It was around five in the morning, on December 11, when the soldiers began rounding up the villagers of El Mozote and separating the men from the women and children. The men were marched to the village’s lone church and eventually lined up and executed; the women were taken to the hills, where they were raped and burned alive. On Monterrosa’s orders, the soldiers advanced to the other villages over the next two days, killing everyone they encountered and setting fire to the homes. Monterrosa had a word for such an operation—it was, he told his subordinates, a limpieza, or cleansing. By the end
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