Nothing Stays Buried: Trauma, Truth, and One Town’s Fight for Justice in the Aftermath of a Massacre
The project:
Over the course of three days in December 1981, Salvadoran soldiers trained and armed by the United States machine-gunned, machete-slashed, bayoneted, and burned to death more than 1,000 civilians in El Mozote, a village in El Salvador, and surrounding rural hamlets. A deeply reported narrative of the long aftermath of this massacre, Nothing Stays Buried traces the lives of the survivors who decided to return and draws a critical portrait of how American foreign policy continues to affect other countries and their citizens long after attention shifts elsewhere.
From Nothing Stays Buried:
Their home was a big wooden champa with a dirt floor and a tin roof. Champas are meant to be temporary, but in hard-up places like El Mozote they often become permanent. An oven, refrigerator, and plastic shelves lined one of the walls. A grain silo sat in the corner, surrounded by sacks of beans, rice, and animal feed. A formica table served as the dining area. Outside were a pit latrine and a pila, the concrete wash station found in every rural Salvadoran home.
The structure was sturdy—Orlando had made sure of that—and stayed dry even during tropical storms. But space was finite. As the five Márquez children grew up, the family expanded to include their partners and their own children, all of whom crammed into a single sleeping area each night. They draped sheets over ropes and strung them from the rafters to create a semblance of privacy around each family’s cluster of beds and hammocks. Only the littlest children didn’t mind the cramped quarters. It was time for a new house.
The opportunity came in the fall of 2010, when a Spanish development agency agreed to finance a housing project for El Mozote families. They broke ground on November 12, a clear day at the start of the dry season. From the top of Cerro La Cruz, lines of indigo mountains could be seen in the distance, pressed together like the folds of an accordion.
Orlando assembled his work crew—twenty-four-year-old Orlando Junior and three other men from the village—and showed them where to start digging, at the foot of a bamboo patch near where the kitchen of his childhood home had stood.
It took the workers several hours of heaving and sweating to carve out the first quadrant, a meter or so below ground. The soil was dense and full of debris. Orlando watched until his antsiness drove him off looking for something to do. Then he heard his son cry out.
“Papá!”
Orlando rushed back to find his son frozen at the corner of the site, his shovel on the ground. Beside it, a face stared out from the dirt. Its eye sockets were empty and its jaw and forehead cracked, but its teeth were nearly intact. The porcelain dentures were unmistakable. Orlando leaned in just to make sure. It was his mother’s skull.
They’d also found a shin bone, dug up by one of his workers. By the time the sun disappeared behind Cerro El Chingo, they had amassed a small pile of shrunken bones and dirt-crusted possessions. Orlando and Míriam placed them inside a nylon sack and set it on a chair in the middle of the champa. The dead and the living would end up sharing the house for nearly two years.
Orlando’s accidental discovery was neither the first nor the last in El Mozote. But thanks to its timing, it was the most pivotal. It would put Orlando and his family—unwillingly, at first—at the center of a collective reckoning that was beginning to gather momentum in the village and would soon spread to the rest of the country. El Mozote, like El Salvador, had been rebuilt after the war on a foundation of silence and bones.
It was beginning to crack.
The grant jury: Powerful, essential reportage with an astute and deeply empathic heart: Sarah Esther Maslin honors the wrenching story of a massacre in a remote village by showing how it is also a story of power, nations, foreign policy, and cycles of trauma. Nothing Stays Buried underscores America’s role in spurring immigration across its own borders, as well as the brutality and reverberations of proxy conflicts so often minimized in the press. Maslin is a keen, sensitive observer, able to put her moral convictions to work in service of nuanced truth-telling. She brings this conflict, mainly remembered in large-scale political terms, down to human size.
Sarah Esther Maslin is a journalist who has worked across Latin America. From 2018 to 2023 she was The Economist’s Brazil correspondent, and before that, was based in El Salvador. Her reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Nation, VICE, Columbia Journalism Review, and others. She is the recipient of a New America fellowship, an Ochberg fellowship from the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, an American Society of Magazine Editors NEXT Award, a Mirror Award, a Fetisov Journalism Award, and a spot on the Forbes 30-under-30 list. She has been a writer-in-residence at MacDowell, Mesa Refuge, and the Logan Nonfiction Program. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in history and is based in Mexico City.