To the deserted village of El Mozote
The relentlessly hedonist and strictly apolitical Lonely Planet World Guide describes El Salvador and its capital as “not the prettiest place in the world” since the central valley around the capital is a pollution trap.
Shantytowns abound and the streets are lined with people selling everything from bruised fruit to Velcro gun holsters just to get by... The city's central landmark is the domed Cathedral Metropolitana, where ArchBishop Oscar Romero is buried. [But the Guide doesn't manage to say how he died, assassinated by the US-trained “anticommunist” militia.] The cathedral faces onto the principal plaza, the Plaza Barrios. Nearby, the red-velvet opulence of the Teatro Nacional dates from 1917... The Museo Nacional David J Guzman holds most of the country's notable archaeological finds, and the Jardin Botanico La Laguna is an attractive garden built on what was once a swamp at the bottom of a volcanic crater...
Yes, yes, but where to go? Well, the Zona Rosa is the “ritziest and most exclusive restaurant and nightlife district” but better is to get to the closest beach to the capital, La Libertad, “about an hour-long trip by bus.” This, Lonely Planet describes as a “been there done that” surfer destination “with some of the best waves rolled out by the Pacific Ocean.” Unfortunately, if you don't surf, “there's not much else to do in this small seaside town full of dried, diced and just plain dead fish—all emitting a pungent, salty smell.”
Mind you, there are plenty of other things to smell in the forest...
In the Montecristo cloud forest, oak and laurel trees grow to 30 meters (98 feet), and their leaves form a canopy impenetrable to sunlight. Ferns, orchids, mushrooms and mosses coat the forest floor, and the local wildlife includes rare and protected spider monkeys, two-fingered anteaters, pumas, agoutis, toucans and striped owls...
And there are other things, some of them not so nice either. But we'll let journalist Mark Danner take up the story, and lead us to El Mozote, “the Thistle.” Its story, he says, is the central parable of the Cold War. Surely worth a stop.
Fly to San Salvador, rent a car and head off to the forest. Mark Danner again:
Heading up into the mountains of Morazán, in the bright, clear air near the Honduran border, you cross the Torola River, the wooden slats of the one-lane bridge clattering beneath your wheels, and enter what was the fiercest of El Salvador's zonas rojas—or “red zones,” as the military officers knew them during a decade of civil war—and after climbing for some time you take leave of the worn blacktop to follow for several miles a bone-jarring dirt track that hugs a mountainside, and soon you will find, among ruined towns and long-abandoned villages that are coming slowly, painfully back to life, a tiny hamlet, by now little more than a scattering of ruins, that is being rapidly reclaimed by the earth, its broken adobe walls cracking and crumbling and giving way before an onslaught of weeds, which are fueled by the rain that beats down each afternoon and by the fog that settles heavily at night in the valleys.
Nearby, in the long-depopulated villages, you can see stirrings of life: even in Arambala, a mile or so away, with its broad grassy plaza bordered by collapsed buildings and dominated, where once a fine church stood, by a shell-pocked bell tower and a jagged adobe arch looming against the sky—even here, a boy leads a brown cow by a rope, a man in a billed cap and blue-jeans trudges along bearing lengths of lumber on his shoulder, three little girls stand on tiptoe at a porch railing, waving and giggling at a passing car...
But 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.
In 1992, as part of the peace settlement established by the Chapultepec Peace Accords of that year, a United Nations Truth Commission investigating human rights abuses committed during the war in general, and ten year old newspaper reports of a massacre at El Mozote in particular, supervised the exhumations of the little village by a team of forensic scientists. This is what they found.
By early 1992, and the peace agreement between the government and the guerrillas that finally allowed the exhumation, the United States had spent more than four billion dollars funding a war that, over twelve years, cost seventy-five thousand Salvadorans their lives. By then, too, the bitter fight over the future of El Salvador had largely been forgotten in Washington—the United States had turned its gaze to other places and other peoples. But El Mozote may have been the largest massacre in modern Latin-American history. That in the United States it had been reported at the time, was denied and the truth allowed to fall back into the dark, makes the story of El Mozote, in Mark Danner's phrase, a central parable of the Cold War.
Nowadays, very safe. That's the thing about razing settlements to the ground.