Mark Danner's The Massacre at El Mozote: Book Review

 The Massacre at El Mozote: Book Review (7/22)

By Armando Ortiz

Reading The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner left a deep impression on me. Danner narrates a massacre that took place in El Salvador in the 1980s in a series of towns that had been believed to be friendly to leftist guerrillas. Between the late 1970s and the mid-90s El Salvador was involved in a civil war that killed many people and displaced countless more. The book itself has a bit of a slow start and details a rough outline of what the book is about -the civil war of El Salvador. As you continue reading the book you begin to see the tragedy that is told and narrated by people who saw the executions take place, and the reports generated by journalists that visited the location.The last part of the book is a collection of all the documents used to support Danner’s narrative.

As I read the book I was struck by the way people were assassinated. An image began to develop in my mind. It wasn't an image that sprung forth from the writings found in the book, but came from my childhood memories. When I was just a child, my mom would receive different evangelical pamphlets, booklets and small posters from the church that we attended. These various zines and fliers talked about the coming of Jesus, the end of the world, and judgment day, where everyone’s actions would be judged by god. If you were found guilty of being a sinner you would face eternity in hell. 

These images on paper showed characters that lived in sin and had died only to come face to face with the creator. In addition to that a poster that had been pinned on the side of our pantry showed the different forms of torture that would happen to real Christians. According to the book of Revelations, the devil would come down and start his reign of terror killing all who did not ge the mark of the beast. All the people that would die in the name of Jesus would be resurrected on the final Judgment Day. 

These cartoon-like images showed people being burned at the stake with yellow, orange and red flames engulfing the person, being shot to death by machine guns and gun shells flying out of the muzzle, and people being hacked to pieces by people armed with swords. Well, to me the book not only detailed the apocalypse that the people in El Mozote experienced, but also described how some Christian groups who had decided to not side with either the guerillas or the army became targets. 

Danner goes on to describe the death of a young woman who gets assaulted repeatedly and as that happens all she does is sing Christian songs. Reading through this section was as if my childhood memories were no longer really what they had been after having had this veil of truth removed before me. It was disturbing to read these facts, and as I kept reading the book I began to remember a song from a musician that was very famous during that time and is probably still played today, Stanislao Marino. In his song, La Gran Tribulacion he talks about the great tribulation, and describes how all true Christians would rise up to heaven to meet their creator. 

In this song he states, “se oye un grito, un lamento, un soyoso much gente esta alarmada, que a pasado se pregunta, que a pasado en el mundo,”  “you hear a scream, a lamentation, a lot of alarmed people, what’s happened they ask, what’s happened in the world, and hums a hymn.” He continues his song with, “una joven, va gritando, mamaaa! Un esposo va buscando su familia, unos dicen que una nave mucha gente se llevo, pero escuchen alo lejos alguien grita, cristo  vino, cristo vino, y su pueblo se llevo, no hay remedio, no hay salida, es la gran tribulacion,” “a youngling screams, moooom, a husband goes around looking for his family, some say that a spaceship a lot of people took, but listen at a distance someone yells, Christ came, Christ came and took its community. It's the Great Tribulation!” This song kept playing in my head, haunting me, like a scratched record that takes you back to the beginning. 

Reading the book took me back to my youth. It also made me think of this nauseating situation where I was listening to these songs, and began to imagine and to think of the people over in El Salvador and Guatemala that lived through these tribulations. Children being bayoneted and parents being hacked for being from a community that had to deal with groups that were both enemy and friend. 

The week spent reading the book was also the week I drove to the White Mountain Trailhead to hike White Mountain Peak. As I drove to the location I had to pass through the ancient bristlecone forest. Driving on that road and through the forest was an unreal experience. Not only did it seem that I was entering a different world, but it seemed that the book had had such an impression on my psyche that the fallen trees looked like petrified mummies, some looked like they were characters from the movie Pan's Labyrinth, other trees looked like they could be memorials to the people killed in El Mozote. This was especially true on my return drive through the gravel road that takes you back to the main road. To me the root systems of these ancient trees showed frozen images of people in agony, crying eyes, frightened faces, and still born babies. The branches of these old trunks looked like arms that were extended to some imagined place of safety, and had been begging for life before they were pulled out of the ground. 

I wondered if all that I was seeing was somehow connected to the book that I had been reading or was it that these ancient trees tell us something about our destruction of each other and our environment. Driving through the curves of the mountain I wondered if the singer knew what was happening in Central America when he made the song. How had he managed to get such a feeling through his music, but then was that feeling projected to those that had not experienced those tragedies. Was his music being played in the communities that would one day be burned to the ground or only in places where the fiction of the mark of the beast and the second coming of Jesus was preached? Eerie question to consider.