“Which son of a bitch says that?” It was December 11, 1981 in El Mozote, a small town in El Salvador, and the major wanted to know which one of his men had refused to kill the children.

The military had just spent an entire day murdering its hundreds of inhabitants. Now, just the town’s kids were left. Gathered outside a schoolhouse in which a number of the children were being kept, the soldiers had had an argument. Some didn’t want to kill the kids, many of whom were under twelve years old and some of whom were infants. The major, without hesitation, walked over, scooped a little boy from a crowd of kids, flung him into the air, and speared him with a bayonet as he came back down. There was no more arguing.

The boy was one of over eight hundred slaughtered that day and the next, thirty-five years ago.