MOUNT VOICES • "Prithee, Let Us Rock This Jointe"

The monument to the massacre.

That strange calm came over the bus

as it pulled through the woods and the rock and earth road of eastern El Salvador. The people on board, all of them students from Mount St. Mary's College, looked around and saw familiar signs. Perquín. Arambala. Towns that they had read about recently in a history book. The silence almost became something solid in the bus, painful to move around. Even the tour guide, who was Salvadoran but who had never been here, a man in his thirties who talked like a kind parrot all during the three hour trip from the capital, said nothing.

We crossed a small river, drove down a steep hill, with forest all around us. The students stared into the forest, as if seeing something that had happened there long ago. Movement: Green slipping through the green of the foliage. But those were ghosts. Then just ahead of us, the large sign, "El Caserío de El Mozote-Bienvenidos," and someone in the back of the bus said "Oh. Oh God."

"In this place in 1992 the remains were found of 146 people, 140 of them children 12 years of age or less. Now they are buried here in this monument. El Mozote Never Again."

Still more mud and stone road before arriving; then the tour bus pulled up alongside the plaza of the village, an area the size of the Circle in the middle of the Chalon Campus. Smaller, really. No cement here, except for that monument of names to one side. Above the monument, a woman hawked T-shirts with Che or Archbishop Romero on them. The church stood to the east of the circle, recently painted.

A second woman came out from a corner of the hamlet. She introduced herself, smiled while greeting us, shaking hands with a few while cradling a baby to her shoulder. Her name was María de la Paz Amaya, but everyone calls her Pacita. "I suppose you're here to see what happened, and what we've done since," she said. Yes. Yes, that's exactly why we're here.

A difficult, embarrassing moment, that moment in which you're asking someone to tell a story that you've already read about in The New Yorker or in a book written by a U.S. journalist. But we weren't the first people to come through asking to hear it all.

She took us from one spot in the plaza to another. "Here," she said, "right here in the middle of the plaza is where they made the entire village, the adults, lie face down, all day, into the night. Then they took the women away, over to that road, and the soldiers started decapitating the men. One after another, they worked for hours, cutting the men's heads off with machetes.

"Here, next to the church, there was a convent. The soldiers took all the children and pushed them into the one room and locked the door. They threw the babies in there. All the kids, one hundred and forty six, all the kids were inside. They left them in there for hours. The babies were crawling in their own shit, the children couldn't hold their water. Finally the soldiers threw open the windows and aimed their M-16 rifles inside and killed them all. They're buried here now, all the remains that we could find.

"Up on that hill? The soldiers marched the teenage girls up there, and spent the entire night raping them. There was one girl who spooked them. All the time they were raping her she was singing Glory Glory Hallelujah, because she was evangelical, you know? She sang and sang, Glory Glory Hallelujah, so one of the soldiers shot her in the chest, but she kept singing, just not as loud, Glory Glory Hallelujah so they shot her again but it didn't shut her up so finally they cut her head off.

A mural for the children killed in the convent. Their names appear underneath.

"This is where our friend Rufina hid. She was the woman, the only woman in the massacre, who escaped. While they were setting fire to her own house, she broke from the line of women and hid in the woods. She watched the soldiers hang her children from a tree. She dug a hole in the ground and stuck her head inside it so she could scream.

"Me? I was eleven at the time. I had gone with my father out to run some errands in Perquín. When we returned, they stopped our bus, wouldn't let us in to the village. 'Something bad is going on,' someone said to my father. Then we heard the shooting, and the glow from the fires they set to our homes. Then, that's when we smelled it-like cooked meat.

"I lost four brothers and two sisters that night."

We knew all this before we came. We also knew the why of the massacre: El Mozote was a tiny theatre in which the United States and the Soviet Union enacted their Cold War play. This was a place where someone decided it was best to burn the land than let the land become communist. And that someone was named Colonel Domingo Monterrosa.

A political tale that Pacita knew as well, if not better. One fact that never ceases to impress me: how people in poor countries, "Third World" countries, know the U.S. political leadership better than we know theirs (and, to be honest, how they know ours better than we do):

"Your president, Reagan, didn't have anybody like a Karl Rove. He had Weinberger, of course. But he didn't need a Karl Rove. Reagan hated our country. He hated that the Sandinistas were our neighbors over in Nicaragua. So…" and Pacita gestured to her town, once dead, now growing back. Like a stubborn thistle.

I asked about Colonel Monterrosa, the man behind the massacre. "Oh he was very popular. He was our own Reagan. Everybody in the capital loved him. Rock star, you now. But it was he who did this," she looked over at the mass grave of children. "He ordered the operation, 'Hammer and Anvil.' Crush the village, make an example out of it: that this is what happens to those who dare think of becoming communist. You know," and she paused, and looked at me straightway, "he learned that operation at your Fort Benning, Georgia." She smiled.

The sign of surviving a massacre: children. El Mozote now has a trickle of children running through its streets, slowly filling the space left there two decades ago. "The kids in the convent," one student said to me as we walked around, "a lot of them, the babies, they would have been our age."

After visiting the convent, the monument of the adults who died, and the long list of names on the church wall of the children who were murdered, Pacita took us to a small kiosk to one side of the plaza. "We don't have much," she said, picking up a large wooden box with Donaciones written atop it, "but there are some bags that we've weaved, and some bracelets, and pot holders…" She spoke with no sense of irony; this was a way for the village to keep surviving-telling the tale, and selling tourists a necklace or a bracelet to remember El Mozote by.

Hours later we all piled into the bus. As we drove away, the students looked back. There was Pacita, with her baby in her arms. She smiled at us, in that way mothers tend to do.