The Massacre at El Mozote

"There’s not a really well developed historical scholarship on the period, so I wanted to recommend books that give a vivid sense of the era. When I teach, sometimes the first book I have students read is The Massacre at El Mozote, which is very eye-opening to young people. They’re not aware of the tremendous political conflict that wracked the United States during the 1980s over policy towards Central America and the Caribbean Basin. Mark Danner’s book is about massacres that were carried out in late 1981 in El Salvador. The Atlacatl battalion was a Salvadoran army battalion that had been trained by US Army personnel and so was considered a source of great pride by the United States. They perpetrated massacres of probably 500-800 people in and around the village of El Mozote, during a period of terrible civil war and bloody counter-insurgency in El Salvador. It was a counter-insurgency that was funded, fueled, and very, very strongly supported by the United States and particularly by the Reagan administration. It was, in the end, a frightful policy and a very bloody policy. It was controversial in the United States, but one of the things you realize by the end of Danner’s book is that, despite all of these horrid revelations — which came to light in the United States in 1982 — it really did not affect US policy. There were investigations, there was some gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth in public but US policy continued as it was. It was a very dogged commitment of Reagan’s personally, to wage this counter-insurgency warfare in Central America and to reclaim the Caribbean Sea as an American Lake, to use a term that was once popular. Only with the ending of the Cold War did members of the US Congress finally prove willing to pull the plug on funding for the counterinsurgency in El Salvador. And that didn’t happen until George HW Bush had become president. Danner’s book, with its highly clinical and very specific, very factual, presentation, brings home the horror of this episode very vividly. I’m not sure they would be completely unacceptable to people now. I’m not sure that much has changed. The question of race is a very important one in the phenomenon of Reaganism, it’s right there on the surface of the Reagan appeal and the conservative movement in the 1980s. But I would treat it separately from the issue of Central American policy. I do think that for Reagan and his supporters the lives lost in Central America were not very real to them. I don’t know if that was strictly speaking a question of race, or not. It was the atmosphere of the Cold War and that’s the framework that Danner thinks is most important in understanding US policy. Reagan was the presidential candidate who began the tradition of Republican presidential aspirants paying respectful pilgrimage to Bob Jones University, which was a segregationist university in South Carolina. Reagan had been against every civil rights law passed by Congress and signed by presidents from the 1960s onward. He had a very clear position, which is that he didn’t think the United States government should play a major role in civil rights at the federal level. He was just not that sympathetic to civil rights advocates and people of color. They were not an important part of his political coalition. In 1984, Reagan was reelected in a landslide. 85% of Americans who voted in that election were white. Reagan got two-thirds of their votes and you do the math. That was Reagan’s political base. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s important to understand that Reagan’s position was the movement conservative position in America from the 1960s through to the 1980s — that the civil rights movement was not an admirable movement and that the major civil rights laws of the era were not salutary and should be opposed. Reagan did accept the major laws after they were passed. He did not try to undo them. In fact, in 1982, he signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a law that he had opposed when it was first passed. His willingness to sign the extension was, I think, evidence of his political realism. “Reagan had been against every civil rights law passed by Congress and signed by presidents from the 1960s onward.” Reagan’s lack of sympathy with civil rights wasn’t simply a matter of his generation, but rather his deep involvement in the conservative movement. And I think a lot of people who have written about the conservative movement in that period have really soft-pedalled the question of race. It was central in the crystallization of their movement and central to their agenda, to resist the push for civil rights in the name of liberty. It was part of their general individualist social ethics and the neo-liberal view that the state should be a weak state. Reagan was not an advocate of white supremacy but he sided with segregationist forces throughout his political career, from the 1960s onward. It’s that simple. No. There were enormous numbers of people who opposed it in this country and elsewhere. I think it would be a mistake for us to say that either on the question of civil rights and race, or on the question of US foreign policy during the Cold War that it would have been somehow impossible or difficult for people of that time or generation to have taken different views, because enormous numbers of people did take different views. These were matters of great division and controversy."