It was the worst massacre in the modern history of Latin America: As many as a thousand Salvadoran civilians, many of them younger than 6, killed by a military dictatorship backed by the United States.
Thirty-nine years later, the suspected killers are on trial, and the judge is seeking a crucial piece of evidence: U.S. government records related to the 1981 El Mozote massacre.
The prosecution has been lauded by both the U.S. government and the relatives of victims. Now the Trump administration will have to decide what to hand over. So far, it has offered nothing.
The Mozote trial, which began in 2016, is considered a milestone in El Salvador's reckoning with its dark history. The massacre remains the most infamous killing in the country's bloody 12-year civil war.
The process has begun to reveal what happened in the northeastern village of El Mozote. Evidence presented by prosecutors contradicts the original Salvadoran and American accounts of the massacre, implicating a U.S.-trained special forces battalion. Jean Manes, a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, has called the trial "an important, positive step for rule of law and ending impunity" in the country.
But as Judge Jorge Guzman Urquilla sorted through reams of evidence and testimony, he found that a key piece was missing: U.S. documents that might shed light on how the massacre was planned and executed. In January, he sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
At a hearing Wednesday, Guzman spoke again about the need for the United States to open its archives.
The State Department declined to comment.
As Cold War attention shifted in the early 1980s to Central America, the Reagan administration bankrolled the Salvadoran government's war against leftist guerrillas, making what was then a nation of fewer than 5 million one of the biggest beneficiaries of U.S. aid. The U.S. military trained Salvadoran officers at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., and sent U.S. military advisers to El Salvador. In the guerrillas, former President Ronald Reagan saw the specter of communism on the U.S. doorstep.
By early 1981, Salvadoran troops were based near El Mozote and patrolling near a guerrilla camp. That December, the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion was dispatched to the area to fight guerrillas. But what happened in the village on Dec. 11 was much different.
"Several hundred civilians, including women and children, were taken from their homes in and around this village and killed by Salvadoran Army troops," The Washington Post reported in January 1982. Survivors said troops herded villagers into two groups -- men in one, women and children in the other -- took them off and shot them.
"Civilians did die during Operation Rescate, but no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone," Thomas Enders, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs at the time of the attack, told Congress in February 1982.
The commanders of the Atlacatl Battalion remain free. So do the former senior defense officials who allegedly issued orders to the battalion. In the 1990s, the country approved an amnesty that protected war criminals. That law was declared unconstitutional in 2016, clearing the way for the trial.
The defendants include 16 former commanders, including a former minister of defense. Last year, Guzman added charges of torture, forced displacement and forced disappearance.
The United States has long acknowledged the role of the Salvadoran military in abuses in the war that ran from 1979 to 1992. This year, the State Department sanctioned 13 former soldiers for the killing of six Jesuit priests and two others in 1989.
The Clinton administration declassified hundreds of documents related to the U.S. role in the Salvadoran civil war. Researchers have received other documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. Many have been catalogued as evidence in the trial. But analysts think the U.S. government is withholding key documents.
The CIA has declined to comment.
Declassified U.S.documents have been used in war crimes trials throughout Latin America in recent decades. Last year, President Trump personally handed over a trove of U.S. documents related to human rights abuses under Argentina's military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983 to then-President Mauricio Macri.
A Section on 03/15/2020