[5] In his 1994 book, The Massacre at El Mozote, American journalist Mark Danner compiled various reports in order to reconstruct an account of the massacre: On the afternoon of December 10, 1981, units of the Salvadoran Army's Atlácatl Battalion, which was created in 1981 with US government funding and military training,[7] arrived at the remote village of El Mozote after a clash with guerrillas in the vicinity.

[9] Its mission, Operación Rescate ("Operation Rescue"), was to eliminate the rebel presence in a small region of northern Morazán where the FMLN had two camps and a training centre.

[6]: 69–81  Around noon, they began taking the women and older girls in groups, separating them from their children and murdering them with machine guns after raping them.

[6]: 81 News of the massacre first appeared in the world media on January 27, 1982, in reports published by The New York Times[10] and The Washington Post.

[11] Raymond Bonner wrote in The New York Times of seeing "the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles".

[10] Salvadoran Army and government leaders denied the reports and officials of the Reagan administration called them "gross exaggerations".

Enders also repeated the claim that only 300 people had lived in El Mozote, and it was impossible for the death toll to have reached that reported in the Times and Post stories.

[16] On February 8, Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, told the committee that "it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.

"[17][18] In February, in an editorial, "The Media's War", The Wall Street Journal criticized Bonner's reporting as "overly credulous" and "out on a limb".

In Time magazine, William A. Henry III wrote a month later, "An even more crucial if common oversight is the fact that women and children, generally presumed to be civilians, can be active participants in guerrilla war.

New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner underplayed that possibility, for example, in a much-protested January 27 report of a massacre by the army in and around the village of [El] Mozote.

Ambassador to El Salvador of Ronald Reagan's presidency, Deane R. Hinton, called Bonner an "advocate journalist".

A Reagan official wrote a letter to the Post stating that she had once worked for a communist newspaper in Mexico, which Guillermoprieto denied.

They were led to the house of Israel Marquez and the women at the front of the line screamed because they saw pools of blood on the floor and piles of bloody corpses.

On October 26, 1990, a criminal complaint was filed against the Atlácatl Battalion for the massacre by Pedro Chicas Romero of La Joya.

[21] When Romero filed the complaint with the Court of the First Instance in the San Francisco Gotera, he used Rufina Amaya, sole survivor of the El Mozote Massacre, as his witness.

[6]: 258–59 In 1992, as part of the peace settlement established by the Chapultepec Peace Accords signed in Mexico City on January 16 of that year, the United Nations-sanctioned Truth Commission for El Salvador investigating human rights abuses committed during the war, supervised the exhumations of the El Mozote's remains by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), beginning November 17.

The truth commission stated in its final report: There is full proof that on December 11, 1981, in the village of El Mozote, units of the Atlácatl Battalion deliberately and systematically killed a group of more than 200 men, women and children, constituting the entire civilian population that they had found there the previous day and had since been holding prisoner... there is [also] sufficient evidence that in the days preceding and following the El Mozote massacre, troops participating in "Operation Rescue" massacred the non-combatant civilian population in La Joya canton, in the villages of La Rancheria, Jocote Amatillo y Los Toriles, and in Cerro Pando canton.

[8]In 1993, El Salvador passed an amnesty law for all individuals implicated by UN investigations, which effectively exempted the army from prosecution.

His article, "The Truth of El Mozote", caused widespread consternation, as it rekindled the debate regarding the United States' role in Central America during the violence-torn 1970s and 1980s.

In a prefatory remark, Danner wrote: That in the United States it came to be known, that it was exposed to the light and then allowed to fall back into the dark, makes the story of El Mozote—how it came to happen and how it came to be denied—a central parable of the Cold War.

[24]A later court decision overturned the amnesty for defendants suspected of "egregious human rights violations" but attempts by Salvadoran lawyers to reopen the case repeatedly failed.

[9] On March 7, 2005, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States reopened an investigation into the El Mozote massacre based on the evidence found by the Argentine forensic anthropologists.

[3] In a January 2007 report in The Washington Post, a former Salvadoran soldier, José Wilfredo Salgado, told of returning to El Mozote several months after the massacre and collecting the skulls of the youngest victims, whose remains were exposed by recent rains, for "candleholders and good-luck charms".

Foreign Minister Hugo Martinez, speaking on the government's behalf, called the massacre the "blindness of state violence" and asked for forgiveness.

[26] On June 2, 2019, newly sworn in President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, ordered the removal of Colonel Domingo Monterrosa's name from the Third Infantry Brigade barracks in San Miguel.

[28] In 2016, Judge Jorge Guzmán reopened the judicial inquiry into the massacre, following the overturning of the amnesty law by the Salvadoran Supreme Court.

[30] In April 2021, Stanford professor Terry Karl testified before the inquiry that United States military advisor Allen Bruce Hazelwood was likely present during the massacre, based on documents and interviews.

Karl alleged that the United States government engaged in a "sophisticated cover-up operation" to conceal the massacre and American presence.

Hazelwood denied the allegations of being present during the massacre, stating that he was actually 100 miles away training soldiers of the Atlácatl Battalion at the time.