Remembering El Mozote
For some strange reason, the story of El Mozote popped into my head this evening.
El Mozote was a small village in El Salvador. It was visited by the Atlacatl Battalion, a U.S.-trained counterinsurgency force, on Dec. 10, 1981.
The soldiers left on Dec. 11. They left behind more than 500 dead.
Raymond Bonner was then a New York Times correspondent in El Salvador. He broke the story of the massacare in a front-page article on Jan. 27, 1982. Another reporter, Alma Guillermoprieto, wrote a similar story for the Washington Post.
The Reagan administration went ballistic, denying there was such a massacre. It was joined by conservative media voices like the Wall Street Journal, which said it would be on Bonner's and the Times's conscience if El Salvador went the way of Cuba.
Executive editor Abe Rosenthal never uttered a word in Bonner's defence.
Seven months later, Bonner was pulled out of El Salvador and replaced by a kid off the business desk with no overseas experience.
Fast-forward to 1992.
Forensic anthropologists found the skeletons around El Mozote of men, women and children who had obviously been executed.
Then in mid-1993, a United Nations-sponsored “truth commission” concluded there had been a massacre conducted at El Mozote by U.S.-trained troops.
Vindication for Bonner.
I guess the lesson to be drawn is just because a government is kicking and screaming about a media report, and is supporting by the baying voices of the right, doesn't make the report wrong.
Apply what lessons you choose to the media controversies of today. :)