FRONTLINE

>> (speaking Spanish) (men speaking Spanish) (yelling, whistles blowing) (guns firing) >> (speaking Spanish) >> Very simply, guerrillas are attempting to impose a Marxist- Leninist dictatorship on the people of El Salvador. (gun firing) >>

NARRATOR

The story of the worst massacre in the modern history of Latin America began in December 1981. (device explodes) It was in the midst of the Cold War. (guns firing, people scream) The United States was supporting the government of El Salvador's fight against Communist-backed rebels known as the FMLN. >> (speaking Spanish) >> There was a lot of risk involved. There were targeted killings of people who organized peasants, organized labor, organized within their churches. >> So, this is more of Mozote's houses. >> Photojournalist Susan Meiselas was covering the war when she began hearing rumors of a government attack on civilians in a remote village. >> (speaking Spanish) >> She and her colleague, foreign correspondent Raymond Bonner, who was working for "The New York Times," decided to go behind rebel lines. >> I think, I think that's you. >> With the help of FMLN fighters, they crossed into the Salvadoran mountains. >> We heard about something, but we didn't really know. And the question was, how do we even find out? Could we even find out, or find a means of, a path to trying to find out? We were walking in a terrain that was completely unknown to us. There was no path. There was no map. But because we felt compelled, we just had to dig deeper, we had to know more. We walked into a tiny pueblo that was completely evacuated. All the houses had been burned to the ground. You saw the remains of people. You felt like it was a ghost town. It was eerie. It was like time was frozen. >> The village was called El Mozote. >> I remember their bodies lying in the cornfield. It was clear this had been a, you know, a scorched-earth policy, if you will. They'd come through and just killed every man, woman, and child they found. >> There was nothing that explained what happened except the remains, you know? The remains couldn't speak to us. You remember the guy that showed us that? >> They soon met a woman named Rufina. >> And that's Rufina. >> Right. >> Sitting in the middle of the village, in shock. >> Rufina, the next day or two, spoke to us and filled in what we were seeing. >> (speaking Spanish) >> Rufina was one of the few survivors, and told the reporters of how government soldiers had laid siege to her town. >> She talked about seeing her husband pulled away, the kids screaming. She was so numb. I don't think she even shed a tear in the telling. Could we believe this woman, a peasant woman, sitting in the middle of the field, pretty much in shock herself? >> After two weeks of reporting in the region, Bonner and Meiselas's story landed on the front page of "The New York Times." It detailed the massacre of over 700 people in El Mozote and the surrounding villages by an elite Salvadoran military unit... (music playing)...the Atlacatl Battalion. >> It was the most elite unit in the Salvadoran army. >> They've been specially trained by the United States Green Berets and they are undoubtedly the cream of the Salvadoran army. >> It was an American-trained battalion, and equipped. All their uniforms, all their M16 rifles, the helicopters that flew them into El Mozote, all supplied by the United States. >> The U.S.-backed Salvadoran government quickly denied the allegations. (fires) But inside the American embassy, they realized they had a problem. >> The news doesn't get any bigger than this. Front page of "The New York Times." Front page of "The Washington Post." >> At the time, Todd Greentree was a junior officer at the embassy. >> There was a lot going on at the time. I mean, there were death squad killings every day. We were associated with a government of which major elements were conducting state terror. And if it meant killing women and children, well, they were just the by-product of this. So, it was in that context that I received a message that there had been this massacre. >> The news reports

about the massacre in El Mozote were explosive

they landed just days before congressional hearings on continuing aid to El Salvador. The Reagan administration's Cold War strategy in Central America was on the line. >> It was a sense of realization from the start that what's at stake is the entire policy. That was the problem. >>

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As worries grew, Greentree and a military attach were sent to find out what happened in El Mozote. >> So, we flew out in a helicopter, and could see, you know, a fairly wide amount of destruction, so it was obvious there had been a military operation. We went out to a displaced persons' camp, where people had fled El Mozote and were gathered. That was a bit of a tricky situation, because we're being transported by Salvadoran soldiers. It was obvious that the people in that camp were traumatized, there was no question. I pretty much concluded that something had happened, something bad had happened. >> But Greentree and his partner wanted to reach El Mozote itself, which was in dangerous rebel-held territory. >> We finally got to a point where the sergeant who was in the jeep with us just stopped and said, "That's it, we're not going any farther." They were scared to death, basically. So we never reached the site. >> Back at the embassy, Greentree wrote up what he had seen. >> I drafted a report that basically said, "We can conclude from the evidence, from what we've seen, what people said, that there was a massacre." >> But that's not the report that reached Congress days later, when U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders went to testify. >> There is no evidence at all to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone, or that the number of civilians killed even remotely approached the 733 or 926 victims variously cited in the press. >> Greentree's initial report was never released, and to this day he says he doesn't know who changed his findings. The final draft, which Enders read from, described what happened as a military operation that resulted in civilian casualties. The U.S. would continue funding the Salvadoran military. Having averted the crisis, the Reagan administration went after the reporters for the "Times" and "Washington Post" who'd broken the El Mozote story. They had already been critical of how the press was covering America's involvement in El Salvador. >> It's not just El Salvador. If we took "The New York Times'" approach, I would guess that all of Central America-- at least all of Central America-- would be in the hands of governments which were manifestly unfriendly to the United States. >> Nobody believed Rufina. The denial, first to the State Department, and then, you know, the attacks more on you than on me, for writing what they accused you to, to have written as, you know, leftist propaganda, communist propaganda, whatever. >> The reaction was fury, vicious. They attacked us as reporters. "The Wall Street Journal" did a whole editorial damning me. "A reporter out on a limb," and... No, I was not prepared for that. The United States government was going to back the Salvadoran government come what may. And this was just another blip on the way to the support, so of course they were gonna claim we were lying. >> It really wasn't until the bones were exhumed that people believed. (men chanting in Spanish) >> For the next decade, the story of El Mozote receded as the civil war in El Salvador raged on. (guns firing) (crowd singing and clapping) Then, in January 1992, the government and the rebels reached a peace agreement. As part of the deal, both sides agreed to let the U.N. investigate alleged atrocities during the war. >> Last week, a U.N.-sponsored forensic team began digging in the remote village of El Mozote. In what used to be the local church, they have now found more than 40 skeletons, nearly all children and infants. >> There's also kids, just, like, three, four, five, six years old. >> Mercedes Doretti was one of the forensic anthropologists at the site. >> As we start digging, we start finding the children, one after the other one, after the other one. It was an extremely difficult situation to see. You see all these little dresses, we'll have to look at the pockets of the girls and little boys. And we found, you know, toys, all kind of little things that kid will have. You know, there were babies. The average age that was established was six years old. And we found 263 cartridge cases inside the convent or immediately outside. The majority of the ammunition that was found there was coming from the U.S. government. All the evidence pointed to large-scale extrajudicial execution. >> The forensic scientists say everything they have found is consistent with what human rights groups have said for years, that American-trained Salvadoran troops went on a four-day rampage, massacring 800 to 1,000 civilians while in search of leftist guerrillas. >> That had a very big impact. I mean, Rufina Maya was there during that. She said, "Now we see the truth. Now we have the proof of what happened." >> The exhumation of the convent attracted an enormous amount of international press, and seeing all these little skulls and little remains of, of all these kids, I think that the government wanted to stop that kind of images and that kind of news to come out. >> A U.N. report would go on to accuse senior members of the Salvadoran military of human rights abuses during the war, including at El Mozote. >> (speaking Spanish) >> Within days of the report, the Salvadoran congress passed a sweeping law granting amnesty to anyone implicated in the atrocities. >> (speaking Spanish) >> I was 21 years old. I wrote it down, right, the day they passed the amnesty law. And I wrote... (speaking Spanish) "Here is our homeland, dancing with the deaths of its own kids."

That was the amnesty law for me

a party made up over dead people. I still feel the same. >>

NARRATOR

Carlos Dada founded the investigative news site "El Faro." He and his colleagues kept pursuing the story, pushing for someone to be held accountable. >> The fact that you pass an amnesty law or the fact that the official narrative is, "Let's leave behind everything and move on," doesn't take the victims anywhere. They are still there. There are still thousands of mothers looking for their disappeared. There are still thousands of people that feel they have not been served justice. Well, they still remember their killed children, their killed husbands, their killed neighbors. What happened in El Mozote was the worst massacre post-World War II in all Latin America. That's what happened at El Mozote. What happened after the massacre is a cover-up of the massacre. I don't think you can hide the killing of 1,000 people. I just don't think you can do that. >> Over the following years, victims' remains were returned to their families, and the government apologized. But there was little movement towards holding anyone accountable. Then, in 2016, on the 35th anniversary of El Mozote, the Supreme Court of El Salvador sided with human rights groups and victims' lawyers, and overturned the amnesty law. >> The Supreme Court ruled that the amnesty law was unconstitutional, and this allowed for the opening of some of the cases that had been left into oblivion by the amnesty law. The first of those cases was El Mozote. >> Ray Bonner, now working for "Retro Report" and "ProPublica," returned to El Salvador to cover the developments. >> The last time I was here, I walked in. >> He visited the scene of the massacre, where people were streaming in to pay tribute at a memorial that had been erected. >> "140 of them children less than 12 years old." (whistles) >> (singing in Spanish) (others join in singing) >> Did you see them killed? >> (speaking Spanish) >> Bonner tracked down a witness who was going to testify at a preliminary hearing about the massacre. Amadeo Martinez Sanchez was eight years old when Salvadoran soldiers killed 24 of his relatives, including his mother and his siblings, the youngest only a year old. >> (speaking Spanish) >> Days later, pre-trial hearings were getting underway in the nearby town of San Francisco Gotera for more than a dozen former high-ranking military officers. Bonner joined "El Faro" journalist Nelson Rauda in the tiny courthouse. >> (speaking Spanish) >> We're a country that maybe has some sort of amnesia with our history. There are some people that say that in El Mozote, what was going on was a fight between the guerilla and the army, or that the amount of bodies in El Mozote is explained because it was a clandestine cemetery. >> All the officers contested the charges against them. >> (speaking Spanish) >> The hearings would stretch on for several years. >> (speaking Spanish) >> But in 2020, there was a breakthrough. Former air force commander General Juan Bustillo said in court that Salvadoran soldiers carried out the massacre. >> The trial is a landmark in, in our democracy. It might set a new page for El Salvador, and build up on from there that killing 989 people, majority of children, cannot go without punishment in, in our country. >> After nearly five years of pre-trial hearings, the judge in the case, Jorge Guzman, was on the verge of taking the case to trial. But the president of El Salvador had other plans. >> (speaking Spanish) >> President Nayib Bukele has described himself as "the world's coolest dictator." He's made Bitcoin an official currency of El Salvador, rallied the military behind him, and pushed his country towards authoritarianism. >> The Bukele administration has gained control over everything that they can control, and the things that they cannot control, they attack. >> In the summer of 2021, he effectively purged the judiciary, paving the way for allies to be appointed by his handpicked Supreme Court. Among the casualties was Judge Guzman. >> (speaking Spanish) >> Bukele had been critical of those who'd brought the El Mozote case. >> (speaking Spanish) >> The president had even blocked Judge Guzman from accessing military records, despite a court order. >> The president attacked the judge, he attacked the victims, he attacked the organizations, he attacked the lawyers of the victims, and he attacked the press. We are now at a state where Judge Guzman had brought the case to nearly the brink of having a decision, to a point where we don't know if the case is going to continue, and if it continues, how it will continue. >> The judge spoke to Rauda after leaving the case. >> (speaking Spanish) >> The current president of El Salvador does not want this case to go forward, just, the elite in that country, the ruling class in that country, does not want accountability. It's that simple. They didn't want it in 1982, and they don't want it today. >> As for the United States, many Salvadorans say that it should be doing more to challenge Bukele's actions. And given America's history in their country, it should at least issue an apology. >> Imagine if you have 24 of your relatives killed, and the U.S. government says, "Nothing happened there." The U.S. kept backing up a government that were violating human rights because of a greater goal of stopping communism. And after it occurred, the U.S. government tried to cover up the massacre. >> Unfortunately, we don't see the implications of, of much of what we do in the world. It's always beyond our sight. Can the truth help Salvador outlive hate? This is the important thing. >> If you can't have justice in the El Mozote trial, can you have justice in El Salvador? The answer is clearly no. >> (speaking Spanish) Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org >> For more on this and other "Frontline" programs, visit our website at pbs.org/frontline. FRONTLINE's, "Pandora Papers" and "Massacre in El Salvador" are available on Amazon Prime Video.