Product Description

Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms - travel essay, narrative history, autobiography - but at its finest it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This new series, hailed as 'a wonderful idea' by Don DeLillo, both restores to print and introduces for the first time some of the greatest works of the genre. In December 1981, the inhabitants of a small Salvadoran hamlet were systematically exterminated by the Atacatl Battalion, a U.S.-trained counter insurgency force. The Reagan administration, determined to preserve U.S. support for El Salvador's war against leftist guerrillas, downplayed reports of this massacre dismissing them as propaganda, and the American-funded war in El Salvador continued. But Mark Danner's subsequent reconstruction is a masterpiece of scrupulous investigative journalism and a testament to the forgotten victims of one of the worst massacres in Latin American history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #429630 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Dazed & Confused
‘A harrowing look at Salvador and the 1981 massacre that history forgot’

About the Author
Mark Danner, hailed as 'one of our best, most ambitious narrative journalists' by Susan Sontag, is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Torture and Truth (Granta Books).

Customer Reviews

Who gives the US the right to interfere in another country?
What a shame it would have been to the writers of the American constitution to see the policy that the US took in El Salvador and the Latin American region. How could a country with the ideals of liberty and freedom of oppression support a government whose army killed and cruelly repressed its innocent inhabitants? I was a young girl when El Mozote massacre occurred but I remember the fear that infused every sector of society. Where was the liberty that the US was promoting if the only emotion allowed in the population was fear? Dissent, protest even ideological differences were brutally repressed! Mark Danner is an excellent journalist and a corageous human being by bringing to the attention of the American society the barbarism committed with the funding and support of the US government. Danner tells the truth about events and violations of basic human rights by the US. supported Salvadorean regime. Danner wins 10 out of five stars in my rankings.

When the army hangs four-year-olds, one ought to ask "why?"
What compelled the army to decapitate infants, hang children and wipe out an entire village of 800 civilians? Why did the U.S. support a government that massacred nuns, priests, social workers and catequists? Danner's book presents in clear and undeniable form the insanity of U.S. policy in El Salvador in the 1980's. I am a U.S. priest working in El Salvador not far from El Mozote. Every day we work with survivors of the war, and see the results of the trauma still evident. Danner's book gave me a great insight into the decisions that led to the Mozote massacre, as a keyhole to the broader conflict.

The failure of U.S. policy in Central America
In the early 1980s the Reagan administration engaged in all sort of efforts to convince the American people that its policies in Central America were geared towards preserving the democracy and freedom of the region's inhabitants, while at the same time preventing damage to their country's own internal security. However, Mark Danner, in his brilliant work that examines one of the darkest episodes of the conflict in Central America during that period, demonstrates that the U.S. supporters of the counterinsurgent option in countries like El Salvador, openly misled the American public as to the origins, methods, and final results of their intervention there. Throughout his well-documented effort, Danner (who himself became another unwilling victim of the Cold War - he was virtually fired from his job at the New York Times as a result of his coverage of El Mozote massacre)provides more than enough evidence that the U.S.-perfected doctrine of counterinsurgent warfare, when applied to situations such as El Salvador, can produce results of unequaled human perversity. In the name of freedom and democracy, the U.S.-trained "Atlacatl Batallion" murdered in cold blood hundreds of innocent, unarmed civilians -mostly women and children. In the meantime, Reagan and his advisors in Washington (even after convincing proof had been provided by the reporting of Danner that the massacre had indeed been carried out by U.S. allies there)cynically denied that anything had taken place. Instead, some argued that perhaps the victims of the massacre had killed themselves to embarrass the U.S and its military allies. In the end, Danner and the only survivor of the massacre - a middle aged woman - would be vindicated by history. And yet, the disturbing nature of that dark episode in the history of U.S. adventurerism in the region continues to terrify and, in a sinister way, fascinate those interested in that region. As Hanna Arendt has already stated in "Eichmann in Jerusalem", the "banality of evil" knows no boundaries. Danner's work must be read by anyone attempting to know the truth of what really happened to unsuspecting civilians in a God-forgotten Salvadoran village in a dark month of December, in 1981.