WHEN forensic teams from Argentina dug in 1992 into the earth at El Mozote, in the mountains of eastern El Salvador, they first came upon a reddish rubble, mixed up with the roots of thorn-plants and weeds. A little deeper they uncovered small, thin skulls, some of them blackened by fire. Underneath these were bundles of what seemed to be brown rags: the blood-soaked cotton dresses, trousers and socks of what had once been children, killed more than a decade before. The pockets of some still held their lucky plastic toys.
The forensic work at this, the most dreadful killing-field of modern Latin America, was memorably reported by Mark Danner in the New Yorker. But it might never have been carried out, and the massacre of 794 people, overwhelmingly civilians, in December 1981 might never have been forced to the world's attention, if María Julia Hernández had not been on the case. She was in charge of the Socorro Jurídico, later the Tutela Legal, which during El Salvador's murderous civil war of 1980-92 kept track of human-rights abuses for the archdiocese of San Salvador. She was therefore the person to whom Rufina Amaya Márquez first told her story.
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