The first chapter begins with a description of the journey to, and surroundings of, the town of El Mozote (which means “The Thistle” in English [7]), in “El Salvador’s zonas rojas—or ‘red zones’ as the military officers knew them during a decade of civil war” (3). The author, Mark Danner, describes the ruins of El Mozote, “its broken adobe walls cracking and crumbling and giving way before an onslaught of weeds” (3), and contrasts the emptiness and desolation there with the surrounding “long-depopulated villages,” in which one can now see “stirrings of life” (3). 

The chapter then turns to a specific set of days, “in mid-October 1992” (4), during which vehicles carrying members of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, enters the still-abandoned El Mozote. They clear underbrush and uncover “an earthen mound protruding several feet from the ground” (4), and then section this area into a grid, slowly digging and sifting through the soil and whatever remnants they can find, coming across bits of charred wood and finally “they knew that they had begun to find, in the northeast corner of the ruined sacristy of the church of Santa Catarina of El Mozote, the skulls of those who had once worshipped there” (5).