[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 201 (Monday, December 11, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H9759-H9760]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               36TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE EL MOZOTE MASSACRE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, 36 years ago, nearly 1,000 men, women, and 
children were murdered by Salvadoran soldiers in El Mozote, El 
Salvador. It is considered one of the worst massacres in modern Latin 
American history.
  On December 2, I traveled to El Mozote with a delegation led by the 
Washington Office on Latin America. Four hours after leaving San 
Salvador, we arrived at El Mozote in the northern region of Morazan, 
near the border of Honduras.
  Three decades ago, El Mozote included about 20 houses on open ground 
around a square. Facing the square was a church and, behind it, a small 
building known as the convent, used by the priest to change into his 
vestments when celebrating Mass. Nearby was a small schoolhouse.
  Our delegation sat in the town square with survivors and victims of 
the massacre. We listened to their stories, shared prayers for their 
loss and suffering, toured the grounds where this atrocity took place, 
and visited memorials the community built to commemorate and preserve 
this tragic history. We also heard from lawyers from Cristosal, a U.S.-
based NGO providing legal aid to the association of victims and 
survivors.
  On December 10, 1981, the Salvadoran Army brigade based in San Miguel 
and the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite infantry unit based in San 
Salvador, arrived in El Mozote. Over the next 2 days, these troops 
methodically and viciously murdered the town's residents and those of 
nearby villages.
  On the morning of December 11, troops assembled the people in the 
town square. They separated the men from the women and children and 
locked them in separate groups in the church, the convent, and various 
houses. According to eyewitness accounts, they then interrogated, 
tortured, and executed the men at several different sites.
  Around noon, they began taking the women and girls in groups, 
separating them from their children and machine-gunning them after 
raping them. Many families were ordered to remain in their homes while 
soldiers set fire to their houses.
  Over 140 of the children--some, mere infants--were jammed into the 
convent next to the church. There, soldiers blocked the doors, aimed 
guns through the windows, and fired into the mass of children, 
murdering them all in cold blood. They then threw an incendiary bomb 
into the building, collapsing the roof and adobe walls.
  Mr. Speaker, I walked with members of the community to the site where 
the children were murdered. A garden cultivated in their memory blooms 
on the site where they perished. A mural on the side of the church 
facing the garden depicts tiny angels ascending to Heaven.
  Beneath the mural are plaques with the names and ages of the children 
killed so brutally. They range from zero to 16 years. Walking on such 
hallowed ground, I was deeply moved and outraged by the atrocity that 
took place there.
  In October 1990, the Salvadoran courts opened an investigation into 
the El Mozote case, and in January 1992, the civil war ended with peace 
accords signed between the Salvadoran Government and FMLN guerrillas. 
In November 1992, the U.S. Truth Commission supervised exhumations of 
El Mozote remains by Argentine forensic experts, confirming that the 
stories told by the survivors were indeed true. Then everything was cut 
short when the Salvadoran Congress passed a sweeping amnesty law in 
1993.
  However, last year, in July 2016, the Salvadoran Supreme Court 
overturned the amnesty law as unconstitutional; and in October of 2016, 
a judge reopened the El Mozote case and began taking testimony, which 
continues today.
  Now, there are many reasons why we in Congress should be engaged in 
the search for justice in the El Mozote case. First, in the postwar 
period, the U.S. has supported a strong and independent judiciary in El 
Salvador, capable of prosecuting corruption and human rights abuses. El 
Mozote is viewed as an exemplar case on whether this is possible to 
achieve.

[[Page H9760]]

  Second, in the 1980s, the United States armed, trained, and equipped 
the Salvadoran Armed Forces, in particular, the army. At El Mozote, 
U.S. guns and bullets were used to massacre infants, children, women, 
and men.
  Third, the U.S. established and trained the Atlacatl Battalion. 
Ostensibly an elite rapid reaction counterinsurgency force, it was a 
major actor in the mass murder at El Mozote. Nine years later, the unit 
also murdered six Jesuit priests and two women at the University of 
Central America in San Salvador.
  Finally, at the time of the massacre, the Salvadoran high command 
denied that it even happened. The U.S. Embassy and State Department 
echoed those denials and denigrated The Washington Post and New York 
Times reporters who traveled to El Mozote and published detailed 
stories about the massacre.
  Mr. Speaker, the U.S. should support the Salvadoran judge presiding 
over the El Mozote case and the Attorney General's Office, including 
releasing all information in our military and intelligence files 
relevant to that period of the civil war. It would be a significant 
contribution to ending the culture of impunity in El Salvador.

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