Denial (1994)

On the 10th of December, 1981, according to a 1992 investigation commissioned by the UN, units of the Atlacatl battalion, an elite battalion of the armed forces of El Salvador, along with a few other Salvadoran miiltary units, entered the town of El Mozote, El Salvador, and executed virtually the entire population, an estimated 794 people - men, women, and children; an exhumation in one building found 131 victims under the age of twelve, several infants between six months and a year. Witnesses of this event, however, survived. A very very lucky, very very few fled. Patry and Lacourse' film interviews two of the survivors, and tells the story of the massacre, in their words, besides interviewing a number of other people connected with the event, and with an alleged subsequent cover-up by the US administration at the time, allegedly related to congressional hearings approving further aid to the government of El Salvador. Interviewed at length: Rufina Almaya. Almaya was living in El Mozote at the time of the massacre; she reports seeing the military cut off her husband's head when he tried to escape; she escaped by kneeling down to pray, then creeping away through the bushes to hide until dark. Wilson Guevera Berera. Berera was born in El Mozote, and was eight years old at the time of the massacre. He reports that after witnessing other children being killed, he ran for it; shots fired at him missed. An unnamed civilian who reports he was working as a support worker for the military company which entered El Mozote. He reports witnessing rapes and executions, and the burning of the church, the children, inside, screaming. Raymond Bonner, former New York Times reporter. Bonner visited the site shortly after the massacre, and broke the story in the US on January 27, 1982. Later, in the face of official denials from the government of the US (the official line was there had been no massacre, that this had been a confrontation between the military and a guerilla force, this while aid packages for El Salvador were before the US Congress), Bonner's coverage was widely criticized as 'credulous'. The Times removed Bonner from the assignment in August 1982. Declassified documents later, however, confirmed the State Department had reason at the time to suspect the massacre had occurred. Also interviewed: Elliott Abrams, Assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights in 1982. Lieutenant Ricardo Castro, former Salvadoran miltary, exiled to the US. David Morris, US military advisor to El Salvador, 1980-1981. Morris took a team into El Salvador to train the Atlacatl battalion in 1980. Mercedes Doretti, from an Argentine team of forensic anthropologists, who conducted a forensic exhumation on the site in 1992.