckloads of troops had begun moving along the Pan-American Highway toward Morazán. On December 1st, Jonás, the most powerful comandante in the zone, had pulled aside Santiago, the director of the E.R.P.'s clandestine Radio Venceremos, and informed him that "an operation of great breadth, named Yunque y Martillo" — Hammer and Anvil — was being planned. Santiago recalls that "intelligence sources within the Army itself" had passed on a report of a key meeting at the High Command. According to the source's reconstruction, the Minister of Defense, Colonel José Guillermo García, declared to his officers that Operation Rescue must "wrest the offensive from the F.M.L.N." — the guerrilla umbrella group, of which the E.R.P. was one of five members. His Vice-Minister, Colonel Francisco Adolfo Castillo, added that the troops "must advance no matter what the cost until we reach the command post and Radio Venceremos." Then Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa Barrios, the dynamic commander of the élite Atlacatl Battalion, broke in, agreeing wholeheartedly that "so long as we don't finish off this Radio Venceremos, we'll always have a scorpion up our ass."

Colonel Monterrosa, who at the time was the most celebrated field commander in the Salvadoran Army, was well known to have an obsession with Radio Venceremos. He was not alone: the station, which specialized in ideological propaganda, acerbic commentary, and pointed ridicule of the government, infuriated most officers, for its every broadcast reminded the world of the Army's impotence in much of Morazán. Even worse, the radio managed to be funny. "They actually acted out this daytime serial, like a soap opera, with Ambassador Hinton in it," a United States defense attaché of the time recalls. "They'd call the Ambassador 'this gringo who is marrying a Salvadoran woman' " — Deane Hinton was about to marry a woman from one of the country's wealthy families — "and at the end they'd say, 'Tune in again tomorrow.' And you couldn't do anything about it. Most people at the Embassy, including the Ambassador, wanted to hear it." The mortified Salvadoran officers maintained that the broadcasts originated in Nicaragua or Honduras.

Colonel Monterrosa was mortified by Radio Venceremos as well, but, unlike his colleagues, he had determined, in his rage and frustration, to do something about it. For Monterrosa, as American military advisers had come to realize, was a very different kind of Salvadoran officer. By late 1981, with Congress and the American public having shown themselves resolutely opposed to dispatching American combat forces to Central America, it had become quite clear that the only way to prevent "another Nicaragua" was somehow to "reform" the Salvadoran Army. "We were on our last legs," an American military adviser who was in the country at the time told me. "We had to reform or we were going to lose. And it wasn't because the guerrillas were so good; it was because the Army was so bad." Salvadoran troops were sent into the field virtually untrained, soldiers rarely left the barracks after five o'clock in the afternoon, and officers rarely left the barracks at all. "The institution simply did not support people being good commanders," this adviser said. "I mean, who ever got relieved? You could surrender with eighty-five men and nothing at all would happen to you."

As the Americans soon realized, however, "reform" meant remaking an officer corps that had developed its own, very special criteria for advancement and reward. These had to do not with military competence but with politics: with showing unstinting loyalty to "the institution" and, above all, to one's military-academy class — one's tanda, as it was called. A hundred teen-age boys might enter the Gerardo Barrios Military Academy, and from their number perhaps twenty toughened, hardened men would emerge four years later; throughout the next quarter century, these men would be promoted together, would become rich together, and would gradually gain power together. If among them there proved to be embarrassing incompetents, not to mention murderers and rapists and thieves, then these men were shielded by their classmates, and defended ferociously. Finally, perhaps two decades after graduation, one or two from the tanda — those who had stood out early on as presidenciables, as destined to become leaders of the country — would lobby within the officer corps to become the President of El Salvador.

Monterrosa had graduated in 1963, and though the records show him fourth in his class of nineteen, it is a testament to the respect he inspired that many officers now remember him as first. In the academy, he was a magnetic figure, charismatic from the start. Short, with the simple face and large nose of a Salvadoran peasant, he walked with the peasant's long, loping stride, which made his distinctly nonmartial figure recognizable from far off. General Adolfo Blandón, a former chief of staff, who was in his last year in the academy when Monterrosa was in his first, recalls that the young man "established himself immediately as the best in his class — the top rank in studies, physical conditioning, knowledge of the concepts of war."

Normally, of course, such prestige, such respect from his colleagues, would brand him presidenciable. But, unlike his fellows, Monterrosa was, as Blandón puts it, "that rare thing: a pure, one- hundred-per-cent soldier, a natural leader, a born military man with the rare quality of being able to instill loyalty in his men."

In the years after his graduation, Monterrosa taught at the academy, took courses from the Americans in Panama, travelled to Taiwan to study anti-Communist counter-insurgency tactics, and served in the paratroops as part of El Salvador's first free-fall team. After the controversial elections of 1972, in which a hard-line faction of the military stole the ballot from what looked to be a winning Christian Democratic ticket, led by San Salvador's Mayor José Napoleón Duarte, Monterrosa grew close to the new military President, Colonel Arturo Molina.

In the Army at this time, the key focus was on politics, and the struggle over El Salvador's stunted political development increasingly split the country, and the officer corps. By the late seventies, after Molina had given place to General Carlos Humberto Romero, in another dubious election, the situation had become even more polarized. On the far left, several tiny guerrilla groups were kidnapping businessmen, robbing banks, and, on occasion, assassinating prominent rightist leaders. Activists on the moderate left, having been denied an electoral path to the Presidential Palace by the Army's habitual ballot tampering, joined populist forces in organizing vast demonstrations, and managed to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. The security forces generally responded to these demonstrations with unflinching violence, shooting down scores, and sometimes hundreds, of Salvadorans.

Within the Salvadoran officer corps, the country's political crisis had reopened a political fault line that had spread apart periodically throughout the century. Back in 1960, a faction of "progressive" officers had staged a coup, but it had been quickly reversed by a conservative counter-coup; in 1972, when Duarte's victory was stolen by conservative officers, the progressives attempted another, with the same result. Finally, in October of 1979, with at least tacit American support, a group of young "reformists" who called themselves the juventud militar — the "military youth" — overthrew General Romero and set in his place a "progressive" junta, which included politicians of the left. As had happened two decades before, however, the conservatives in the Army almost immediately regained the upper hand, and now, under cover of a more internationally acceptable "reformist" government, they felt free to combat the "Communist agitation" in their own particular way — by intensifying the "dirty war" against the left.

The most visible signs of the "dirty war" were mutilated corpses that each morning littered the streets of El Salvador's cities. Sometimes the bodies were headless, or faceless, their features having been obliterated with a shotgun blast or an application of battery acid; sometimes limbs were missing, or hands or feet chopped off, or eyes gouged out; women's genitals were torn and bloody, bespeaking repeated rape; men's were often found severed and stuffed into their mouths. And cut into the flesh of a corpse's back or chest was likely to be the signature of one or another of the "death squads" that had done the work, the most notorious of which were the Union of White Warriors and the Maximiliano Hernández Martínez Brigade.

The latter was named for a general who had taken over the country in 1931, during a time of rising leftist agitation among the peasantry, and had responded the following year with a campaign of repression so ferocious that it came to be known simply as La Matanza. Throughout the western part of the country, where an abortive rebellion had been centered, members of the National Guard, along with civilian irregulars, lined peasants up against a wall and shot them. Before the purge was over, they had murdered well over ten thousand people.

Now rightist officers who proudly counted themselves heirs of Martínez determined to root out this new leftist infection with equal thoroughness. Drawing on money from wealthy businessmen who had moved to Miami to avoid kidnapping or assassination, and benefitting from the theoretical guidance of ideological compatriots in neighboring Guatemala, the officers organized and unleashed an efficient campaign of terror in the cities. The campaign intensified dramatically after the "progressive" coup of October, 1979. By the end of the year, monthly estimates of the dead ranged as high as eight hundred.

Against the urban infrastructure of the left — the network of political organizers, labor leaders, human-rights workers, teachers, and activists of all progressive stripes which had put together the enormous demonstrations of the late seventies — this technique proved devastating. "These people weren't organized militarily, which is what made them so easy to kill," William Stanley, a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico, told me in an interview in San Salvador. As the repression went on, month after month, it became less and less discriminating. "By the end, the killing basically outran the intelligence capability of the Army and the security services, and they began killing according to very crude profiles," Stanley said. "I remember, for example, hearing that a big pile of corpses was discovered one morning, and almost all of them turned out to be young women wearing jeans and tennis shoes. Apparently, one of the intelligence people had decided that this 'profile' — you know, young women who dressed in that way — made it easy to separate out 'leftists,' and so that became one of the profiles that they used to round up so-called subversives."

Some civilians were certainly involved, particularly on the funding end, but there can be no doubt that the "dirty war" was basically organized and directed by Salvadoran Army officers — and no doubt, either, that the American Embassy was well aware of it. "There was no secret about who was doing the killing," Howard Lane, the public-affairs officer in the Embassy from 1980 to 1982, told me in an interview. "I mean, you formed that view within forty-eight hours after arriving in the country, and there was no secret at all about it — except, maybe, in the White House." In public, the fiction was resolutely maintained that the identity of the killers was a mystery — that the corpses were the work of "rightist vigilantes." This campaign of lies was designed in part to accommodate the squeamishness of the Administration in Washington, which had to deal with growing concern in Congress about "human-rights violations," particularly after several notorious cases, including the murder, in March of 1980, of Archbishop Oscar Romero while he said Mass; the rape and murder, the following December, of four American churchwomen; and the assassination, in January of 1981, of the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency and two of his American advisers.

On the evening of December 1, 1981, Santiago, the director of Radio Venceremos, after learning from Jonás, the comandante, about the coming operation, set out on foot from the guerrilla base at La Guacamaya, four miles south of El Mozote. As darkness fell, Santiago hiked east over the hills and through the gullies, crossed the Río Sapo, and climbed down into a heavily forested ravine at El Zapotal. Here, dug into a rock niche half a dozen feet underground, was the "studio" of Radio Venceremos, which consisted of a small transmitter, an unwieldy gasoline generator, assorted tape recorders, microphones, and other paraphernalia, and a flexible antenna that snaked its way up through a forest of brush. Santiago gathered his handful of young staff members, and soon news of the coming operation was broadcast throughout the zone.

Back in La Guacamaya, in a rough encampment in the open air, perhaps two hundred young men and women, outfitted in a motley combination of peasant clothing and camouflage garb, were making preparations. Some cleaned their weapons — mostly old M1s and Mausers, along with a few captured American M16s. Many of the women bent over smooth flat stones, grinding corn, making the meal that would serve as the company's fuel during the days ahead — for, confronted with the arrival of thousands of troops, the guerrillas of the E.R.P. were preparing not to fight but to flee.

Mobility and quickness had always been central to the guerrillas' strength, along with their familiarity with the mountain terrain. Like El Salvador's other radical groups, the People's Revolutionary Army had been the brainchild of young urban intellectuals, who had founded the organization in Mexico City in 1972, funded it during the mid-seventies largely by robbing banks and by seizing and ransoming wealthy businessmen, and battled among themselves for its leadership, using high-toned abstract arguments of the left (which more than once deteriorated into violent schism).

"The revolutionary process started in Morazán around 1977 or '78 with the consciousness-raising of Christian 'base communities' led by radical priests," said Licho, the rebel commander, whose parents were campesinos living on the other side of the black road from El Mozote. "We young people would get together and read the Bible and apply it to our own situation, and gradually we became more politically aware." When the young men came of age, the guerrilla leaders often urged them to join the Army — they had urged Licho to do so — in order to receive military training and gain firsthand knowledge of the enemy while providing useful intelligence until they could return to their home provinces to take up arms.

By 1980, small groups of young guerrillas were operating throughout northern Morazán, drawing food and support from sympathetic peasants, and launching raids from time to time against the National Guard posts in the towns. They would attack suddenly, kill a few Guardsmen and capture their weapons, then fade back into the bush. After the posts had been reinforced, the Guardsmen responded, as they had done for years, by beating or killing peasants they suspected of having been "infected" with Communist sympathies. This quickened the flow of able-bodied men and women into the mountains. Soon some villages were inhabited almost entirely by old people and mothers and their children. The Guardsmen abandoned some towns completely — in effect, ceding them to the control of the guerrillas. And the people abandoned other towns, either fleeing to the refugee camps beyond the Honduran border or joining the guerrillas, and thus forming, as time went on, a quasi-permanent baggage train of masas, or civilian supporters. "The people who supported us moved around as our rear guard, providing food and other help," Licho told me. "In some areas, our supporters were in the majority, in others not." The distinction between combatants and noncombatants, never very clear in this guerrilla war, was growing cloudier still.

The Salvadoran High Command had become increasingly alarmed by the situation in Morazán. "The military view the situation in the countryside as critical," the United States Ambassador, Frank Devine, wrote in a 1980 cable. "Many feel there are 'liberated' areas where they dare not operate due to the concentration of leftist-terrorist strength."

In January of 1981, the F.M.L.N. proclaimed a "final offensive" — the badly equipped guerrillas hoped to provoke a popular insurrection, as the Sandinistas had done in Nicaragua eighteen months before, and to do it in the days just before Ronald Reagan took power in Washington — but the people did not rise up, and the offensive ended in a costly defeat. After the collapse, hundreds of fighters streamed out of the cities and headed for the mountains. Having failed to overthrow the government, and having seen many of their civilian sympathizers liquidated in the past months by death squads, the guerrillas decided to focus their forces on a full-scale rural insurgency rooted in the northern mountains.

By November, General Fred F. Woerner, whom a worried Pentagon had sent to assess the Salvadoran war, was concluding in a secret report that the situation on the ground had so deteriorated that a primary aim of the Salvadoran Army had now become to "prevent the establishment of an insurgent 'liberated' zone in the Department of Morazán, which could lead to international recognition of the insurgents as a belligerent force." (Three months before, France and Mexico had recognized the F.M.L.N. as "a representative political force.") If the guerrillas were not dislodged from Morazán, the Salvadoran officers feared, they would risk seeing their country split in two.

On December 1, 1981, after Radio Venceremos broadcast word that the Army was coming, people throughout northern Morazán began talking among themselves, arguing, and coming to decisions about what to do next. Hundreds of people assembled outside the guerrilla camp at La Guacamaya, having packed up what tortillas and beans they had, and gathered their children, ready for the hard trek ahead.

On Monday, December 7th, the young men and women of Radio Venceremos began doing what they had practiced many times: rapidly dismantling the components, loading the generator aboard a mule, and hoisting the transmitter, the antenna, and the other equipment on one another's backs. Then they hiked off to join the fighters at La Guacamaya.

Around this time, according to Joaquín Villalobos, representatives of the guerrillas approached El Mozote and attempted to warn the campesinos there. "We always had rear-guard people, political people, behind the lines," he says. "So when the fighting was beginning in the south they advised people in the north to leave the zone." But the people in El Mozote had already made their decision. "Because they had little relation to us, and because they were evangelical, they decided they had little to fear from the Army," Villalobos says. More likely, they had decided, after listening to the words of Marcos Díaz, that the danger would be greater outside the hamlet than within.

"We told them what might happen," Licho says. "But they didn't believe that the Army would do anything to them." Perhaps they regarded the guerrillas' warnings — those who heard them, that is (Rufina, for one, heard nothing) — as attempts at recruitment. As the people of El Mozote well knew, in the view of the Salvadoran Army, to go with the guerrillas was to be a guerrilla.

By Tuesday morning, December 8th, the guerrillas at La Guacamaya could hear the sounds of battle, of mortars and small-arms fire, coming, it seemed, from all directions; they knew by now that perhaps four thousand soldiers had entered the zone, that troops had crossed the Torola and were moving toward them from the south, that others were approaching the Sapo from the east. The only way clear had seemed to be to the north, toward the Honduran border; but, even as the Radio Venceremos announcers were putting out their last broadcast, urging the people of the zone to join the guerrilla columns, the guerrillas heard the helicopters approach and saw them pass overhead, carrying the troops of Domingo Monterrosa's Atlacatl Battalion northward, to the mountain town of Perquín.

To reach Perquín from El Mozote, you turn right on the black road and begin to climb. Soon the grade grows steeper, the tropical brush gives place to mountain pine, and the air lightens and grows fresh. Here and there, a bit of sorghum or corn or maguey pokes out from among the trees, but, increasingly, from the red soil of the mountainside only great white rocks grow. The overpowering fragrance of freshly cut pine announces the hamlet of La Tejera and its sawmill, a low building of unstripped logs surrounded by stacks of new planks. Finally, a sign announces Perquín; the road tilts sharply upward and becomes a street of large cobblestones; and, after a few moments' jolting, the traveller comes upon a dramatically uneven town square, which, despite blasted buildings and damaged streets, remains an oddly beautiful, vaguely otherworldly place. At its heart is a bizarre park, which accommodates many wildly slanting levels of green grass, like lopsided terraces on a cultivated but dilapidated hillside. Bordering the park are a yellow-painted clinic, a rough-hewn little hut, and a remarkable church crowned by a bulbous steeple.

When Colonel Monterrosa set his helicopter down here in December of 1981, he found a town in government hands, but barely. Only four months earlier, in mid-August, the guerrillas had swept out of the surrounding hills and overwhelmed the local National Guard post, killing four men and capturing five. "There were many young ones, but some really old ones, too," children in Perquín told Alma Guillermoprieto, then a stringer for the Washington Post. "There were eight women. Some of them were in uniforms, but most of them wore raggedy clothes, like us. We knew some of them; they were from this town." The guerrillas had spent a week and a half digging defensive trenches, buying corn from the local coöperative, and marching about the streets shouting "Pueblo libre!" and other slogans. When the Air Force began bombing the city, ten days later, the guerrillas swiftly vanished, fading into the mountains and ravines they knew so well, and leaving behind the four dead men, buried in a bomb crater, and also the civilians who had been there all along — the civilians who, after playing host to the guerrillas for ten days, now gazed with all innocence into the faces of the National Guardsmen who had taken the places of their dead comrades.

Colonel Monterrosa had thought long and hard about civilians and guerrilla war, about the necessity of counterinsurgency, about the frustrations of the odd and bloody conflict that the overextended Salvadoran Army had been fighting and losing. When the men of his Atlacatl Battalion touched down in Perquín that Tuesday morning in December, storming from helicopters in a crouch, gripping their helmets tightly against the backwash from the rotors, the officers had in their pockets lists of names to hand to the National Guardsmen. While the Atlacatl captains mustered their troops, the Guardsmen marched off through the town and pounded on doors. They were big men, well fed, and they looked even bigger than they were, outfitted in high black boots and uniforms of heavy greenish-brown cloth, with automatic rifles on their backs, and razor-sharp machetes hanging at their belts.

"In those days, if they came to your house to ask you to come with them to 'do something,' you'd end up dead," a Perquín man whom the Guardsmen visited that morning told me. When he heard the pounding and pulled open the door to find the Guardsmen there glowering down at him — they always glowered, for their business was, and had been since the early days of the century, to induce fear in the countryside and to stamp out rebellion from the moment it revealed itself as a lessening of fear in a campesino's eyes — this man could only try to control his terror as the Guardsmen stared for a moment, then barked, "Hey, we have work to do! Come with us and help us do it!" The man came outside, watched as one of the Guardsmen ran his finger down the list that Monterrosa's men had handed him, then looked up, exchanged glances with his partner, and murmured, "Ya vamos dándole." ("Now let's get started.") The Perquín man knew what that meant — the killing was to begin — and, in a panic, he began to protest, digging an identification card out of his pocket and begging the Guardsmen to look at it carefully. Finally, after a terrible few minutes, he succeeded in convincing these impassive men that the name on the list was not his — that one of the surnames was different.

Nonetheless, the Guardsmen hustled him along the streets with them, and as they moved through town they pounded on other doors and collected other frightened men. Those men numbered ten by the time they reached a field in front of the clinic, which was a blur of unaccustomed activity: helicopters landing and hovering and departing, and, amid the blast and the roar from the rotors, hundreds of men in green moving about, checking weapons, cinching the straps on their packs, and talking among themselves as officers marched back and forth shouting orders. By then, several hundred of the Atlacatl soldiers had stormed off the helicopters, most of them in olive green, and a few in camouflage garb above black jungle boots. On the shoulders of their uniforms they bore, in white or yellow, the figure of an Indian and the word "Atlacatl" (the name of a legendary Indian warrior who had led the fight against the conquistadores). To a practiced eye, they seemed a somewhat different breed from most Salvadoran soldiers — more businesslike, grimmer even — and their equipment was better: they had the latest American M16s, plenty of M60 machine guns, 90-mm. recoilless rifles, and 60- and 81-mm. mortars.

But it wasn't their equipment that made them "the élite, American-trained Atlacatl Battalion" (as press accounts invariably identified them). It was their aggressiveness, their willingness to "do the job": a willingness that the rest of the badly led and badly trained Army generally lacked. In part, perhaps, this aggressiveness was instilled by American trainers — Special Forces personnel, who, beginning in March, had been coming over from Southern Command, in Panama, to show the Salvadoran recruits how to shoot and how to seize positions. Mostly, though, it came from Monterrosa. Among senior field commanders who in many cases, as one lieutenant put it to me, "don't even own fatigues," Monterrosa seemed a soldier of the classic type: aggressive, charismatic, a man who liked nothing better than to get out in the field and fight alongside his troops. The Salvadoran grunts — mostly unlettered peasant boys, many of whom had been pulled from buses or off country roads and pressed into service, having received little training and less regard from their officers — loved Monterrosa for his willingness to get down in the dirt with them and fight. The press loved him, too: not only was he a natural story but he was only too happy to invite reporters to come along with him in his helicopter. And, of course, the Americans loved him as well: Colonel John Cash, a United States military attaché, speaks of "a hot-shot strategist like Monterrosa, whom I'd put up against any American hot shot."

As the war moved decisively to the countryside, the American government was no longer able to deny that it had a major problem on its hands. The Salvadoran officers were showing themselves utterly incapable of fighting a war of rural counter-insurgency. Not only was the Army, with a total of thirteen thousand men facing perhaps a third that many guerrillas, terribly overstretched, but its officer corps was burdened by a byzantine political structure and a perverse system of anti-incentives. The most important commands from the military point of view were from the point of view of most Salvadoran officers the least desirable, and the result was that those posts tended to be assigned to the politically least powerful, and often least talented, members of the officer corps. "The guys in the real combat commands tended to be the total incompetents," Todd Greentree, who was a junior reporting officer in the United States Embassy at the time, told me. "These guys would be sent out there to the end of the line, and they'd spend their days drinking in the cuartel."

Embassy officials recommended, cajoled, and finally urged reassignments, but changes, when they came at all, came only after enormous effort. The explanation was not just the superior political and economic power of the right wing of the officer corps but the fact that the tanda system, in which classmates, no matter what their failings, were fiercely protected, appeared nearly impervious to outside pressure — including pressure from the Americans, who were now pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the country. As the officers understood only too quickly, the ultimate sanction that the Americans could brandish — turning off the aid spigot — threatened to hurt the Americans themselves as much as it would hurt the Salvadorans, since the American fear of a Communist El Salvador taking its place alongside Sandinista Nicaragua had become overriding. Even during the final months of the Carter Administration, this underlying reality became embarrassingly evident, when President Carter, after cutting off aid in response to the murder of the American churchwomen, rushed to restore it only a few weeks later, in the face of the rebels' "final offensive."

Ronald Reagan did not suffer from the same ambivalence. By the fall of 1981, Reagan had removed the outspoken American Ambassador, Robert White; had vowed, through Secretary of State Alexander Haig, to "draw the line" in El Salvador against Communist subversion in the hemisphere; had almost doubled economic aid for El Salvador, to a hundred and forty-four million dollars, and increased military aid, from twenty-six million dollars to more than thirty-five million; and, in November, had begun funding the Nicaraguan Contra fighters as a proxy force against the Sandinista government. By late 1981, the priorities of American policy in El Salvador had become unmistakable.

The Americans had stepped forward to fund the war, but they were unwilling to fight it; it would be left to the Salvadorans to defeat the guerrillas. "The guerrilla always carries his masas into battle with him" was a famous Army saying of the era, a piece of received wisdom from that darkest period of the Salvadoran civil war, and its author was Colonel Monterrosa himself. It was intended not only as a statement of fact but as a general affirmation of principle: in this bloody war, in the red zones, there was really no such thing as a civilian.

A large professional Army would have reoccupied territory and sent out aggressive patrols, all the while doing "political work" in the countryside to regain the loyalty of the people. Indeed, that was part of the rationale behind the search-and-destroy operations. "There are a lot of different names for counter-guerrilla fighting," Colonel Castillo, then the Vice-Minister of Defense, told me in an interview. "Whether they call it Hammer and Anvil, or the Piston, or something else, it's all the same idea — to try to expel the guerrillas from the zone. After we managed to expel them, they would lose the support of all the people they had indoctrinated."

But in those days, Castillo conceded, the Army "didn't have enough equipment or forces to maintain operations there for a long enough time." The result was that the Army would enter a zone in force; the guerrillas, after a few minor engagements, would flee; and the soldiers, after killing a number of supposed "subversives" (civilians who may or may not have been guerrilla supporters but hadn't been quick enough, or smart enough, to get out of the way), would evacuate the zone, leaving a token force behind — which the guerrillas, when they flowed back in a few days later, would maul and expel.

The Army's tactic was not effective, and it made for great frustration. "When I arrived here, in June of 1982, the Salvadoran officers used to brag to me that they didn't take prisoners," Colonel Cash, the military attaché, said. "They said, 'We don't want to dignify them by taking prisoners.' They wouldn't even call them prisoners, or guerrillas. They called them terroristas — delincuentes terroristas." (General Blandón, the former chief of staff, told me, "Before 1983, we never took prisoners of war.") As the guerrillas were reduced to the status of terrorist delinquents, all civilians in certain zones were reduced to the status of masas, guerrilla supporters, and thus became legitimate targets. North of the Torola, for example, it was believed that the civilians and the guerrillas were all mixed together, and were indistinguishable.

By late 1980, the Army had begun the tactic that William Stanley, the political-science professor, refers to as "killing by zone." One of the first such operations took place in October, and began with a staff meeting in Perquín. "Colonel Castillo explained that it was necessary to stop the Communist revolution — that it was necessary to make an example of this place, so we wouldn't have the same problems in other parts of the country," an officer who had been present at the meeting told me. "He said we must take into account that the great majority of the people here are guerrillas. So the idea was to surround them all, to create this 'hammer and anvil' thing, push all the people down to Villa El Rosario, where a huge artillery barrage would be unleashed. The city would be totally destroyed. We were going to make an example of these people." The brutality of this operation provoked the first major exodus from Morazán, as entire populations fled their villages for the refugee camps in Gotera, or for the camps over the border in Honduras.

Despite the Army's success in taking away the water, however, the fish continued to multiply and grow stronger. In November of 1980, a month after the Villa El Rosario operation, the guerrillas began to receive the first of a number of shipments of small arms from the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua — "a mixture of fals, M16s, and Uzis," according to Stanley. After the collapse of the "final offensive," in January, the guerrillas also benefitted from a fresh infusion of manpower, including not only the fighters who had fled the cities but a number of important deserters from the Army.

In front of the Perquín health clinic that Tuesday in early December, amid the backwash from the helicopters, the men of the Atlacatl mustered and made ready. The National Guardsmen, who by this time had collected the ten villagers, pushed their reluctant charges forward through the troops until they reached a tall, green-eyed officer in combat fatigues, who was striding about amid the commotion, pointing here and there and issuing orders. One of the Perquín men, who had served in the Army several years before, recognized the officer as Major Natividad de Jesús Cáceres Cabrera, a legendary figure: sixth in his academy class, a born-again Christian, a fanatical anti-Communist, and now the executive officer of the Atlacatl Battalion. (Later, his legend grew: as a colonel in command of Chalatenango in 1986, he forced all the residents of that substantial city to "express their desire for peace ... their purity, their soul, and also their cleanliness" by painting the entire city white; and in 1989, on a Salvadoran highway, Cáceres ordered his men to block the convoy of the American Ambassador, William Walker, and, when the Ambassador refused to emerge and offer proof of his identity, threatened to blow up his limousine with antitank weapons.)

On that Tuesday, Major Cáceres looked over the ten men and gestured to five captains who were organizing the companies under their command. "He put two of us with each company," one of the Perquín men told me, "and he said, 'We want you to come with us, to show us the area.' " They had been brought there to serve as guides for the Atlacatl.

Major Cáceres gathered the captains together, gave them pseudonyms to be used over the radio during the operation — he himself would be known as Charlie — and issued a few orders. Then the five companies of the Atlacatl moved out, down the mountainside. Everywhere, above the roar of the helicopters, could be heard the thud of mortars and the booming of artillery. "It was a huge operation," the guide from Perquín told me. "There were helicopters and planes and heavy equipment and troops all through the mountains, and they even had animals to cart along some of the guns and ammunition."

As the Atlacatl men set off south from Perquín, hundreds of other soldiers were moving steadily north. Having been deployed as a blocking force along the Torola and Sapo Rivers, to the south and east, and along the black road, to the west, they were now tightening the circle. These units, the hammer of the operation, were meant to push all the guerrillas in the zone up toward the anvil of the Atlacatl and crush them against the best troops the Army had to offer. But, as a lieutenant involved in the operation remarked to me, "you take troops from all over the country and move them up to Morazán in about ninety truckloads, right along the Pan-American Highway — I mean, you think somebody might notice?"

As Monterrosa's men circled the hills below Perquín, the guerrillas of the People's Revolutionary Army, far to the south, at La Guacamaya, completed their preparations. Confronted with a heavy force blocking the river to the south, and the Atlacatl moving down from the north, the guerrillas would break straight west, punching their way through the military's lines at the black road. That night, some of their train started the trek: long columns of peasants, their belongings, food, and young children bundled on their backs, trudged single file through the mountains, flowing in a vast nocturnal exodus that would carry them over the mountains to the Honduran border.

On the morning of Wednesday, December 9th, while thick mist still carpeted the valleys, the men of the Third Company of the Atlacatl rose in their encampment on a hill called El Gigante, broke camp, and circled back toward the black road. In the hamlet of La Tejera that afternoon, they seized three civilians, two youths and an old man of eighty or more, hustled them along to a field not far from the sawmill, and began interrogating them "very strongly, very brutally," according to the guide from Perquín. The officers accused the men of being guerrillas, demanded to be given the names of their comrades, to be told where they had hidden their weapons. When the men denied the charges, Major Cáceres declared that they would be executed; the killing, he said, would begin here. But then a farmer from the area came forward. The two youths worked for him, he told the Major, and he protested vigorously that they had nothing to do with the guerrillas. One of the guides vouched for them as well, and after a prolonged dispute the men were spared.

This argument over identity, over who was a guerrilla and who wasn't and what constituted evidence one way or the other, would recur during the next two days. Already in La Tejera, officers disagreed about whether the men should have been spared; according to the guide, Captain Walter Oswaldo Salazar, the company commander, reacted angrily when he was told of a comment from another officer that the local people should be treated with respect unless there was evidence that they were guerrillas. "Salazar said, 'No, these are all guerrillas,' " the guide said. "He said the soldiers could go ahead and kill any of them, or all of them." Later that day, according to the guide, Captain Salazar let slip his suspicion that the other officer was in fact a guerrilla himself, and vowed to assassinate him.

This wasn't simply paranoia. "We had tremendous infiltration in the Army at that time," the lieutenant involved in the operation told me. "We knew that certain sales of arms were going to these people, that information was being leaked — all our operations, all our movements, were being leaked." The overwhelming suspicion that this engendered, together with the growing panic among the officers about the deterioration in the government position, gave the hardest-line officers a decisive upper hand.

"The hard-core guys there really did believe that it was a virus, an infection," Todd Greentree said. "They'd always say 'a cancer' — you know, 'Communism is a cancer.' And so if you're a guerrilla they don't just kill you, they kill your cousin, you know, everybody in the family, to make sure the cancer is cut out."

These officers, of course, had Salvadoran history on their side. "They had a 'kill the seed' mentality," Professor Stanley told me. "After all, what happened in 1932? To this day, when someone wants to make a threat here, why do they invoke the name of Martínez?" — the author of the Matanza. "Because he is an icon, that's why. The idea of going out to the zones and killing everyone is not a new idea. It's a proved idea."

Putting that proved idea into practice would become the mission of the Atlacatl Battalion. Hoping to insure that at least one unit of the Salvadoran Army was adequately prepared to fight, the Americans sent Special Forces instructors in early 1981 to train the first recruits of the new Immediate Reaction Infantry Battalion (biri). Yet, as the American advisers well knew, the epithet of "élite, American-trained" that was hung on the Atlacatl by the press was a bit of a joke. "They had no specialized training," one of the original Special Forces trainers told me. "They had basic individualized training — you know, basic shooting, marksmanship, squad tactics. I mean, the difference was that the Salvadorans basically had no trained units in the country, so this was going to be a unit that would be trained."

Some officials in the Embassy and the Pentagon had wanted the entire unit to be trained in the United States — and, indeed, later in the year recruits for the second of the biris, the Belloso, would be flown en masse to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. But the Atlacatl had something the Belloso didn't: it had Monterrosa. "That the battalion wasn't sent to the United States but was trained by Monterrosa here was in large part a testament to his authority," a contemporary of Monterrosa's told me. "The High Command had been preparing him, grooming him. He had taken all the courses the Americans offered, including those for the paratroopers and the commandos. His ambition became very concrete around the time the Americans decided to direct a major counter-insurgency effort here. When the Atlacatl came along, he jumped at it."

From the beginning, Monterrosa worked to give his new force a mística — a mystique. "They shot animals and smeared the blood all over their faces, they slit open the animals' bellies and drank the blood," a lieutenant in another unit told me. "They were a hell of a raunchy unit. They had no discipline of fire, none at all. I mean, they saw something moving out there, they shot it — deer, pigs, whatever. You'd be out there in the field trying to sleep, and all night those assholes would keep shooting at things." According to one reporter, the men of the Atlacatl celebrated their graduation by collecting all the dead animals they could find off the roads — dogs, vultures, anything — boiling them together into a bloody soup, and chugging it down. Then they stood at rigid attention and sang, full-throated, the unit's theme song, "Somos Guerreros":

We are warriors!
Warriors all!
We are going forth to kill A mountain of terrorists!

By the fall of 1981, the Atlacatl was well on its way to building that mountain. The pattern of its operations had become well known: units of the regular Army and the security forces would move into place along the border of one of the red zones, walling it off, with the help, very often, of a natural barrier, like a river or a mountain range. Then a blocking force would invade the zone, pushing before it everyone and everything living. Finally, the helicopters would sweep in, and the men of the Atlacatl would storm out, bombard all whom the trap had snared with artillery and mortar fire, and then with small arms.

It was the strategy of "draining the sea," or, as Monterrosa was heard to describe it on occasion, of La Limpieza — the Cleanup. Those parts of El Salvador "infected" by Communism were being ruthlessly scrubbed; the cancer would be cut out, even if healthy flesh had to be lost, too. "El Mozote was in a place, in a zone, that was one hundred per cent controlled by the guerrillas," one of the original American advisers with the Atlacatl told me. "You try to dry those areas up. You know you're not going to be able to work with the civilian population up there, you're never going to get a permanent base there. So you just decide to kill everybody. That'll scare everybody else out of the zone. It's done more out of frustration than anything else."

Joaquín Villalobos, the E.R.P. comandante, freely conceded to me in an interview that in a number of the most notorious operations, both before and after El Mozote, many of the civilians killed were in fact sympathetic to the guerrillas. "In San Vicente in 1982, for example, the massacre at El Calabozo that involved more than two hundred people," he said. "This was a situation where the Army was stronger, where our guerrilla force was too weak to protect our followers. We simply weren't able to provide those people sufficient military protection. It was the same in 1980 at the Sumpul River in Chalatenango, where a group of our sympathizers were fleeing, trying to cross the river." The guerrillas, benefitting from very good intelligence and excellent mobility, generally managed to escape from the zones ahead of the Army; it was their supporters, and any other civilians who happened to be there, who took the punishment.

In the case of many of the massacres during the early eighties, then, the Salvadoran Army was managing to do what it set out to do: killing Salvadorans who were sympathetic to the insurgents. However blatantly this behavior violated the rules of war — however infamous it was to murder men, women, and children en masse, without trial or investigation, simply because of the political sympathies of some of their number — the strategy did at least have some rationale. Even against this grim background, El Mozote stands out. "El Mozote was a town that was not militant," Villalobos said. "That's why what happened at El Mozote was special."

Sometime during the incident at La Tejera that Wednesday afternoon, word came over the radio that the First Company of the Atlacatl had engaged the guerrillas. "There was an exchange of fire, an armed confrontation," the guide says. But, like so much else in this story, the battle — its intensity, even its precise location — has become a matter of fierce dispute. From the start, the Salvadoran military claimed that the fighting took place at El Mozote itself. On December 17th, a C.I.A. officer cabled from San Salvador that "the heaviest fighting had occurred at El Mozote ... where 30 to 35 insurgents and four Salvadoran soldiers were killed."

It is impossible to know for sure, but from the context of the cable it seems very probable that the C.I.A. man's information came, one way or another, from the Salvadoran Army. The guide, on the other hand, who was a few miles away and heard the report on the fighting as it came over the Atlacatl radio, places it "around Arambala. It was a little skirmish," he told me, "and it happened at El Portillón, near Arambala — a little over a mile from El Mozote."

Villalobos, who appears to remember the operation in great detail, also insists that the fighting took place at Arambala, which "was in effect our rear guard," he said. "Although most of the serious fighting took place south of us, along the Torola, there was a minor level of fighting, including maybe a little mortar fire, near Arambala." He went on to say, "It's normal when you displace a large force to leave small units to protect the retreat and keep up resistance." Guerrilla squads around Arambala, north of La Guacamaya, were in a perfect position to protect the flank of the main guerrilla force as it retreated west.

Santiago, who was still in La Guacamaya, readying his Radio Venceremos crew for that night's retreat, describes how "the pressure of the enemy was growing in his north-south advance." On that day, he writes in his memoirs, "the comrades of the Fourth Section took by assault a position of the Atlacatl Battalion and captured two rifles" — a plausible number in view of the four dead that the Salvadoran Army apparently acknowledged. But Santiago makes no mention of the "30 to 35 insurgents" killed that are claimed in the C.I.A. cable, and neither, so far as I know, does any other guerrilla memoir. This would have been a very large number of dead; the fact that no one mentions them, and the fact that, in the wake of this fighting, the guerrillas did indeed manage, as Santiago recounts, to "maintain the lines of fire and organize the movement to break the circle and make a joke of Monterrosa's hammer blow" — these two facts lead one to wonder whether the officers, in providing their reports to their own superiors (and possibly to the C.I.A.), had created a victory at El Mozote from what was in fact a defeat at Arambala.

The officers would have been especially reluctant to admit a defeat at the hands of the Fourth Section. An élite guerrilla unit, it had been trained, in large part, by Captain Francisco Emilio Mena Sandoval, an Army officer who had deserted to the guerrillas the previous January. Salvadoran officers had developed a deep hatred for Mena Sandoval, regarding him and others like him as much more despicable forms of life than, say, Villalobos: in their eyes, the latter was merely a delinquent terrorist, whereas officers like Mena Sandoval were traitors. And, as it happened, the officers and men of the Atlacatl had a special reason not only to hate Mena Sandoval but to remember with the greatest distaste the town of Arambala and also the hamlet of El Mozote, just down the road.

It was near Arambala, eight months earlier, that the first unit of the brash new Atlacatl had ventured forth to show the guerrillas, and the rest of the Army, what it was made of; and it was there that, to the embarrassment of its officers and men, the highly touted new unit suffered a humiliating defeat — in large part because Captain Mena Sandoval had had the foresight to steal an Army radio when he came over to the guerrillas. Thanks to the radio and Mena Sandoval's knowledge of the enemy's codes, the rebels were able to keep one crucial step ahead of their opponents. "We defended one line on the outskirts of El Mozote, which the enemy was unable to take for many days," Mena Sandoval writes in his memoirs. "Their cost in casualties kept growing, as did our morale. It had been twelve days of combat and we had almost no casualties."

Finally, after twenty-two days of intense fighting, the guerrillas slipped away across the black road under cover of night. As for the Atlacatl, news of its poor performance spread quickly through the Army. Soon officers and soldiers began passing on a little joke. The Atlacatl's designation as a biri, they said, stood not for Immediate Reaction Infantry Battalion, as everyone had thought, but for Immediate Retreat Infantry Battalion. This kind of needling would likely have assured that, eight months later, many officers and soldiers in the Atlacatl would have retained vivid memories of Arambala and El Mozote.

Now, after the initial engagement on Wednesday, according to the guide, "we heard by radio that the other company killed people there." Under the gaze of Major Cáceres, who was then with the First Company, the troops entered the town of Arambala, brought out the people who had remained there, and assembled them in the plaza. They led the women and children to the church and locked them inside. Then the troops ordered the men to lie face down on the ground, whereupon they bound them, blindfolded them, and began to beat them, demanding information about the guerrillas. A number of men — the guide believes as many as twenty (and his estimate agrees with the figure given in a detailed analysis of the operation in and around El Mozote by Tutela Legal, the San Salvador Archbishopric's human-rights office, in November, 1991), though other estimates range as low as three — were taken from the assembly, led away, and executed.

In Arambala, the officers still relied on their lists to select who would die. However, by the following afternoon, Thursday, the lists had run out, and at some point — perhaps that day, perhaps late the day before — the officers made a decision about the direction the operation was to take. For, despite Rufina Amaya's bitter conviction that there had been a "betrayal," that the officer who had spoken to Marcos Díaz as he left Gotera had taken part in a nefarious plot to make sure that the people of El Mozote stayed in their homes to await the fate that had been planned for them, an equally likely explanation — and, in a way, a more horrible one — is that the officer was in fact trying to do his friend Díaz and the people of the hamlet a favor, for at that point nothing whatever may have been planned for them.

Whenever the officers made the decision, it is clear that by the time they reached El Mozote they had ordered a change in tactics. "They had lists from Perquín south to Arambala," the guide told me. "But farther down, there were no lists. Farther down, they killed everything down to the ground. Farther down was scorched earth."

Just after midnight on Wednesday, as the men of the Atlacatl settled down to sleep, a long column wound its way out of La Guacamaya and snaked slowly through the ravines and gullies, heading west toward the black road. The guerrillas and their entourage travelled quietly: the only sound in the tense darkness was that of hundreds of moving feet. The fighters came first, lugging their rifles and ammunition and whatever other supplies they could manage. Then came the civilian followers, loaded down with their bundles of clothing and sacks of tortillas and coffee, and nervously hushing their children. And at the rear came the men and women of Radio Venceremos, bent under the weight of the transmitter and the generator and the other equipment that formed the station's heart.

In the end, it was these burdens which betrayed them: the weight slowed them, so that, as they finally came within sight of the black road, struggling along in increasing panic, the darkness thinned and faded, dawn broke behind them, and they could see, as they gazed upward from their hiding place — a ravine full of prickly maguey — the men of the Atlacatl rising and stretching there on the highway. One soldier was swirling his poncho around him to free it of moisture, and the first rays of sunlight glinted off the droplets. The guerrillas had been caught, but turning back was out of the question; there was nothing for it but to run.

"Advance!" Jonás ordered. No one moved. "Advance, I say!"

A handful of guerrillas broke from their cover, zigzagging in a wild, desperate sprint toward the road, staggering under the weight of their equipment. A moment passed before they heard the shouts of the soldiers, and a moment more before the bullets started to come. They took cover and returned fire, then again ran, took cover, and fired; but they were badly exposed, and by the time they had managed to cross a hundred and fifty yards of open country three men had been hit. One of them, Toni, had been carrying the transmitter, and as he collapsed his precious burden slipped from his back and tumbled down, end over end, into another ravine. His comrades gathered around him. Toni was dying; the bullets kept coming; there could be no question of retrieving the transmitter. Monterrosa would have his war prize.

Late that Thursday afternoon, the men of the Atlacatl trudged into El Mozote. They found the streets deserted. For the last two days, the thud of the mortars, the firecracker staccato of the small arms, and the roar of the aircraft had been coming steadily closer, and that morning helicopters and planes of the Salvadoran Air Force had strafed and bombed the area around the hamlet, terrifying the inhabitants. "Everything was closer every day, louder every day," Rufina Amaya told me, "and finally, by that day, the people were hiding in their houses."

The strafing ceased not long before the men of the Atlacatl entered the hamlet, dragging with them civilians they had found hiding along the way. Tired and impatient, the soldiers swarmed about the houses of El Mozote and pounded on the doors with the butts of their M16s. "Salgan!" they shouted angrily. "Get out here! Get out here now!"

Hesitantly, the people came out into the twilight, frightened, bewildered, unsure of what was happening. The soldiers, cursing and yelling, pulled them forward, hustled them along with the butts of their rifles, herded everyone into the center of the street. Rufina and her husband, Domingo Claros, emerged with their four children: he was carrying three-year-old Marta Lilián and leading Cristino, nine years old, while Rufina had five-year-old María Dolores by the hand and carried at her breast María Isabel, eight months old. "They told us all to lie down in the street, boca abajo" — literally, "mouth down" — "and they began pushing some of us down," Rufina says. "As my husband was setting the little girl down, a soldier pushed him to the ground. The girl started to cry. By then, all the children were crying."

The entire town lay like that, perhaps four hundred people face down in the dirt, as darkness fell. Between the wailing of at least a hundred children and the shouting of the soldiers — hundreds had entered the hamlet by now — the din must have been unbearable. The soldiers marched up and down the lines of people, kicking one here and there, striking another with a rifle butt, and all the while keeping up a steady rain of shouted insults and demands. As Rufina tells it, a soldier would stop next to a man or a woman, kick the prone body, and bark out a question: Who were the guerrillas? Where were they? Where did they hide their guns? The men and women of El Mozote insisted that there were no guerrillas there, that they knew nothing of guerrillas or weapons. "If you want to find guerrillas," one woman shouted tearfully, raising her head from the ground, "go out there" — she waved toward the hills — "outside town. But here, here we're not guerrillas."

This only made the soldiers angrier. "All you sons of bitches are collaborators," an officer said. "You're going to have to pay for those bastards."

At one point, as Rufina tells it, the wealthy and influential Marcos Díaz, lying in the street beside his wife and their sons and daughters, raised his head. "Wait!" he pleaded. "They promised me nothing would happen to the people here. The officer told me so."

At that, the Atlacatl officer laughed and said, "No, motherfucker, you all have to pay. Now, get your face back in the ground." And he raised his black boot and pushed Marcos Díaz's head down into the dirt.

"They were very abusive," Rufina says. "We couldn't do anything. They had all these guns. We had to obey." Some of the soldiers took down names as others went along the lines demanding to see people's hands and pulling from their fingers any rings they saw, then ordering them to turn over their jewelry and crucifixes and anything else that might have some value.

The people of El Mozote lay there in the street, their faces in the dust, the children sobbing, for a long time. The soldiers yelled, strode back and forth, aimed their weapons at them. "We thought that they were going to kill us all — that we were sentenced to die right there," Rufina says.

But finally the soldiers ordered them to get up. As the people of El Mozote climbed unsteadily to their feet, the soldiers barked out an order: they were to go back into their houses, the soldiers said, and not let "even so much as their noses" poke out the door.

The people, terrified, grateful to be alive, hurried into their houses — crowded into them, for virtually every room in the hamlet held extra people. Now the wailing of children made the houses seem smaller still. No one slept. Outside, the men of the Atlacatl shouted and laughed and sang songs, punctuating the hilarity with celebratory bursts of gunfire. Rufina and her husband, packed into a house with two other families, struggled to calm their children. "They were hungry, and we had no food to give them," she says. "We were going to kill a chicken to feed them, but as soon as we lit a candle the soldiers yelled at us from the street to put out the light. Our children were scared, and hungry, and the littlest ones were messing all over themselves, and we couldn't even take them outside to clean them."

So they huddled inside in the darkness, listening anxiously to the laughter, starting up each time it was cut by a burst of automatic fire, and all the while trying to soothe the children. "The saddest thing was that the children were crying and we could do nothing for them," Rufina says. Soon everything would be all right, their parents assured them — soon they would be safe.

Perhaps the parents began to believe it themselves. After the terror of that evening, after feeling the earth against their faces and the gun muzzles at their necks, Rufina and her husband prayed that they had seen the worst, that the soldiers would leave the next day. "We were thinking that because they hadn't killed us yet, maybe they wouldn't," Rufina says. After all, no one had really been harmed, and, even if the promises of Marcos Díaz's officer friend had been worthless — well, the people here had never had trouble with the Army. The people knew that they weren't guerrillas, and the soldiers, despite their angry shouting, must know it, too.

As the people of El Mozote huddled in their dark houses, down at Osicala, the base camp of the operation, south of the Torola River, the officers were taking stock. The first stage of the operation — the convergence of the Atlacatl companies on El Mozote, the capture of the hamlet and its people — had gone well.

"The first phase was over," an officer involved in the operation told me. "All the unit commanders came to Osicala to talk it over. I was heading for the mess hall, and I bumped into" — he named a major who at that time was a key figure in military intelligence — "and he said to me, 'Look, we might need you tomorrow. Be ready.' " Then the major gave the younger officer a rundown of the situation. "He said, 'You know, the first phase is over, the units have gone through and done what they've had to do, and now it's just a question of going in there and interrogating those people' — you know, like P.O.W.s. I asked him if there had been any guerrillas there, and he said, 'No, they're gone. But we might need you. We have people to interrogate. We have maybe six hundred people altogether.' "

That was a lot of people to interrogate. "If I had gone in there," the officer told me, "I would have expected to spend two or three days, considering all the people they had."

The two men stood there for four or five minutes while the major briefed the younger man on the sort of information they wanted to get out of the prisoners. "Basically, we were looking for the guerrillas' means of support — how they were getting their food, and so on. We'd stopped a lot of their communications, but we wanted to know their logistics, how they were getting their supplies, what their routes were, and so on. Especially, we wanted to know who it was they'd infiltrated" — into the Army itself — "and who was selling them arms. We had evidence that there was considerable selling of arms from the Army at that time — I mean, you could ask three and four times what a weapon was worth, and these people would pay it, and many of the soldiers couldn't resist that. There was selling of information as well. All our operations were being leaked. Everyone wanted to make a buck — that was the game."

Other officers passed by as the two men talked. That the first phase had been completed, that the Atlacatl had seized El Mozote and now held its population prisoner — that much was widely known among the officers at Osicala that night. "My impression was that the plan was to spend the next day interrogating these people," the officer told me. "And apparently that was the major's impression as well. But the next day he never called me. And by that night everyone knew that something had happened."

While it was still dark, the soldiers came to Rufina's door and began pounding on it with the butts of their rifles. "Salgan!" they shouted once again. "Get out here!" The families were hustled outside. "We wanted to give our children food," Rufina says, "but they said, 'No, get out to the plaza.' "

All around, the people were emerging from the houses; the soldiers pushed them along roughly, and in the darkness they stumbled over the ground and bumped against one another. "Form lines!" the soldiers shouted. "Men and older boys over here! Women and children over there!"

Soon all the people of El Mozote were lined up in the plaza. The soldiers ordered them not to move. They stood for hours. The children, having had no food and no rest, sobbed and fussed; the mothers tried to quiet them. The soldiers, unlike the evening before, said little. "They just marched up and down the lines looking real mean and ugly, not saying anything," Rufina says. And so the sun rose on the people of El Mozote that Friday.

Around seven, they heard the sound of a helicopter approaching. As it hovered overhead, the soldiers began herding the people from the plaza. The men were ordered into the church, a small whitewashed building adjacent to the even smaller sacristy; the women and children were crowded into the house of Alfredo Márquez, a small building on the main street a few feet from the larger house of Marcos Díaz and directly opposite the church and the sacristy.

Looking out a window of the tightly crowded house — well over a hundred women and children had been forced into a space meant for perhaps a dozen — Rufina saw the helicopter touch down in the plaza and half a dozen officers climb out. She saw several of them, accompanied by soldiers of the Atlacatl, stride to the church, where the men were being held. The others came marching to the house where she was, and pushed through the door into the packed, noisy room.

"They had bayonets on their guns, and they used them to push the women back," Rufina says. "They said we were collaborators. They were angry. They kept asking us where our pistols were, where the men had hidden our guns, and when we kept saying, again and again, that we didn't have any, they'd push at us with the bayonets. Then they'd say, 'Shut up, old woman, what are you crying about?' They said they'd kill us if we didn't tell them."

After only a few minutes, the officers strode out, leaving soldiers to guard the door. Around this time, the helicopter lifted off, taking at least some of the officers along.

Now the women began to hear shouting from the church. "We could hear them yelling — the men," Rufina says. "They were screaming, 'No! No! Don't do this to us! Don't kill us!' "

When she heard the screams, Rufina, who together with her children had been sitting on a bench with her back to the front wall of the house — the wall facing the church — climbed up on the bench so that she could look out a small window high up in that wall. Through the window she saw soldiers leading groups of men from the little whitewashed church — blindfolded men whose hands were bound behind them. Each pair of soldiers led five or six men past the house of Alfredo Márquez and took them out of the hamlet in various directions. After a time, she saw her husband in one group, and as she watched, along with young Cristino, who had climbed up next to her, eager to see what was happening, they both saw him — Domingo Claros, twenty-nine-year-old woodcutter, husband of Rufina and father of Cristino, María Dolores, Marta Lilián, and María Isabel — bolt forward, together with another man, in a desperate effort to escape the soldiers. But there was nowhere to run. The men of the Atlacatl levelled their M16s and brought both men down with short bursts of fire. Then the soldiers strode forward to where the men lay gasping on the ground, and, unsheathing their machetes, they bent over them, grasped their hair, jerked their heads back sharply, and beheaded them with strong blows to the backs of their necks.

"I got down from the bench and I hugged my children to me," Rufina says. "My son was crying and saying over and over, 'They killed my father.' I was crying. I knew then that they were all being taken away to be killed. I just hugged my children to me and cried."

While the officers had been questioning the women, other officers and soldiers were interrogating the men in the church. "Many of the men were bound, blindfolded, and forced to lie face down on the ground while they were interrogated," according to the Tutela Legal report (which was evidently compiled with the coöperation of at least one soldier who had been present). "The soldiers would step on their backs and pull their heads back by their hair until they screamed in pain." For all their brutality, however, the interrogations of the men appear to have been almost as perfunctory as those of the women. The officers devoted scarcely an hour to questioning the hundreds of supposed collaborators, which makes it difficult to believe that they really expected to acquire useful intelligence from the people of El Mozote.

At about eight o'clock, "various of the men who had been gathered in the church were lifted off the ground and decapitated with machetes by soldiers," according to the Tutela report. "The soldiers dragged the bodies and the heads of the decapitated victims to the convent of the church, where they were piled together." It must have been at this point that the women in the house across the street began to hear the men screaming.

Decapitation is tiring work, and slow, and more than a hundred men were crammed into that small building. After the initial beheadings — it is unclear how many died inside the church — the soldiers began bringing the men out in groups, and it was from one of the first of the groups that Domingo Claros had attempted to escape.

While Rufina huddled with her children in the crowded house, mourning her husband, other women climbed up on the bench beside her and peered out the small window. From here, they, too, saw the soldiers taking groups of men from the church and marching them off in different directions.

Outside the hamlet, on a hill known as El Pinalito, the guides from Perquín waited in the company of several corporals — the officers had ordered them to stay there, lest they become confused with the townspeople during the operation — and throughout the morning the guides watched the soldiers pass. "I saw them marching along groups of maybe ten each," one guide told me. "They were all blindfolded, and they had their hands tied behind their backs. Then we would hear the shots, the bursts from the rifles." Out in the forest, the soldiers forced the men to the ground and ordered them to lie flat, with their faces against the earth, as they had lain, with their families, the evening before. Then the soldiers lowered their M16s and fired bursts into each man's brain.

"All morning, you could hear the shots, the crying and the screaming," Rufina says. In the house of Alfredo Márquez, some of the children had become hysterical, and no one knew how to calm them. Cristino begged his mother tearfully to take them out of the house, lest they be killed, as he had seen his father killed. Rufina could do nothing but point helplessly to the guards and try to calm him. None of the women had any idea what would happen next. "We just cried and hugged one another."

Around midday, a group of soldiers came into the house. "Now it's your turn, women," one of the soldiers said. They were going to take the women out now in groups, the soldier explained, and then, he said, the women would be free to go to their homes, or down to Gotera, or wherever they liked.

With that, the soldiers began picking out, one by one, the younger women and the girls, and pulling them toward the door. "The girls would hang on to their mothers, and the soldiers would come in and just grab them from their mothers," Rufina says. "There was a lot of screaming and shouting. Everyone was screaming, 'No! No! Don't do this!' But the soldiers would hit the mothers with the butts of their rifles, and they would reach behind and grab the girls and pull them along with them."

From the house of Alfredo Márquez, the soldiers marched the group of young women and girls — some of them as young as ten years old — out of the hamlet and up onto the hills known as El Chingo and La Cruz. Before long, the women in the house could hear screams coming from the hills.

The guides, on El Pinalito, nearby, also heard the screaming. "We could hear the women being raped on the hills," the Perquín man told me. "And then, you know, the soldiers would pass by, coming from there, and they'd talk about it. You know, they were talking and joking, saying how much they liked the twelve-year-olds."

In the midst of this, one or perhaps two helicopters — accounts differ, as they do about many details of the story — touched down in the plaza in front of the church, and a number of officers climbed out. From his vantage point on the hill, the guide says, he recognized the distinctive figure of an officer he had seen several times before: Colonel Jaime Ernesto Flores Grijalba, the commander of the Third Brigade, in San Miguel, who was widely known as El Gordo (the Fat Man). Among the officers accompanying Colonel Flores was one famous figure, a small but charismatic man whom the soldiers of the Atlacatl proudly pointed out to the guide: Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, their beloved commander.

The officers, having been received at their helicopter by Major Cáceres and the company captains, were escorted to a house not far from the church, and disappeared inside. After some time, during which the killings went on around El Mozote — and also in the adjacent hamlet of Tierra Colorada, where patrolling Atlacatl troops had begun shooting people they found hiding in the houses — the officers strolled out onto the common, climbed back into their helicopter, and lifted off from El Mozote.

Around this time, the soldiers returned to the house of Alfredo Márquez. "I was still sitting on the bench with my kids," Rufina says. "When they came back, they began separating the women from their kids. They pulled the mothers away, leaving the children there crying. They took one group of women and then in a while they came back and took another. That was the saddest thing — little by little, the mothers disappeared, and the house became filled mostly with crying children."

Rufina found herself in one of the last groups. "It must have been five o'clock. There were maybe twenty of us. I was crying and struggling with the soldiers, because I had my baby on my chest. It took two soldiers to pull the baby from me. So when I came outside into the street, I was the last in the group. I was crying and miserable, and begging God to help me."

The soldiers marched the women down the main street. They passed the house of Marcos Díaz on the right and, on the left, that of Ambrosiano Claros, where Rufina and her family had spent the previous night. Ambrosiano Claros's house was in flames. "I saw other houses burning, and I saw blood on the ground. We turned the corner and walked toward the house of Israel Márquez. Then the woman at the head of the line — we were in single file — began to scream. She had looked through the door and seen the people in the house."

What the woman had seen was thick pools of blood covering the floor and, farther inside, piles of bloody corpses — the bodies of the women who only minutes before had been sitting in the house with them, waiting.

"The first woman screamed, 'There are dead people! They're killing people!' and everyone began screaming. All down the line, the women began resisting, hugging one another, begging the soldiers not to kill them. The soldiers were struggling with them, trying to push the first women into the house. One soldier said, 'Don't cry, women. Here comes the Devil to take you.' "

Rufina, still at the end of the line, fell to her knees. "I was crying and begging God to forgive my sins," she says. "Though I was almost at the feet of the soldiers, I wasn't begging them — I was begging God. Where I was kneeling, I was between a crab-apple and a pine tree. Maybe that was what saved me. In all the yelling and commotion, they didn't see me there. The soldier behind me had gone up front to help with the first women. They didn't see me when I crawled between the trees."

The crab-apple tree — which still stands, next to the ruin of Israel Márquez's house, as gnarled and twisted an old crab apple as one can imagine — was within about fifteen feet of the house. "I couldn't move, couldn't even cry," Rufina says. "I had to remain absolutely still and silent. The whole group was still outside the house — the women grabbing one another and hugging one another and trying to resist. Soon, though, the soldiers pushed some of them into the house. I couldn't see inside, but I started hearing shots and screams."

Finally, when the screams and the gunfire had stopped, some of the soldiers went off. A few minutes later, they returned, pushing along the last group of women, and now Rufina heard the sequence — the cries of terror, the screaming, the begging, and the shooting — all over again. After a time, those sounds ceased. In the sudden silence, scattered shooting and fainter screams could be heard echoing from the hills. A few feet from where Rufina lay hidden behind the tree, nine or ten soldiers laid down their guns and collapsed wearily to the ground.

"Well, all these old bastards are dead," one said to somebody farther off. "Go ahead and burn the house."

It was growing dark, and soon flames were rising from the house of Israel Márquez, highlighting the soldiers' faces and the trunk of the tree. It grew so hot that Rufina began to fear that the tree would catch and she would be forced to run. She had remained perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe, and her legs had begun to fall asleep. And the soldiers, still close enough to touch, remained where they were, smoking cigarettes and watching the fire.

"We'll just stay here and wait for the witches of Mozote to come out of that fire," one said.

The soldiers watched the fire and talked, and Rufina, frozen in her terror a few feet away, listened. "Well, we've killed all the old men and women," one said. "But there's still a lot of kids down there. You know, a lot of those kids are really good-looking, really cute. I wouldn't want to kill all of them. Maybe we can keep some of them, you know — take them with us."

"What are you talking about?" another soldier answered roughly. "We have to finish everyone, you know that. That's the colonel's order. This is an operativo de tierra arrasada here" — a scorched-earth operation — "and we have to kill the kids as well, or we'll get it ourselves."

"Listen, I don't want to kill kids," the first soldier said.

"Look," another said. "We have orders to finish everyone and we have to complete our orders. That's it."

At about this time, up on the hill known as El Pinalito, Captain Salazar was shrugging off a guide's timid plea for the children's lives. "If we don't kill them now," he said angrily, "they'll just grow up to be guerrillas. We have to take care of the job now."

Meanwhile, the soldiers sat and gazed at the burning house. Finally, one stood up. "Well, no witches came out," he said. "There are no witches. Let's go see what kind of food they have in that store."

With that, the other men got to their feet, picked up their rifles, and trudged off. A few minutes later, Rufina could hear, from the store of Marcos Díaz, "bottles clinking — you know, as if they were drinking sodas."

The fire was still burning furiously, but the big crab-apple tree, which some miracle had kept from igniting, shielded Rufina from the heat. Over the crackling of the fire she could still hear, coming from the hill called La Cruz, the screams of the girls. Now and again, she heard a burst of gunfire.

After a time, when the soldiers seemed to have finished drinking their sodas, Rufina heard crying and screaming begin from the house of Alfredo Márquez: the screaming of the children. "They were crying, 'Mommy! Mommy! They're hurting us! Help us! They're cutting us! They're choking us! Help us!'

"Then I heard one of my children crying. My son, Cristino, was crying, 'Mama Rufina, help me! They're killing me! They killed my sister! They're killing me! Help me!' I didn't know what to do. They were killing my children. I knew that if I went back there to help my children I would be cut to pieces. But I couldn't stand to hear it, I couldn't bear it. I was afraid that I would cry out, that I would scream, that I would go crazy. I couldn't stand it, and I prayed to God to help me. I promised God that if He helped me I would tell the world what happened here.

"Then I tied my hair up and tied my skirt between my legs and I crawled on my belly out from behind the tree. There were animals there, cows and a dog, and they saw me, and I was afraid they would make a noise, but God made them stay quiet as I crawled among them. I crawled across the road and under the barbed wire and into the maguey on the other side. I crawled a little farther through the thorns, and I dug a little hole with my hands and put my face in the hole so I could cry without anyone hearing. I could hear the children screaming still, and I lay there with my face against the earth and cried."

Rufina could not see the children; she could only hear their cries as the soldiers waded into them, slashing some with their machetes, crushing the skulls of others with the butts of their rifles. Many others — the youngest children, most below the age of twelve — the soldiers herded from the house of Alfredo Márquez across the street to the sacristy, pushing them, crying and screaming, into the dark tiny room. There the soldiers raised their M16s and emptied their magazines into the roomful of children.

Not all the children of El Mozote died at the sacristy. A young man now known as Chepe Mozote told me that when the townspeople were forced to assemble on the plaza that evening he and his little brother had been left behind in their house, on the outskirts of the hamlet, near the school. By the next morning, Chepe had heard plenty of shooting; his mother had not returned. "About six o'clock, around ten soldiers in camouflage uniforms came to the house," Chepe says. "They asked me where my mother was. I told them she had gone to the plaza the night before. I asked them if I could see my mother, and they said I couldn't but I should come with them to the playing field" — near the school. "They said when we got there they would explain where my mother was."

Carrying his little brother, Chepe went with the soldiers and walked along with them as they searched house to house. "We found maybe fifteen kids," he says, "and then they took us all to the playing field. On the way, I heard shooting and I saw some dead bodies, maybe five old people." When they reached the playing field, "there were maybe thirty children," he says. "The soldiers were putting ropes on the trees. I was seven years old, and I didn't really understand what was happening until I saw one of the soldiers take a kid he had been carrying — the kid was maybe three years old — throw him in the air, and stab him with a bayonet.

"They slit some of the kids' throats, and many they hanged from the tree. All of us were crying now, but we were their prisoners — there was nothing we could do. The soldiers kept telling us, 'You are guerrillas and this is justice. This is justice.' Finally, there were only three of us left. I watched them hang my brother. He was two years old. I could see I was going to be killed soon, and I thought it would be better to die running, so I ran. I slipped through the soldiers and dived into the bushes. They fired into the bushes, but none of their bullets hit me."

Lying amid the maguey that night, Rufina Amaya heard the chorus of screams dwindle to a few voices, and those grew weaker and weaker and finally ceased. She heard the officers order that fire be put to the house of Alfredo Márquez and the church and the sacristy, and from the maguey she saw the flames rise and then she heard faint cries start up again inside the buildings and the short bursts of gunfire finishing off a few wounded, who had been forced by the flames to reveal that they were still alive.

Soon the only sounds were those which trickled down from the hills — laughter, intermittent screams, a few shots. On La Cruz, soldiers were raping the young girls who were left. On El Chingo and El Pinalito, other soldiers busied themselves making camp. Down in the hamlet, a few troops walked about here and there, patrolling. Not far from the still burning house of Israel Márquez, two soldiers halted suddenly, and one of them pointed to the patch of maguey. He lowered his rifle and fired, and after a moment his companion fired, too. In the patch of brush, the stream of bullets sent a dark-green rain of maguey shreds fluttering to the earth. Then the soldiers charged forward and began poking among the weeds.

"She was right here," one said, pulling at some maguey. "I saw her, I know it."

Up on the hills, the soldiers listened to the shots, exchanged glances, and waited. Then they went on with what they had been doing: watching the flames rise from the burning houses and talking quietly among themselves, telling tales of the day's work.

They spoke wonderingly about the evangelicals, those people whose faith seemed to grant them a strange power.

"They said maybe some of the people believed in God so strongly that they just delivered themselves up, they didn't resist," the guide told me. "They said some of the people were singing even as they were killed."

There was one in particular the soldiers talked about that evening (she is mentioned in the Tutela Legal report as well): a girl on La Cruz whom they had raped many times during the course of the afternoon, and through it all, while the other women of El Mozote had screamed and cried as if they had never had a man, this girl had sung hymns, strange evangelical songs, and she had kept right on singing, too, even after they had done what had to be done, and shot her in the chest. She had lain there on La Cruz with the blood flowing from her chest, and had kept on singing — a bit weaker than before, but still singing. And the soldiers, stupefied, had watched and pointed. Then they had grown tired of the game and shot her again, and she sang still, and their wonder began to turn to fear — until finally they had unsheathed their machetes and hacked through her neck, and at last the singing had stopped.

Now the soldiers argued about this. Some declared that the girl's strange power proved that God existed. And that brought them back to the killing of the children. "There were a lot of differences among the soldiers about whether this had been a good thing or whether they shouldn't have done it," the guide told me.

As the soldiers related it now, the guide said, there had been a disagreement outside the schoolhouse, where a number of children were being held. Some of the men had hesitated, saying they didn't want to kill the children, and the others had ridiculed them.

According to one account, a soldier had called the commanding officer. "Hey, Major!" he had shouted. "Someone says he won't kill children!"

"Which son of a bitch says that?" the Major had shouted back angrily, striding over. The Major had not hesitated to do what an officer does in such situations: show leadership. He'd pushed into the group of children, seized a little boy, thrown him in the air, and impaled him as he fell. That had put an end to the discussion.

Now, up on the hills, the soldiers talked and argued and watched the burning houses, while the two men down below still searched among the maguey, cursing at the sharp thorns.

"I know she was here," the first soldier said. "I saw her. She was right here."

"No, no," his companion finally said. "There's no one here. You're just seeing the dead. You're seeing ghosts. The ghosts of the people you killed are frightening you." With that, the soldiers looked at each other, then turned and trotted back to the center of the hamlet. Amid the maguey, Rufina Amaya closed her eyes, remained motionless. After a time, she reached out a hand and began groping about in the weeds, slowly pulling the thorny strips to her, gathering them into a pile and heaping them over her body.

She lay there still when the stars began to disappear from the lightening sky. She heard sounds of movement from the hills, rising voices as the men woke, urinated, ate, prepared their equipment. Shots echoed here and there, interspersed with the barking and howling of dogs and the lowing of cows as the soldiers killed the animals one by one. From up on La Cruz came a burst of high-pitched screaming and begging, followed by a prolonged chorus of gunfire, and, at last, silence. And then the men of the Atlacatl, having completed the operation in El Mozote, moved out.

Hours earlier, when the chill of the night came on, Rufina Amaya had shivered, for the maguey had badly ripped her blouse and skirt. The thorns had torn the flesh of her arms and legs, but at the time she hadn't noticed. Now she could feel the cuts, swelling and throbbing, and the blood, dried and prickly, on her limbs. And as she lay sobbing amid the thorns, listening to the soldiers pass, her breasts ached with the milk that had gathered there to feed her youngest child.

Marching past the church, which was burning still, past the carcasses of cows and dogs, and out of El Mozote, the men of the Atlacatl did not see the dark shape in the maguey patch, the heap of dark-green leaves. Their minds were on their work, which on that Saturday morning in December lay ahead in the hamlet of Los Toriles.

In Los Toriles, "the soldiers pulled people from their houses and hustled them into the square," the guide told me, "and went down the line taking money and anything of value out of people's pockets. Then they just lined the people up against a wall and shot them with machine guns. The people fell like trees falling."

Even so, the killing in Los Toriles took much of the day. Some of the residents, having seen the columns of smoke rising the afternoon before from El Mozote, had fled their homes and hidden in caves above the hamlet. But most had stayed, wanting to protect their homes: they remembered that on a previous operation soldiers had set fire to houses they found empty, claiming that they belonged to guerrillas.

By afternoon, the streets of Los Toriles were filled with corpses. "It was so terrible that we had to jump over the dead so as not to step on them," the guide told me. "There were dogs and cows and other animals, and people of all ages, from newborn to very old. I saw them shoot an old woman, and they had to hold her up to shoot her. I was filled with pity. I wished we had gone out and fought guerrillas, because to see all those dead children filled me with sadness."

As night fell, the soldiers walked through the town setting fire to the houses. It was dark by the time they left Los Toriles, to march south toward the guerrilla stronghold of La Guacamaya. They made camp in open country, rose at dawn, and, as they prepared to move out again, Captain Salazar motioned them over. The men of the Atlacatl gathered in a circle, sitting cross-legged on the ground as he stood and addressed them.

"Señores!" the Captain said angrily. "What we did yesterday, and the day before, this is called war. This is what war is. War is hell. And, goddammit, if I order you to kill your mother,