November 29th, 2020 
Introduction:
The El Mozote Massacre took place in El Salvador on December 11th and 12th, 1981, when the Salvadoran army killed more than eight hundred civiliansvirtually all of the inhabitants of the village of El Mozote, including babies and children. The massacre was one of the worst of abuses of the civil war and took place in the village that had been widely understood locally to be neutral in the conflictoccasionally selling supplies to guerrillas but not supporting recruitment. The New York Times article reproduced here was the first account of the massacre to be published in the international media. Its author, the journalist Raymond Bonner, had been smuggled to visit the site by guerrilla leaders roughly a month after the massacre occurred. The article immediately attracted controversy. The Salvadorian army and government denied the report and the Reagan Administration accused Bonnera former captain in the Marines and a Stanford JDof bias and exaggeration. Conservative media accused the New York Times of seeking to influence an upcoming Congressional hearing on US involvement in the Salvadoran civil war, and Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed accusing Bonner of being overly credulous in his reporting. Bonner was recalled to New York and subsequently left the Times. Yet forensic excavations carried out by Argentine investigators following the Salvadoran Peace Accords of 1992 confirmed Bonners report that hundreds of civilians have been killed at El Mozote; and in 1993 a detailed article on the massacre and its subsequent cover-up was published by Mark Danner in the New Yorker (later to be expanded into a 1994 book) that upheld the veracity of Bonners original account. In 2011 the Salvadorian government officially apologized for the massacre.
Read the attached documents and answer the following questions:
1. What are the main allegations laid out in Boners account in the New York Times?
2. What sources does Bonner use to substantiate his account? How reliable are these sources?
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