I've never seen a testimony that bizarre. Is he afraid to admit the truth, or is he simply laughing in everyones' faces?
Clearly, even Helen Keller would have heard about THAT unbearable event a long time ago. There would have been shock waves in that country going on for ages afterward.
http://www.markdanner.com.nyud.net:8090/images/harvard3.png
http://cache.daylife.com.nyud.net:8090/imageserve/0cnA70o5M57hb/610x.jpg
23 months ago: Relatives of Rufina Amaya, the only survivor of a massacre of more than one thousand farmers during the last civil war in El Salvador, carry her coffing during her funeral 09 March 2007 at El Mozote town where the massacre ocurred. Amaya died of a cardiac arrest.
- Survivor of El Mozote Massacre Passes
Rufina Amaya, human rights activist and survivor of the El Mozote Massacre passed on Tuesday March 6, 2007 due to heart failure. She was a mother, grandmother, friend and hero to many.
In 1981 an SOA-trained Salvadoran army battalion known as the Atlacatl Battalion swept through the region of Morazon in a campaign to root out guerillas and their sympathizers. In a shocking turn of events, nearly one thousand peasants were slaughtered in the village of El Mozote.
As the sole survivor, Rufina's brave testimony of the massacre shed light on the atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military and uncovered the Reagan administration's role in providing training and millions of dollars in military aid to a government with a complete disregard for human rights.
The Atlacatl Battalion continued to commit atrocities in El Salvador, including the murder of six Jesuit priests and two Salvadoran women at the University of Central America on November 16, 1989.
?God saved me because he needed someone to tell the story of what happened.? Rufina Amaya continued to be an outspoken and compelling witness to what may have been the largest massacre in modern Latin American history until the day of her death.
Rufina's legacy will live on in the hearts of the people of Latin America and the world.
http://www.soaw.org/article.php?id=1515http://d.yimg.com.nyud.net:8090/fu/p/081209/afp/isgegpj05091208175250photo01.jpg"Early on the morning of December 11, 1981, soldiers from the elite US-trained Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran armed forces roused residents from their beds and hustled them to the center of town. Men and women were separated and locked in various places, including the church and convent. For the entire day, and into the next and the next, soldiers terrorized and executed everyone they captured, often to sadistic extremes - women and girls were marched into the hills to be raped, infants were speared with bayonets, a group of children was locked in the church and machine gunned through the windows. Many of the bodies were left to rot, others were burned along with the village houses. In all, at least 767 people were killed."
http://notesfromlatinamerica.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.htmlhttp://www.sacredheartsjm.org.nyud.net:8090/assets/images/El_Salvador_013.jpg http://farm3.static.flickr.com.nyud.net:8090/2047/2373985985_f510ff8f78.jpg
Garden planted where some of the innocents fell~snip~
El Salvador was traditionally ruled by a small group of wealthy oligarchs(Fourteen Families), who had close-knit ties with the US government and traditionally represented the interests of US companies than those of the average Salvadoran campesinos. Anger and discontent mounted among the nation's mistreated masses, and through the 60's and the 70's the opposition composed of workers, peasants, students and church leaders began to radicalize. The Salvadoran right-wing government's response to the opposition was harsher oppression, martial laws, and death squads(who were mostly off-duty policemen or soldiers, veterans, and street gangsters).
In 1979(the same year US-friendly regimes in Iran and Nicaragua were deposed) the right-wing government of Carlos Humberto Romero was replaced with the Revolutionary Government Junta(Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno; JRG), a group of young, moderate and more democratic army officers. JRG began economic and social reforms, but there were disagreements within the junta on how to deal with the growing communist insurgency. Moderates wanted the communist party to be legalized and accepted into the political realm, while hawks wanted to escalate the oppression and keep hunting the guerillas down. Eventually the ultra right-wing faction prevailed. Crackdowns would continue, and death squads with names such as "ORDEN" and Maximiliano Hernández Martínez" would kill anyone they suspected of being communist sympathizers with brazenness.
On March 24 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero, the widely repected Catholic priest of San Salvador who spoke out against the ruling oligarchy, criticized the military junta's violation of human rights and the persecution of the Catholic church(who were influenced by liberation theology and championed for the rights of the campesinos and workers) and publically requested the US government to stop supporting the regime, was fatally shot by the death squads as he was celebrating Mass. His funeral on March 30 became the scene of a brutal carnage, when bombs exploded and gunmen(whose identies were never identified) fired into the crowd. More than 44 mourners died at the spot. The death of Romero further polarized the situation.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?p=3912649