By Kathleen Kern

As the solders from the Atlacatl battalion raped her, the girl sung evangelical Christian hymns. They shot her in the chest, and she kept singing. Bewildered, the soldiers pumped more bullets into her. When she continued to sing, their astonishment turned to fear, and finally they hacked through her neck with machetes to make the singing stop.

Dec. 11, 2006, marks the 25th anniversary of the massacre at El Mozote, committed by an elite Salvadoran Army unit, the leaders of which had received training at the School of the Americas paid for with U.S. tax dollars.

Since more than half of the village’s residents were evangelical Christian and anti-communist, they thought they were safe from the violence that the Salvadoran army was committing in villages whose Catholic priests and lay people had adopted the tenets of liberation theology. Many other people from surrounding villages had also taken refuge in El Mozote, thinking they would be safer there.

But they had not reckoned on the gruesome training of the Atlacatl battalion, whose draftees were forced to kill animals by biting their throats and watch fellow soldiers torture and dismember dissidents, then play games with severed body parts.

After interrogating and torturing the men to get information on guerillas operating in the area, the Atlacatl forces killed them all. Then they raped and killed the women and girls. Then they killed the children. Some of the soldiers were unwilling to kill the children, after having witnessed the strange power of the girl who had sung during her rape and shooting. A major, upon hearing about their reluctance, threw a little boy into the air and impaled him. After the slaughter, the soldiers burned the village, and peasants hiding in the mountains reported that they smelled the odor of roasting meat.

Between 700 and 900 people died in the El Mozote massacre. The Reagan administration dismissed accounts of the atrocity as “exaggerations.” The Salvadoran government, which received support from the United States, declared it never happened.

Washington Post and New York Times reporters who viewed the charred bodies in the village and wrote about the massacre in January 1982 were accused by the Reagan administration and right-wing media of communist sympathies.

In 1992, the United Nations Truth Commission sent a team of Argentinean forensic anthropologists to the village. After examining the skeletons of more than 200 victims, they confirmed that the massacre had indeed taken place. A 2003 Argentinean investigation uncovered further evidence of atrocities.

When Christian media talk about the persecution of Christians, they usually refer to evangelicals whose civil rights communist and Muslim governments are violating. They cite use of the word “holiday” instead of “Christmas,” or talk-show hosts making fun of TV preachers, as proof that Christians are persecuted.

I do not recall any members of the U.S. evangelical Christian establishment citing the 1981 massacre in El Mozote as an example of persecution against Christians. I wonder what the white-robed martyrs of El Mozote thought as they looked down from heaven and saw that those who committed the carnage were supported by an administration for which most white evangelical Americans had voted.

Even now, the dimensions of the horror in El Mozote overwhelm me. On Dec. 11, I will light a candle for a martyr — the girl who defied her rapists and murderers by singing about Jesus.