BOOK REVIEW / HISTORY : ‘Shots, the Crying and the Screaming’ : THE MASSACRE AT EL MOZOTE, <i> by Mark Danner</i> (Vintage; $12, paper; 304 pages)

When I first read about the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team in Mark Danner’s otherwise horrifying book, “The Massacre at El Mozote,” I found myself heartened by the very notion of its existence.

The team consists of scientific experts who specialize in bringing murderers to justice by literally digging up evidence of war atrocities, and they’ve done their work throughout Central and South America and as far afield as Iraq.

But as I read Danner’s account of what happened in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote in 1981, my heart began to break. The Argentine forensic experts uncovered evidence of mass murder that took the lives of nearly 700 men, women and children in El Mozote and the surrounding hamlets; many of the victims died only after enduring rape and torture at the hands of the Salvadoran army.

A member of the forensic team, for example, dug up the skeleton of a child, identified only as No. 59, and an orange plastic horse that had once belonged to the tiny victim.

“Ordinarily, we could use this for identification,” the anthropologist observes. “I mean, even after 11 years, any mother would recognize this as her kid’s, you know? But here, they killed all the mothers, too.”

Danner’s work, which first appeared in the New Yorker, is a taut construction of investigative reporting, political analysis and a curious, sometimes almost rhapsodic description of the lives (and deaths) of the innocents unlucky enough to find themselves in El Mozote on the day the men in camouflage uniforms appeared in the village.

There’s a strangely poetic quality, for instance, in the testimony of one Salvadoran man who describes how government troops swept through the zona rosa --or free-fire zone--where El Mozote was located in an effort to round up and execute the suspected guerrillas whose names appeared on the death lists that their officers carried.

“They had lists from Perquin south to Arambala,” the man told Danner, reciting the villages on the road to El Mozote. “But farther down there were no lists. Farther down, they killed everything down to the ground. Farther down was scorched earth.”

The victims, as Danner shows us, were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time--a vast battlefield in the civil war that has ravaged El Salvador for more than a decade.

“The people of El Mozote were struggling to keep their balance in the middle of the perilously shifting ground of a brutal war,” Danner explains, “working hard to remain on friendly terms with the soldiers while fearing to alienate the guerrillas.”

The Ronald Reagan Administration, Danner writes, had “vowed . . . to ‘draw the line’ in El Salvador against communist subversion in the hemisphere.” Salvadoran army and police units, armed and trained by the United States, were sent into the countryside not only to engage the guerrillas in battle, but also to terrorize the campesinos into loyalty to the government. At El Mozote, as in Vietnam, they sought to save the village by destroying it.

The narrative in “The Massacre at El Mozote” is a spare 161 pages, and a good deal of reportage is devoted to the decade-long effort of both the United States and El Salvador to cover up the killings and discredit the early reports of the crime. The rest of the book consists of the documentation that Danner has assembled to convince us that the massacre took place as he says it did--CIA reports, diplomatic memoranda, death lists and eyewitness accounts.

“All morning, you could hear the shots, the crying and the screaming,” recalls one woman who was among the few survivors. “If only you could have heard that enormous screaming.”

Now, thanks to the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team--and thanks, especially, to the work of Danner in “The Massacre at El Mozote”--the screams of the victims can be heard anew. As a result, El Mozote, like My Lai, has become a code word for the very worst excesses of humankind at war with itself.