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http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Danner/1993/truthelmoz01.htmlBut follow the stony dirt track, which turns and twists through the woodland, and in a few minutes you enter a large clearing, and here all is quiet. No one has returned to El Mozote. Empty as it is, shot through with sunlight, the place remains -- as a young guerrilla who had patrolled here during the war told me with a shiver -- espantoso: spooky, scary, dreadful. After a moment's gaze, half a dozen battered structures -- roofless, doorless, windowless, half engulfed by underbrush -- resolve themselves into a semblance of pattern: four ruins off to the right must have marked the main street, and a fifth the beginning of a side lane, while an open area opposite looks to have been a common, though no church can be seen -- only a ragged knoll, a sort of earthen platform nearly invisible beneath a great tangle of weeds and brush.... They pounded stakes into the ground and marked off the mound with bright-yellow tape; they stretched lengths of twine this way and that to divide it into quadrangles; they brought out tape measures and rulers and levels to record its dimensions and map its contours. And then they began to dig. At first, they loosened the earth with hoes, took it up in shovels, dumped it into plastic pails, and poured it onto a screen large enough to require several people to shake it back and forth. As they dug deeper, they exchanged these tools for smaller, more precise ones: hand shovels, trowels, brushes, dustpans, screens. Slowly, painstakingly, they dug and sifted, making their way through the several feet of earth and crumbled adobe -- remnants of a building's walls -- and, by the end of the second day, reaching wood-beam splinters and tile shards, many now blackened by fire, that had formed the building's roof. Then, late on the afternoon of the third day, as they crouched low over the ground and stroked with tiny brushes to draw away bits of reddish dust, darkened forms began to emerge from the earth, taking shape in the soil like fossils embedded in stone; and soon they knew that they had begun to find, in the northeast corner of the ruined sacristy of the church of Santa Catarina of El Mozote, the skulls of those who had once worshipped there. By the next afternoon, the workers had uncovered twenty-five of them, and all but two were the skulls of children.More... Why remember El Mozote? Because, 23 years after the massacre of some 900 Salvadoran innocents by the American-trained Atlacatl Battalion, the sons of bitches who are running this country are planning the same kind of operations in Iraq. Salvador Option from the BBC Truthout on the Salvador OptionDemocrats - cooperation with these bastards is unacceptable.
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