Did Bill O’Reilly Cover Up a War Crime in El Salvador?

Greg Grandin asks Did Bill O’Reilly Cover Up a War Crime in El Salvador? There is probably something more to the story but something just seems lacking here. Bill O'Reilly traveled to El Salvador in the first half of 1982 and reported on a massacre that allegedly took place in Meanguera, in the department of Mozote. The massacre ("wipe out a small village") was perhaps carried out by the FMLN.

However, the problem is that O'Reilly did not investigate or report on the massacre that the Atlacatl Battalion did carry out in El Mozote, Morazan a few months earlier. It's doesn't look good for O'Reilly but covering up seems a bit too strong. He reported on one alleged massacre in Meanguera and should have reported on another massacre.

A few other issues from the article. El Mozote wasn't a liberation theology town. From all reports, the towns people were mainly evangelicals. They tried to remain neutral during the war. It is an important detail because Mark Danner's book is subtitled "A Parable of the Cold War." There was no neutrality in El Salvador's civil war or in Latin America's Cold War - that is one of the lessons to the book. The lesson is not that liberation theology folks would be killed. That might be another lesson but not as part of El Mozote.

The other issue is that there were people in the US Embassy (I can't remember off the top of my head but I believe it was Ambassador Hinton, maybe even Greentree) who pushed back against State Department officials in the US. Reagan administration officials wanted to say that there was no massacre at El Mozote but Embassy officials in El Salvador would no go that far. They would say that they did not have any evidence of a massacre. Technically, they were right because no one actually made it to El Salvador to investigate. After speaking with refugees from the area, however, they were convinced that something bad had happened. They didn't exactly know what that "bad was but they had an inkling that what had been reported was accurate. They avoided doing things, however, that would have revealed the truth to them.

Those are important historical details to El Mozote. No matter the reason, however, O'Reilly traveling to El Salvador in early 1982 and only reporting on an alleged FMLN massacre would be a gross violation of journalistic standards. I don't know whether he mentioned El Mozote in any of his other reporting at the time.