Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

A thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Rufina Amaya, whose children and husband were killed in front of her, was the lone survivor of the massacre at El Mozote. A month later, she met two war reporters—Raymond Bonner, an American working for The New York Times, and Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto, a freelancer for The Washington Post. Each had traveled independently to El Mozote, where they found scenes of devastation: homes razed, the church destroyed, scattered corpses rotting in the sun. At the center of El Mozote, beside a demolished sacristy, bones, severed limbs, and pieces of flesh jutted from the rubble; the corpses of children were still clothed. The soldiers hadn’t bothered to bury any of their victims, or to hide the evidence of their atrocities. Both newspapers ran the story on their front pages on January 27, 1982, the day before Ronald Reagan was planning to send a formal notice to Congress announcing that El Salvador was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.”