Survivors of massacre ask: 'why did they have to kill those children?'

But after a recent court decision, they have finally begun to speak out publicly, describing in grim detail the four days in December 1981 when Salvadoran military units, trained and equipped by the United States, killed almost 1,000 people in the largest single massacre in recent Latin American history.

“Miraculously, God spared us so that we could tell what happened,” said Dorila Márquez, 61, sitting on the covered terrace of the rebuilt house she fled with her husband and small children when she was 25. As the young family ran that day, they heard screams and gunfire behind them.

Survivors like Márquez had faint hope they would ever see justice. But a provincial judge has reopened a long-dormant trial over the massacre at El Mozote, ordering the retired military commanders who once sowed terror across El Salvador to hear charges of war crimes in his 40-seat courtroom.

“Why did they do it, why did they have to kill those children?” said Márquez, reliving her anger and grief at the moment when she finally saw the generals in the courtroom.

The massacre occurred in the midst of a conflict in El Salvador that became a singular focus of Washington’s battle against communism in the final decade of the Cold War.

As soon as President Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, he increased military aid and sent Special Forces instructors to El Salvador, whose army was fighting the leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or the FMLN.

In December of that year, the Salvadoran army began a campaign to flush out insurgents from the northern hills of eastern Morazán province. According to accounts by a United Nations truth commission and a later ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the operation began with an aerial and artillery bombardment of El Mozote before the soldiers marched in Dec. 10 and began interrogating villagers about the guerrillas.

The following morning, they ordered everyone into the town square, separating the men and women, and shoving the children into a small building known as the convent alongside the village church.

Throughout that day, the soldiers methodically executed everyone in the village. They killed the children last, firing a barrage of bullets into the convent and then setting it aflame. An exhumation more than a decade later found the remains of at least 143 victims in that building. The average age was 6.

The same day, the soldiers continued on to La Joya, a hamlet tucked along a valley, where they hauled people out of their homes, shot them and set fire to their houses.

After the government and the FMLN signed peace accords in 1992, a U.N.-backed truth commission described 32 cases of human rights abuses during the civil war, including El Mozote, and named those whom investigators believed were responsible.

Five days after the United Nations issued its report in 1993, the national assembly in El Salvador granted amnesty for crimes committed during the war. Impunity for the atrocities carried out — as many as 85,000 civilians were killed or disappeared in the conflict — was now enshrined in law, and it appeared military leaders would remain untouchable.

That ended two years ago, when the Salvadoran Supreme Court overturned the amnesty.

Lawyers for the survivors asked a provincial judge to reopen a trial that had begun in 1990, and he agreed.

While the Mozote case is one of the few exceptions where evidence was compiled before the amnesty law, prosecuting a crime that occurred more than 35 years ago will not be easy.

“The amnesty law was pernicious,” said Naomi Roht-Arriaza, a law professor at the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California who follows historical human rights violations in Latin America. “Now we’re at a point where the courts are starting these cases in very difficult conditions regarding evidence.”

For many witnesses, though, the events remain seared on their memories.

In the attack on La Joya, soldiers killed 24 relatives of Rosario López, 70, including her parents, two sisters and 17 nieces and nephews.

When the shooting started, her husband, José de Los Angeles Mejía, now 72, took his three children up a hill to hide, then went back for his wife. The two of them escaped just ahead of the troops.

“I heard the commotion, the prayers, from where I was hiding up in the mountain,” he said. “There was shooting at a bunch of kids and some of them cried — and others had stopped.”

Mejía clambered down the mountain five days later to La Joya’s silent horror. He found the body of one of his wife’s sisters, her dress hiked up, her underwear tossed on a rock. He covered her.

The bodies of children were stacked in a pile, their faces unrecognizable. “I said to myself: What barbarity!” he recalled.

Another survivor, José Amparo Martínez, 66, returned to La Joya to look for his mother, days after he had fled with his wife and four young children. He found her body under the collapsed wood of her burned house. “Everybody did what little they could to bury the bones,” he said.

After La Joya, the troops moved on to surrounding villages, killing 978 people in total. Almost half the victims were younger than 12, according to government records provided late last year to El Faro, an online newspaper in San Salvador.

The slaughter was akin to genocide, said the Rev. José María Tojeira, the director of the Human Rights Institute of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University in San Salvador, the capital. “The country has to be aware of that brutality, and in a democracy, that awareness is acknowledged in the judicial system,” he said. “It is the only way.”

As the trial has slowly unspooled in the provincial capital of San Francisco Gotera, the evidence given by survivors has helped to establish what happened. But it has yet to show why the soldiers killed civilians so relentlessly, and who had ordered them to do so.

Eighteen elderly men are facing preliminary charges of murder, aggravated rape and terrorism — accused of being the architects and executors of the scorched-earth assault.

“What is so compelling about this trial is that the prosecutors for the victims have finally gone up the chain of command,” said Terry L. Karl, a Stanford University political scientist who follows El Salvador. “The trial hopefully will provide more understanding about what the military strategy was and why these families died.”

At the top of the pyramid of those standing trial is a retired general, José Guillermo García Merino, 84, who served as the defense minister from 1979 to 1983.

Granted asylum by the United States in 1990, he was sent back to El Salvador in 2015. In the immigration court ruling ordering his deportation, Judge Michael C. Horn rejected García’s argument that the abuses occurred without his knowledge or against his orders. Instead, the judge wrote, the atrocities were part of García’s “deliberate military policy.”

For decades the Salvadoran military denied anything had occurred in El Mozote. Six weeks after the massacre, The New York Times and the The Washington Post published witness accounts, but García told the U.S. ambassador the reports were nothing but Marxist propaganda, according to State Department documents published by journalist Mark Danner in his 1994 book about the massacre.

Lizandro Quintanilla, a prominent defense lawyer representing one of the accused, retired Gen. Walter Salazar, said there are still questions about what occurred in El Mozote and that it was impossible to link the exhumed remains to the commanders facing trial.

“It isn’t a history from which we can infer any responsibility,” Quintanilla said, “to my client or the accused.”

The military men have appeared in court once to hear the charges. Survivors watched in silence.

“I wasn’t scared, but I felt angry, enraged,” said López, one of the witnesses in attendance. “I wanted to say something to them, but in front of the judge, it’s not permitted.”

The trial could run well into 2019, according to the judge, Jorge Guzmán Urquilla, who said in an interview he was committed to a fair trial, and uncovering the truth for survivors.

“These gaps, these holes in our history cannot persist,” Guzmán said. “They have to be filled.”

For the victims, the trial could finally answer essential questions, said María Sol Yañez, a social psychologist at Central American University.

“The survivors say they don’t even know who to forgive,” she said, adding a refrain she hears from the witnesses: “'What were we doing that they wanted to inflict so much harm on us?'”

The explanation could lie in the military archives, but the army has told the court that records of the operation do not exist.

What may help uncover the military secrets are records kept far from El Salvador.

U.S. support means that “the U.S. archives are chock-full of information about the El Mozote massacre,” said Kate Doyle, an El Salvador expert at the National Security Archive, an organization that seeks to declassify government documents.

The Clinton administration did release many records, but Doyle said there are more that El Salvador could ask the United States to declassify.

In El Mozote today, children ride bicycles across the plaza just steps from a monument to the victims. Some are identified simply as “son” or “daughter” along with the names of their parents. There was nobody left who knew their names.

A few survivors have returned after decades away.

Sofía Romero Pereira, 55, was raped by soldiers a few weeks before the massacre and fled the village. She stayed away until 2010. Her parents and four siblings were killed and she had long feared she could not bear the memories of her mother.

“Remembering is reliving the past,” Romero said, able now to repeat her story as many times as she must to obtain justice.

Finding justice is also what has been driving Márquez, the woman who escaped with her family in 1981 and has been a leader in the village’s efforts to finally hold those responsible accountable.

Looking out over a garden of bamboo and orange trees, she spoke of the men who had destroyed her village. “They will face God — but they also have to respect the law,” Márquez said. “What is the law if you don’t apply it?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.