military operation through the northern part of Morazan Province just before Christmas 1981. Again, it was the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion, reinforced by helicopter gunships and heavy artillery. ... The first column of soldiers arrived on foot in Mozote at about 6:00 a.m. More soldiers were landed by helicopter. The villagers were ordered out of their houses, into the tiny square in front of the church, men in one group, women in another. The men were blindfolded, taken away in small groups of four and five, and shot. Women were raped [including children ten years old and up, as later evidence would show]. Of the 482 Mozote victims [later revised to over 800], 280 were children under 14 years old. ... In addition to her [survivor Rufina Amaya's] son, somewhere among the ruins in Mozote were the skeletons of her blind husband and three daughters, ages three years, five years, and eight months. ... When the soldiers and helicopters began arriving in La Joya, a smaller village south of Mozote, the older boys and men fled. "We didn't think they would kill children, women, and old people," explained Csar Martnez. ... But the soldiers killed Martnez's mother and sister and his sister's two children, ages five and eight. ... Another villager from La Joya, Gumersindo Lucas ... explained that before he fled from the advancing troops with his wife, children, and other relatives, he had taken his sixty-two-year old mother, too sick to walk, to a neighbor's house and hidden her