A return to El Mozote

by Anton Zuiker on May 26, 2025

The Truth of El Mozote, in the New Yorker (Dec. 6, 1993)

Throughout its centennial year, the New Yorker is inviting its contributors to revisit notable works from its archive. They didn’t ask me, but I’m offering my take anyway, on the long feature that made up nearly the entire Dec. 6, 1993 issue.

In December 1993, I was a year-and-a-half out of college and living with my father and a brother in Honolulu. I was working two jobs, joining a djembe drum circle under a banyan tree one night a week, surfing on the weekends, and running on my lunch breaks. I was active, overstimulated, exhausted, and lonely—the love of my life was still in college (and studying in Austria for the semester), and I still had hopes of being an accomplished magazine journalist, a Peace Corps Volunteer, a globetrotting pacifist.

One day after my shift as a corporate writer, I walked to nearby Ala Moana Mall and into the Honolulu Book Shop, where I browsed the shelves of magazines. There was the new issue of the New Yorker, with its colorful cover art (In the Field, by Owen Smith) showing Death stalking campesinos in a field of maize, the wrapper blaring “The Massacre at El Mozote.” That’s all the editors were promoting for this issue, which was devoted entirely to the single long feature report, by Mark Danner, about a 1981 massacre at a mountain village in El Salvador.

At John Carroll University, the Jesuit university outside of Cleveland, I had studied liberation theology and narrative nonfiction, learned about the martyrdom of Archbishop Óscar Romero and Cleveland’s own Dorothy Kazel, and read dense, intense novels in a class called Latin American Dictators in Literature. This investigation about El Mozote, naturally, was something I had to read. I purchased the magazine and walked home.

Danner’s report opens as a team of specialists, arriving in El Mozote 11 years after the massacre, carefully excavate the ruined church and its skeletons. “By the next afternoon, the workers had uncovered twenty-five of them, and all but two were the skulls of children.” The murders of the children, and the men and women, too, will be described in horrific detail later. Across 80 pages of the magazine, Danner gives a clear and compelling recounting of the killings, as well as focus on the Salvadoran military personalities and the U.S. political pressures that mixed in this small nation and allowed such an atrocity to occur.

By early 1992, when a peace agreement between the government and the guerrillas was finally signed, Americans had spent more than four billion dollars funding a civil war that had lasted twelve years and left seventy-five thousand Salvadorans dead.

I read The Truth of El Mozote in its entirety that December. Danner’s reporting enlightened me. It saddened me. It inspired me a new to a life of writing and justice. It also hooked me on the New Yorker, and I have read most of the issues of the magazine over the last 30 years, sitting in coffee shops, standing in commuter trains, and swinging in hammocks (I paid the international subscription rate to get the magazine at my Peace Corps village in the South Pacific).

I’ve always remembered the tragedy in that first purchase, which I still have. I found it in a box of saved magazines and I reread it over the last few days, taking notes.

The killings of hundreds of men, women, and children at El Mozote during the El Salvador civil war in 1981, wrote Danner, “represented the climax of the era of the great massacres.”

That’s a line that comes toward the end of the report, and for a moment, sitting on the patio in front of a fire, a gentle rain falling on this Memorial Day, I naively read that as a larger hope for humanity. But I realized that the Rwandan genocide would unfold five months later, then the Srebrenica massacre (July 1995), 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, later the Mariupol theatre airstrike (2022), the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel and Israel’s subsequent scorched-earth response in Gaza (2023-2025). Sadly, war and terror and massacres continue.

It was not the last of them—most notably, in August of 1982 the Atlacatl, in an operation similar to that in El Mozote, killed some two hundred people at El Calabozo, in the Department of San Vincente—but after El Mozote the Army relied less and less on search-and-destroy operations that entailed large-scale killings of civilians.

El Salvador survived, and peace prevailed. Sadly, that nation has returned to the pages of the New Yorker as the current administration begins to send money and deportees to a prison there.

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