Rufina Amaya

Rufina
Originally uploaded by Bel Vezer.

I was browsing Flickr for pictures of El Salvador (thanks to Prof. Silver for revealing this goldmine of photos to me!), and in searching for El Mozote, I found this photo, which I thought was beautiful. Rufina Amaya was the only survivor of a massacre in 1981 in which the entire town of El Mozote was wiped out, with the exception of her. She went on to tell her story, but for a long time people refused to believe her. The U.S. was funding El Salvador's civil war, and it was our tax dollars that paid for this brutal massacre. The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner is a very good book about this. You can also read the New Yorker piece by Mark Danner, which I believe is what the book was based on. It's because of things like this that I'm going to El Salvador.