El Mozote Massacre - Initial Reports and Controversy

Initial Reports and Controversy

News of the massacre first appeared in the world media on January 27, 1982, in reports published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Raymond Bonner wrote in the Times of seeing "the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles." The villagers gave Bonner a list of 733 names—mostly children, women, and old people—all of whom, they claimed, had been murdered by government soldiers.

Alma Guillermoprieto of the Post, who visited the village separately a few days later, wrote of "dozens of decomposing bodies still seen beneath the rubble and lying in nearby fields, despite the month that has passed since the incident ... countless bits of bones—skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column—poked out of the rubble."

Both reporters cited Rufina Amaya, a witness who had escaped into a tree during the attack. She told the reporters that the army had killed her husband and her four children, the youngest of whom was eight months old, and then lit the bodies on fire.

Salvadoran army and government leaders denied the reports and officials of the Reagan administration called them "gross exaggerations." The Associated Press reported that "the U.S. Embassy disputed the reports, saying its own investigation had found ... that no more than 300 people had lived in El Mozote."

The conservative press-watch organization Accuracy in Media accused the Times and Post of timing their stories to release them just before the congressional debate; five months later, Accuracy in Media devoted an entire edition of its AIM Report to Bonner, in which its editor Reed Irvine declared that "Mr. Bonner had been worth a division to the communists in Central America". Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders attacked Bonner and Guillermoprieto before a Senate committee, stating that though there had been a battle between guerrillas and the army, "no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians." Enders also repeated the claim that only 300 people had lived in Mozote, making it impossible for the death toll to have reached that reported in the Times and Post stories. On February 8, Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, told the committee that "it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas".

In February, in an editorial titled "The Media's War", The Wall Street Journal criticized Bonner's reporting as "overly credulous" and "out on a limb". In Time magazine, William A. Henry III wrote a month later: "An even more crucial if common oversight is the fact that women and children, generally presumed to be civilians, can be active participants in guerrilla war. New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner underplayed that possibility, for example, in a much-protested January 27 report of a massacre by the army in and around the village of Mozote." U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton called Bonner an "advocate journalist". Bonner was recalled to New York in August and later left the paper.

Although attacked less vigorously than Bonner, Alma Guillermoprieto was also a target of criticism. A Reagan official wrote a letter to the Post stating that she had once worked for a communist newspaper in Mexico, a claim which Guillermoprieto denied.