The massacre at El Mozote was a tragic event that occurred at the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War and it remains one of the most brutal moments in Latin American history. This essay seeks to explain the incidence of the massacre, the egregious level of violence involved, and the varied interpretations and uses of the story by different parties in its aftermath. By examining the historical contexts in the Modern Latin America (8th edition) textbook, primary accounts from Mark Danner’s The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War, and the film Innocent Voices, this essay provides a comprehensive understanding of the massacre and its broader implications. The Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992) was a conflict rooted in deep social, …show more content…
Danner describes the meticulous execution as part of a broader strategy to eliminate any potential support for the FMLN coalition group by instilling fear in the civilian population. Nevertheless, the act of violence highlights the role that U.S. military aid plays in enabling the entire “conduct of relations with” (Danner, 223) the government. The level of violence displayed in the massacre was shocking by the standards of the Salvadoran Civil War. The deliberate targeting of civilians, including children, underscores the brutality of the military’s tactics. This egregious violence can be understood as a form of psychological warfare aimed at breaking the will of the FMLN and their perceived supporters. By making an example of El Mozote, the government sought to deter other villages from aiding the FMLN. The film Innocent Voices, directed by Luis Mandoki, complements the accounts of Danner by providing a visual representation of the violence. The movie focuses on the experiences of civilians, particularly children during the Salvadoran Civil War. The film’s protagonist, Chava, is an 11-year-old boy living in a village similar to El
Mark Danner, an editor for the New York Times magazine, recounts in The Massacre at El Mozote a horrific crime against humanity committed by a branch of the Salvadorian army. He gives multiple points of views and cites numerous eye witnesses to try and piece together something that has been tucked away by the government at the time. In December, of 1981, news reports were leaked to major newspapers in the united states about an atrocity committed and a total massacre of a hamlet in El Salvador, known as El Mozote, or the Thicket. At first, the account was of over a thousand civilians, women men and children with no guerrilla affiliation were massacred. Danner pieces together the testimonies of the survivors, and interviews with officers in the Salvadorian army.
It is no secret that the United States has a history of economic and political interventions in countries around the world, especially in Latin America. By comparing the lives of the characters in Tobar’s novel, The Tattooed Soldier, to events that occurred in Latin American history, this paper will focus specifically on how U.S. imperialism, political and economic interventions in the central American countries of Guatemala and El Salvador forced many to flee and immigrate to the United states. Where the newly immigrated Central Americans faced lives of hardships and poverty compared to other Latin communities such as the Cubans who had an easier migration due to their acquisition of the refuge status.
When focusing on Nicaragua one will need to pay close attention to the rebel group called the Sandinistas who took over Nicaragua’s previous dictator, Anastasio Somoza in 1979, in which the United States Congress decided it would be best to provide them with aid that lasted till 1981.1 Nicaragua’s geographic location made it a big concern for President Reagan based on his philosophy that surrounded the Reagan Doctrine. At that point, President Reagan ended the aid deal and adamantly advised that support be sent to those who were trying to over throw the new socialized, Sandinista leadership.2 Furthermore, the Nicaraguan’s were dealing with some of the worst warfare ever, by the mass killings that took place, which were at the mercy of death squads.3 This gruesome realization allowed President Reaga...
During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book out o...
In the novel All The Shah’s Men we are introduced to Iran, and the many struggles and hardships associated with the history of this troubled country. The Iranian coup is discussed in depth throughout the novel, and whether the Untied States made the right decision to enter into Iran and provide assistance with the British. If I were to travel back to 1952 and take a position in the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) for the sole purpose of examining the American Foreign Intelligence, I would have to conclude that the United States should have examined their options more thoroughly, and decided not to intervene with Iran and Mossadegh. I have taken this position after great analysis, which is something that Eisenhower and his staff never did. By discussing the history of Iran, the Anglo-Iranian oil company, and Document NSC-68 I will try to prove once and for all that going through with the coup in Iran was a terrible mistake made by the United States.
David W. Blight's book Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War, is an intriguing look back into the Civil War era which is very heavily studied but misunderstood according to Blight. Blight focuses on how memory shapes history Blight feels, while the Civil War accomplished it goal of abolishing slavery, it fell short of its ultimate potential to pave the way for equality. Blight attempts to prove that the Civil War does little to bring equality to blacks. This book is a composite of twelve essays which are spilt into three parts. The Preludes describe blacks during the era before the Civil War and their struggle to over come slavery and describes the causes, course and consequences of the war. Problems in Civil War memory describes black history and deals with how during and after the war Americans seemed to forget the true meaning of the war which was race. And the postludes describes some for the leaders of black society and how they are attempting to keep the memory and the real meaning of the Civil War alive and explains the purpose of studying historical memory.
The Civil War in El Salvador lasted from 1980 to 1992, and the El SAlvadoran government was doing their best to minimize the threat of their opposition. Their main opposition, The Frente Farabundo Marti Para La Liberacion Nacional; otherwise known as the FMLN, was a guerrilla group that was organized to fight the corruption in the country. 175). One of the main goals of the organization was to create a new society that is not degrading its citizens and promotes equality. Throughout El Salvador’s history, one organization to the next would run the country through repressive actions and social injustice. One of the main reasons that the FMLN fought the acting government were due to these social restraints on the lower- class citizens in El Salvador.
The Return of Martin Guerre written by Natalie Davis gives the audience a rare glimpse into the world of peasant life in sixteenth century France. It also allows a modern day audience a chance to examine and to compare their own identities and questions of self. What makes the story so interesting to modern day viewers and readers is how relevant the story and the people in it are to our own times. This story is about a history of everyday people rather than royalty and generals, history's usual subjects.
Beginning in the late 1970s Liberation Theology, Marxism, and U.S. Cold War policy collided in El Salvador culminating in a civil war that lasted over a decade and ultimately produced democratic political institutions that persist into the 21st century. Despite the prejudices against the church on behalf of government and media organizations in the U.S. and El Salvador, religious actors fought for human rights and the implementation of democratic institutions throughout the period of conflict. The Salvadoran Civil War, which occurred in the context of the Cold War, was one of the bloodiest and longest events in the history of Latin America after the Guatemalan Civil War. The conflict lasted from 1979 to 1992, left approximately 75,000 people dead, and a country in ashes. The conflict started after the fraudulent elections of the Coronel Arturo Armando Molina (1972), who focused his term on repressing the communist political parties that wanted to work for a social reform. This aroused the anger of the popular sectors, which started to organize groups and demonstrations demanding fair election and improvement of social conditions. The government responded to their demands with savage violence, focusing primarily on the oppression of campesinos because they were the ones who supported the revolutionary leftist forces. These actions alienated the Salvadoran population even more and caused many people in the Catholic Church to start denouncing the government’s actions. Thus, as the Civil War started to rise, the church started to radicalize and to and spoke up against the government’s actions. One of its most fervent advocates was Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who during his short time as the Archbishop of San Salvador manifested hi...
This essay will study the Central Intelligence Agency’s intervention in Guatemala, and how they assisted Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas in the coup d’état against Jacobo Arbenz. It will describe the reasons of the intervention, the United States’ interest in Guatemala, and how it affected Guatemalans. Such events help explain much about the role that the United States has in their own migration. The paper argues that the United States’ political interest in Guatemala played a fundamental role in the migration of Guatemalans to its borders. As a result of this intervention, Guatemala suffered one of its worse political periods in their history. Guatemala experienced a period of political instability that led the country into social chaos, where many Guatemalans opted to migrate to the United States.
The “Panama Deception,” directed by Barbara Trent of the Empowerment Project and narrated by actress Elizabeth Montgomery, observes a distinct failure to implement 20th-century democracy in Latin America in the late '80s and early '90s. More specifically, the film documents the U.S. invasion of Panama under "Operation Just Cause” during this period, showing how the cause was anything but just. Rather, the film shows how the Operation intended to impose a biased renegotiation of the aforementioned treaties.
War and violence in Central America is a result of governmental injustice due to the United States’ foreign policies. The United States supported El Salvador with weapons and money throughout the civil war. As a result of enforcing these policies, El Salvador’s poverty, population and crime rate increased. The books “…After…” by Carolina Rivera Escamilla and “The Tattooed Soldier” by Hector Tobar give us a glimpse of the issues Central Americans faced.
Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about the war and about the Americans. In The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explores the truth of The Vietnam War by vividly describing the dead body and the imagined life of the man he has killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to have no point to him.
Between the years of 1976 to 1983, the period known as the ‘Dirty War’ was in full force in Argentina. During this period, thousands of people mysteriously went missing, and are referred to now as the ‘Disappeared’. It is believed that many of the disappeared were taken by agents of the Argentine government, and perhaps tortured and killed before their bodies were disposed of in unmarked graves or rural areas. Whenever the female captives were pregnant, their children were stolen away right after giving birth, while they themselves remained detained. It is estimated that 500 young children and infants were given to families with close ties to the military to be raised. Within this essay I would like to touch on the brief history of the Dirty war and why the military felt it was necessary to take and kill thousands of Argentina’s, and also the devastating affects the disappeared, and stolen children are having on living relatives of those taken or killed. It is hard to imagine something like this happening in North America relatively recently. To wakeup and have members of your family missing, with no explanation, or to one day be told your parents are not biologically related is something Argentina’s had to deal with, and are continuing to face even today.
Preston, Paul. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2007. Print.