When we passed through El Mozote we made an effort to convince people, we could perceive that something bad would happen. But people were not willing to leave because they would lose their houses, their belongings, their animals. It takes a lot of effort to have those things and they really cared for them, and also they thought nothing will happen. But the army did do the massacre.
After a few weeks we went back...I remember the panorama, all destroyed, and it was a pretty town, it was a hamlet but with the size and profile of a town… very pretty but everything was destroyed. It smelled of death and there were people who were not completely buried yet. It had a huge impact on me. I had arrived one year before to El Mozote to preach, to talk about hope, to tell the people that the war would be a hard time, but it would end and then we would live in a different country. And precisely where I preached and talked of hope, the massacre happened.
-El Faro, "Cuando le apuntan, el cristiano tiene derecho a defenderse, a apuntar también", 2014
Padre Rogelio Ponceland Padre Pedro, both Belgian priests who have lived in El Salvador for 27 years, give mass honoring the victims on the 20th anniversary of the El Mozote massacre. El Mozote, El Salvador 2001
Family members carry the coffins with exhumed remains through the plaza of El Mozote, El Salvador 2001
Team holding photograph taken by Susan Meiselas in Jan. 1982, showing the walls of a burned house and charred remains under the fallen ceramic roof tiles. The two story cement house in th background is the only structure that reveals the location of that home today, which the team plans to evaluate for future exhumations.
Obituary for Rufina Amaya, The New York Times, March 9, 2007