In El Salvador, the Reagan administration, with Abrams as point man, routinely defended the Salvadoran government in the face of evidence that its regular army, and allied right-wing death squads, were operating with impunity, killing peasants, students, union leaders, and anyone considered anti-government or pro-guerrilla. Abrams went so far as to defend one of the death squads’ most notorious leaders, Roberto D’Aubuisson, who was responsible for the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass, in March 1980.

It was Romero’s assassination that touched off a civil war in El Salvador—an alliance of the military and the oligarchs, which had ruled for decades with support from the United States, against a Marxist-inspired insurgency. Most of the support for the revolution came from El Salvador’s peasants, who had little to lose in seeking to overthrow a government that had resorted to brutal repression to keep them in miserable poverty.

To drain the peasant sea in which guerrillas swam, to borrow from Mao, the Atlacatl Battalion, whose officers had recently completed counterinsurgency training in the United States, launched a “scorched earth” operation in Morazán, a mountainous region where semiliterate peasants labored on their small plots of sisal and corn.

I began reporting from El Salvador for The New York Times in December 1980. Four American Roman Catholic churchwomen had just been raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers, another heinous crime that the Reagan administration sought to cover up. One year later, I was smuggled by guerrillas into Morazán. I was accompanied by Susan Meiselas, the photojournalist already well known for her work in Nicaragua. Simultaneously, but separately, Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post made her way into the area as well.

When we reached El Mozote, evidence of the massacre was still abundant. Skeletons were being picked over by vultures, the stench of death carried by the breeze.

My reporting and Susan’s pictures appeared in the Times, and Alma’s reporting in the Post, in January 1982. Immediately, the administration attacked us and sought to deny the stories, calling them guerrilla propaganda. The reports were not credible, Abrams said. As Abrams put it, El Mozote “appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.” So the murder of hundreds of children became a mere “incident.”

I returned to El Mozote last year, the first time since the 1980s. I found a survivor, Amadeo Sanchez. He was 8 years old at the time of the massacre, a peasant boy who worked in the fields with his father. When word of the Atlacatl’s operation reached his village, the gunfire close enough to be heard and the helicopter gunships overhead, Sanchez told me he fled with his father. His mother remained in the village, with Sanchez’s three younger siblings, including a year-old brother. “I have done nothing wrong. Nothing is going to happen to me,” Sanchez recalled his mother saying.