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The Massacre at El Mozote | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Danner
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 53993
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 067975525X
Dewey Decimal Number: 972.8433
EAN: 9780679755258
ASIN: 067975525X
Publication Date: April 5, 1994
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Product Description
In December 1981 soldiers of the Salvadoran Army's select, American-trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote, where they murdered hundreds of men, women, and children, often by decapitation. Although reports of the massacre -- and photographs of its victims -- appeared in the United States, the Reagan administration quickly dismissed them as propaganda. In the end, El Mozote was forgotten. The war in El Salvador continued, with American funding.
When Mark Danner's reconstruction of these events first appeared in The New Yorker, it sent shock waves through the news media and the American foreign-policy establishment. Now Danner has expanded his report into a brilliant book, adding new material as well as the actual sources. He has produced a masterpiece of scrupulous investigative journalism that is also a testament to the forgotten victims of a neglected theater of the cold war.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 SHOCKING July 30, 2008
I picked up this book primarily from the intriguing cover. The words inside the cover were shocking. This short little book (161 pages of text and 141 pages of notes) is a straightforward account of one of the greatest shames of the century. The extensive research involved gives it the weight of authority. The style of writing was plain reporting and somewhat dry and uninteresting in places. However, I doubt that this book was written to entertain. This work is a must for students of Central American politics and foreign relations. I came away with the growing distrust and dismay of government, including the USA. Patriotism in every land seems to be a diversionary tactic used to orient the populace away from the amoral and often immoral workings of government run by people motivated by greed and fear. I have an equally increasing admiration for the press and good reporting. Free speech and a free press is the conscience, gadfly, and salvation of trusting and sometimes misguided persons.
A Detailed Report on a Little Known Event December 24, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I read this book for a college course I am taking that focuses on the struggle between colonizing nations and those nations that are colonized. Looking through this perspective, Danner writes a meaningful account of the massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador that captures enough emotion but still maintains some distance to avoid a blatant bias (towards the guerillas, namely).
This read is not for the weak stomached, as Danner does go into detail as to how many of the townspeople of El Mozote and the surrounding areas were killed. In order to emphasize the brutality that the government allowed, he does recount the slaughter of babies and young children. However, he does later make up for these descriptions through the dealings with the military and its leaders, the relationships of the US and El Salvador, and globally speaking, a fight (perhaps) between the US and the USSR.
This book is well written and easy to follow. Danner does a good job of getting everything said succinctly and it gives an interesting perspective in the minds of many of those involved with the happenings of El Salvador at the time, mainly major leaders from both the guerilla side and the military side. His interviews with these significant people help Danner depict a scene that goes beyond the scope of this one massacre that happens in the small town of El Mozote. He broadens the scope to include the implications this event would later have on the future.
Highly Recommended May 20, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is probably one of the best books I've read in a while. I had to read it for a history class at Furman University, but it's one I definitley would have read on my own as well. It tells a heart-wrenching story, but gives the facts as they are. Not necessarily an easy story to hear, but one that I feel everyone should know about. It's fairly easy to read and isn't too history-like (a lot of facts, no emotion, confusing to follow). I recommend this book for anyone willing to learn about Latin America, and especially the part that the US plays in allowing things like this to happen.
Very good book, so-so prose July 25, 2005
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
I read The Massacre at El Mozote immediately after finishing Mark Bowden's Killing Pablo (I was clearly in the mood, at the time, for books revolving around U.S. military/political affairs in Latin America). I absolutely loved Bowden's book but only liked Danner's. I found the prose in El Mozote to be rather dense and fleshy, especially in the first 30 or so pages of the book. Danner's overuse of comma-offset clauses tends to muddle his sentences. But once he cut to the chase, it was much easier to follow along and really get into the action. Overall, it was an eye-opening read, well researched and presented. I really do think that reading Killing Pablo immediately prior to picking up El Mozote colored my opinion tremendously, since I literally was enthralled by Bowden's fast-paced, detailed, page-turning prose and thus somewhat put off by Danner's paragraphs-long sentences.
A lesson for our times March 14, 2004
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
Mark Danner's short book, The Massacre at El Mozote, is an extremely powerful depiction of not only what can go wrong with US foreign policy, but of the lengths politicians will go through to convince us that what they are doing is, in fact, right. The thoroughness and integrity of Danner's investigation cannot be disputed; on top of that, he is very adept at leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. The book may be the Hiroshima of our times. While I agree with earlier reviewers, especially the point that what appears to be propaganda should not be immediately dismissed as such, I think the real lesson of the book is that the US, as a leader in world affairs, needs to choose its "friends" very carefully. Danner's book made me realize that while the US likes to shape Latin American policy, in point of fact the powerful "Good Neighbor" to the north is often manipulated by the very regimes it seeks to control. And as citizens of this great country, we have a hard time imagining such a thing. The butchers of the El Salvador government, trained and financed by the US, knew that they could commit whatever atrocities they wished so long as they opposed the socialist rebels. Consequently, in December 1981, they murdered 767 people at El Mozote and in surrounding villages with impunity because they understood that the political stakes were much higher in Washington once the Reagan administration had committed itself to supporting the status quo. In its frantic attempts to dispute or to ignore the details of the massacre, the Reagan administration-which liked to portray itself as hard-line-really appears as the spineless weakling in this whole affair. Truly, the "tail wagged the dog." This is an important lesson to bear in mind as the US conducts a new war on terrorism (the Communists having been vanquished years ago). Is our country going to find itself supporting human rights abusers once again because our leaders are afraid of political fallout, by appearing to be weak on combating terrorism or inept at finding WMDs? Human rights--and especially the right to life itself--should be the criteria our government considers when it decides to throw its support behind a foreign government.
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