Summary

Anne Nelson, international program director at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and former director of the Committee to Protect Journalists

Anne Nelson spoke about her experience as a journalist in El Salvador. She said that the situation in El Salvador in the early 1980s worried U.S. policymakers. The influence of Cuba and the rise to power of the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua in 1979 stoked fears that "the commies were coming to Texas." The invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 added credibility to U.S. policymakers' concerns about Soviet expansionism. In this context, she said, U.S. support for an authoritarian client government in El Salvador was justified to stop a growing and supposedly even more oppressive communism.

Nelson said that after the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1980, El Salvador's right-wing governments felt they had "carte blanche" to do anything under the guise of fighting communism. The government responded to peaceful dissent by labeling as a communist anyone who questioned its rule or policies. The armed forces and paramilitary, right-wing death squads increased their killings and drove opposition groups underground; in response, El Salvador's guerilla groups began escalating their activities against the government.

In addition to the overall climate of fear and violence, Nelson said there were a number of specific factors that made it difficult to gather and publicize information about human rights abuses and earlier massacres in El Salvador:

Some editors were reluctant to publish information that was critical of the U.S. government;
Death squads were targeting foreign journalists like Raymond Bonner of the New York Times;
Journalists' movements were restricted by the military;
Areas of conflict or interest in the countryside were hard to reach, and reporting and filing stories could take days or weeks.

Susan Meiselas, photographer

Meiselas had been working in El Salvador since 1979 and said she was struck by the large, non-violent street protests and increasingly organized political movement that was growing against the government in the early 1980s. Soon, however, government repression increased and opposition leaders and groups fled to the mountains.

She noted that El Salvador was not like Vietnam, where journalists had usually traveled with troops. Instead, reporters and photographers increasingly had to "cross the lines"—go into the countryside and disputed areas—in order to cover stories. Reporters often had little idea who controlled these areas.

According to Meiselas, the Morazan region, where El Mozote was located, had a growing reputation as a guerilla stronghold. She said that she and other reporters were interested in how much of the organizing was being done by Salvadorans, and how much, if any, support was coming from Nicaragua or Cuba.

When Meiselas recalled arriving in El Mozote after the massacre, she remembers the eerie, dead silence, the intense smell, and seeing bodies and parts of bodies. She said that she had a sense that something horrible had happened, that she was witnessing something significant, but she didn't yet have a sense of the magnitude.

She said initially that she wasn't totally sure of who was responsible. She observed that as a photographer she often witnesses the aftermath, not the action.

Maria Julia Hernandez, founding director of Tutela Legal

Tutela Legal was organized during 1978 as part of the efforts by the archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, and his successor, Arturo Rivera y Damas, to create commissions and organizations to defend human rights. Hernandez said that in the late 1970s and 1980s, human rights activists in El Salvador knew they needed to have strong, scientific evidence as the basis to denounce abuses. At the time, gathering this kind of information was particularly dangerous because many people who worked for these groups, reported violations, or tried to take legal action were either threatened, assaulted, or murdered by death squads.

Tutela Legal went to sites of supposed human rights violations and collected evidence as well as relied on testimony from survivors. Hernandez pointed out that since El Salvador was a signatory to the Geneva Conventions (international agreements that outlawed torture and established human rights precedents), Tutela Legal had a framework of standards and law for carrying out its investigations.

Another important innovation described by Hernandez was Tutela Legal's monitoring of El Salvador's main guerilla force, the FMLN. Hernandez said that Romero and Rivera y Damas urged human rights groups to also focus on the guerillas, not just on the army.

Tutela Legal became a credible source of information and human rights abuse evidence for delegations from the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations. Hernandez noted, however, that judges in El Salvador refused to bring up human rights abuse cases throughout the 80s. U.S. embassy staff claimed Tutela Legal's evidence was not conclusive. Hernandez said Salvadoran and American officials insisted that cases like El Mozote were a result of conflict between government forces and guerillas, not massacres. The government of El Salvador considered Tutela Legal as a partisan, left-wing group.

Hernandez said the evidence Tutela Legal compiled during the war indicated that the government security forces and death squads were committing the majority of the abuses. The 1993 Truth Commission confirmed Tutela Legal's findings. According to the commission, 85 percent of the human rights abuses during the war were committed by government forces, 7 percent by the FMLN, and the rest are unresolved.

Mark Danner, author of The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War

Danner said El Mozote is remarkable because it was on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post very soon after the fact, and that the reporters had got 90 percent of it right under very difficult conditions.

Danner also said that the reporting about El Mozote was a positive example of the journalistic tradition of disclosure, of exposing problems that people in power want to keep secret, and of hoping that exposure will correct the situation and make things better.

According to Danner, conservatives in the United States attacked the stories not for the information they contained, but for how they were reported. The Wall Street Journal, which supported the Reagan administration's policy in El Salvador, seized upon the fact that New York Times reporter Raymond Bonner had not clearly stated that he had been guided to El Mozote by leftist guerillas. A Wall Street Journal op-ed used this in an effort to discredit the story and Bonner's reporting.

For Danner, the lingering questions from El Mozote are not so much about disclosure but about what happens after disclosure. According to him, unfortunately, the reporting did not do that much to change policy.

Danner cited other political factors such as the fact that although the army was absolutely responsible for the massacre, the massacre was first reported on the guerillas’ radio station, Radio Venceramos. U.S. embassy officials cited this as a reason to dismiss the reports as a propaganda effort to convince the U.S. Congress to stop military aid to El Salvador.

Danner concluded that the reporting and images provided by journalists and photographers like Meiselas, as well as evidence collected by Salvadoran human rights groups and U.S. congressional investigators, revealed the truth about El Mozote. Later disclosure by the Clinton administration confirmed that the Reagan White House also knew the truth about El Mozote when it occurred. The challenge, said Danner, is combining the disclosure of the truth with political work that changes policy and prevents human rights violations.

David Morales, deputy director of the Office for Human Rights Ombudsman in El Salvador

Morales described the investigation into El Mozote that started in 1990 as a symbol of democracy that is not yet effective in El Salvador.

Morales said that Tutela Legal worked on human rights cases in the 1980s but it was difficult because people who reported human rights abuses put their lives in danger. In 1990 new efforts were made to find out what happened at El Mozote. There was not a lot of government support, but survivors and people who had fled were now willing to testify. Investigators also had greater access to sites and forensic evidence.

Morales said that the 1992 peace agreement was welcomed because it ended the armed conflict, created a political process, and gave more room to conduct human rights investigations. He said these changes allowed Tutela Legal to invite an Argentinean forensic team to join the El Mozote exhumation. El Mozote soon became an important symbol for human rights.

On the other hand, Morales pointed out that the UN Truth Commission efforts to bring accountability for human rights abuses have been undermined by political agreements that have secured impunity for human rights violators. Five days after the commission issued a report and recommendations about El Mozote and the civil war, El Salvador's legislature granted amnesty to all those who had committed human rights abuses during the war. Other setbacks noted by Morales included lack of judicial reform in accordance with the commission's recommendations; infiltration of the police by members of the former military regime; and harassment and underfunding of El Salvador's human rights ombudsman's office.

Morales said that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report in 2000 marked a new stage for human rights efforts in El Salvador. The report documents the assassination of Archbishop Romero in 1980, the murder of six Jesuit professors and two of their staff in 1989, and the massacre at El Mozote.

The amnesty law has been upheld by El Salvador's Supreme Court, but Morales said a number of recent rulings appear to leave open the option for trial judges to decide to prosecute human rights abuses in some specific cases. Morales said human rights activists are now working on getting El Mozote accepted as one of these cases. If successful, Morales said the El Mozote case could bring human rights violators to justice and symbolize El Salvador's growing commitment to human rights and the rule of law.