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El Salvador's Forgotten Genocide: 40 Years Later - Impakter

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Life provides hard times for each of us, but they come little by little, as if giving us time to recover. For Rufina Amaya, however, life threw its difficulties mercilessly at her, all in just a few hours.

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Details of plot to murder archbishop Óscar Romero revealed in new book

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The assassination of the archbishop Óscar Romero as he celebrated mass in March 1980 remains one of the most notorious political murders of the 20th century. The murder plunged El Salvador into a full-blown civil war which eventually left 80,000 dead and 8,000 disappeared.

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The Judge of the Municipality of San Francisco Gotera, Jorge Guzman, left, swears-in U.S. expert Terry Karl before a hearing on the case of the El Mozote massacre, in San Francisco Gotera, El Salvador, April 26 2021. (Miguel Lemus/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

correction

A previous version of this article stated that Orlando Márquez found the bones of relatives while digging the foundations for a house in 2011. The discovery was in 2010.

Forty years ago, one of the most widely known mass killings in recent Latin American history occurred in and around the village of El Mozote in El Salvador. A U.S.-backed Salvadoran army unit attacked civilians, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,000 people, 500 of them children.

After decades of fits and starts, a trial has resumed in El Salvador that is shedding new light on the events of those few days in early December 1981, as well as on how much U.S. officials knew and how they tried to cover up that knowledge.

Victims are still - after decades of denial, stonewalling and obfuscation - seeking justice for their suffering and the deaths of family when members of the U.S.-trained and armed Atlacatl battalion and other similarly equipped Salvadoran soldiers slaughtered the villagers.

The massacre was part of a war between an alliance of the military and an oligarchy that had oppressively ruled for five decades and a collection of guerrilla opposition groups that unified in 1980. The conflict's official start date is typically marked by the 1980 assassination by a right-wing death squad of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was canonized a saint in 2018. Romero's killing was the culmination of a half-century-long class war that pitted an extraordinarily impoverished peasantry against an ostentatiously wealthy landed elite that relied on murderous repression to maintain its stranglehold and squeeze profit out of the workers.

Though the United States had been meddling in the region for decades, by the 1960s, both Green Beret and CIA officers were in El Salvador organizing paramilitary groups that would, in the following decades, mature into death squads.

By the height of the Reagan era's anti-communist fervor, the United States was dumping more than a million dollars a day of military aid into El Salvador. Terrified of any leftist activism in the context of the Cold War, the United States wanted to save face after the prolonged disaster of Vietnam and threw resources into El Salvador - as well as Guatemala and Nicaragua - to try to beat back the alleged Marxist menace. The United States poured in materiel and money. An estimated 75,000 people were killed in the 12-year civil war, half a million were displaced, and tens of thousands went missing. There were dozens of massacres: Whole villages like El Mozote and neighboring hamlets were razed, with survivors left to deal with the tragedy and trauma for decades.

In El Mozote in December 1981, the victims' bodies were dumped behind houses, in the fields, in the dirt roads, left to rot or be burned. Villagers scurried to hide in a nearby cave. After a night listening to sporadic gunfire, explosions and screams outside, one woman took her infant baby down to a stream to wash. She was spotted by a soldier, who followed her to the cave and, perhaps for the sake of efficiency, perhaps just following orders, pulled the pin on a grenade and chucked it into the cave. Another child in the cave, a 6-year-old boy, was shielded from the shrapnel by his father. He survived. So did the father, who was temporarily deafened, and brother, who was bleeding from his ears. His mother died, and his 3-day-old sister's legs were blown off. She died, too.

On Jan. 27, 1982, The Washington Post and the New York Times exposed the massacre to the world. Yet, one day later, the Reagan administration certified to Congress that the Salvadoran government had made strides in terms of the army's reduction of abuses and violations of human rights.

But the Reagan administration knew this was false: Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state, energetically defended the continuity of aid to the Salvadoran army during congressional hearings in 1982. In doing so, he relied on an investigation that the State Department asked the U.S. Embassy to conduct. The objective was to disprove that the massacre at El Mozote had occurred. The embassy sent two researchers into the field. Although they never really entered the scenes of the slaughter and were systematically blocked by Salvadoran soldiers, their interviews of refugees indicated the magnitude of what had taken place. The refugees' testimony, however, was ignored.

(Abrams would later play roles in Iraq and Venezuela under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump.)

The civil war ended with the peace accords in 1992. A year later, the rightist government established an amnesty law that lasted until 2016 and spared from prosecution masterminds and foot soldiers alike. This injustice is being corrected through the current trial.

The civil war and massacres like El Mozote prompted Salvadorans to flee and emigrate. "When the Atlacatl arrives, people flee to the mountains," Stanford University professor Terry Karl testified during the El Mozote trial, recalling a quote a Salvadoran farmer told a U.S. military adviser in the early 1980s. And when the mountains didn't provide enough shelter from the Atlacatl, or other murderous brigades, Salvadorans took to the migrant trails, headed north, across Guatemala and Mexico until they got to Texas, New York, Maryland or California. But, because of its support for the Salvadoran government, the Reagan administration roundly denied their asylum claims.

While the El Mozote massacre was extreme, such atrocities continue across Central America today, but the U.S. populace remains mostly unaware, whether through indifference or by design.

News out of Central America rarely appears in U.S. media. Central Americans fleeing the carnage are only seen as embodying the border crisis and domestic issue, with little regard as to what sent them north. Rarely acknowledged is the past and current role of the United States in Central America.

Those that survived the massacre and have stayed in El Mozote and its surrounding area still live with the psychological and economic toll.

Pedro Ramos, who testified in August 2018, still wakes before dawn in La Joya and trudges his way to earn $5 a day in the fields. Amadeo Sánchez, who lost 24 family members during the massacre, is still searching for funds to finish the house he started to build with reparation money. His father, Santos, still works to make rope and fabric out of the sisal plant, only he says it's now a hobby.

Some faces, however, aren't to be found. At Orlando Márquez's house, not far from Mozote's main plaza, one of his granddaughters, an adorable 6-year-old, liked to play at his feet. (In 2010, Márquez found the bones of his relatives while digging the foundations for a house.) When asked about her, in the middle of the hearings, he said she had left with her parents. "There's nothing to do here for young people. They don't want to stay and earn $400 a month," Márquez explained. Both the girl and her parents now live in New York.

Their migration reflects an effort to find safety from continued human rights violations, rampant crime, drug cartels, gang violence and poverty.

Indeed, the pattern of violence sparking northward migration hasn't fundamentally changed since the El Mozote massacre. Perhaps because justice has never been served. Perhaps because both the governments of the United States and El Salvador have yet to own up to the atrocities that were committed.

The trial is bringing these atrocities - including the revelation that napalm bombs were used in El Mozote - into the open, offering a different lens through which to view Central Americans' migration to the United States and the debate about U.S. border and immigration policy.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Perspective | The U.S. role in the El Mozote massacre echoes in today's immigration

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correction A previous version of this article stated that Orlando Márquez found the bones of relatives while digging the foundations for a house in 2011. The discovery was in 2010. Forty years ago, one of the most widely known mass killings in recent Latin American history occurred in and around the village of El Mozote in El Salvador.

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Article - controversy on declaring sainthood to Oscar Romero

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Article - controversy on declaring sainthood to Oscar Romero

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The pontiff who earlier denounced the "tyranny of capitalism" is now opening the way to sainthood for clergy killed because they were identified with "the theology of liberation"

On Wednesday, the Vatican announced officially that Pope Francis has given final approval to several sainthood causes, including that of slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. As I discussed in the following article from 2014, this has been a long time coming.

- Christopher Dickey, March 7, 2018

One of the things that made Archbishop Oscar Romero so extraordinary, I realized long after I met him and long after he was murdered, was that at first he seemed to be so ordinary. When I went to interview him in early 1980, I was led to believe I'd be meeting a man who would change the world, or, at least, the little world of El Salvador. But he seemed on first encounter to be very gray, more a forgettable clerk than a firebrand cleric. Not a revolutionary, certainly. Not a martyr. Not a saint.

In his quiet, affable, good-humored way, he never seemed to want to be any of those things, in any case, and yet in the minds of millions of people, especially in Latin America, he became all of them.

Only the popes held out against him. For three decades the theological machinery of John Paul II and Benedict XVI prevented the martyred Romero from advancing toward the formal title of saint, a long process that was fast-tracked for John Paul II himself, and also for much less sympathetic figures like the founder of the wealthy and secretive order Opus Dei.

Yes, symbolic gestures were made. John Paul II twice visited Romero's tomb in the cathedral in San Salvador. But the conservative popes from Poland and Germany didn't like the way people fighting for the rights of the poor - some of whom were communists, many of whom were leftists wrapped up in what was called "the theology of liberation" - adopted Romero as a symbol. John Paul and Benedict both detested that current in the church, seeing it as a front for politics, not faith. As Benedict told reporters in 2007, "the problem was that a political party wanted to take [Romero] for itself as a flag, as an emblematic figure." Benedict conceded this was "unjust," but "for reasons of prudence," it was said, Romero's beatification was put on hold.

Last week, finally, Pope Francis, from Argentina, told reporters bluntly that the Salvadoran's path toward official sainthood had been blocked by his predecessors and "now it is unblocked."

Perhaps even more importantly, Francis suggested that once Romero moves forward on the way to formal sainthood, others who were even more closely identified with liberation theology than he was - and who paid with their lives - could follow on the same path.

One of those was a Jesuit, like the pope, named Rutilio Grande. In 1977 Grande gave a famous homily in Apopa, El Salvador, warning that "very soon the Bible and the Gospel will not be able to come across our borders. We will get the covers, nothing more, because all the pages are 'subversive.'" And if Jesus of Nazareth were to come to El Salvador, Grande told his flock, Christ would be arrested and "crucified all over again." Shortly afterward, Grande and two others with him were murdered.

The killing went on and on. In December 1980, four American churchwomen were raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran Guardia Nacional. In 1989, the widely respected rector of San Salvador's Universidad Centroamericana, along with five other Jesuits, a housekeeper and her daughter, were slaughtered by officers from the Salvadoran government that was, by then, getting heavy support from Washington.

These men and women who died for their faith must be at once inspiring and troubling for Francis, who identifies so closely with the poor himself that conservative Catholics have tied themselves in knots trying to portray him as a friend, or at least not the enemy, of capitalism. Certainly his personal warmth and humility is, in many respects, reminiscent of Romero's.

Francis was himself a witness to the dirty wars in Latin America in the 1970s and '80s that cost so many priests and nuns their lives. At the height of the violence he was the provincial superior of all the Jesuits in Argentina, which should have been an influential position. He has done penance since, feeling that he and his fellow churchmen did not speak out strongly enough against the atrocities taking place in the name of anti-communism.

So, Pope Francis makes a nod to the theological hurdles that martyrs must pass through to become saints on the roster of the Catholic Church: "For me Romero is a man of God, but the process has to be followed, and the Lord too has to give his sign." But there is no question where this pope's sympathies lie, and any believer who knows Romero's story would have to think that the Lord has given many signs.

Still, the Vatican will call in its experts. We will hear, no doubt, that Romero's blood, stored separately from his embalmed body, was still liquid years later. Indeed, a vial was given to John Paul. People will testify they were cured of dread diseases when they prayed to Romero. And there will be debates about whether or not Romero died in odium fidei, at the hands of those who hated his faith, which would make him a martyr more quickly eligible for sainthood. As Pope Francis said last week, "this is a task for the theologians." But it's likely the pontiff will give them guidance.

When I was covering the wars in Central America, all of us knew that the archbishop would be killed. After the murder of Rutilio Grande, who was his friend, Romero began to speak out ever more critically of the government and of the rich in a country where the gap between the wealthy and the poor - really, the oligarchs and the peasantry - was on a feudal scale. The gray cleric, who had been given the position of archbishop partly because he seemed so uncontroversial, began to articulate the hopes and dreams and finally the desperation of the dispossessed. Guerrillas with Cuban backing were making a bid for power. But Romero became the most visible and most important enemy of the oligarchs and of those in the military and on its margins who defended their interests.

One day a cameraman friend of mine went out to a rural community where Romero was performing a mass wedding ceremony for campesinos who had lived together for years as husband and wife, but had never had their marriage blessed by the church. On the way back, the cameraman ran into a group of men who looked like the thugs usually associated with the right-wing death squads. He struck up a conversation with them and realized that, indeed, they had been sent to kill the archbishop, but when his car approached and they saw him, and he stopped and talked to them, they could not do it.

Then on March 23, Romero delivered a truly impassioned homily. "I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and policemen: each of you is one of us," he said. "The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear a man telling you to kill, remember God's words, 'thou shalt not kill.' No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you; in the name of God I command you to stop the repression."

The next evening, Romero was saying mass in the chapel at the hospice where he lived in a tiny room near the infirm and the dying. A gunman on the road outside shot him through the heart.

At Romero's funeral a week later, tens of thousands of mourners turned out knowing there was a chance they might be killed, and at least 35 of them died when shooting erupted - whether by the military or the guerrillas or both remains disputed. Most of the dead were crushed in the panic. I was there, and I can tell you the miracle was that any of us survived.

Someday in the not too distant future, Romero will be beatified. And then, if Pope Francis is still with us, we may well see the leftist saints come marching in.

On Wednesday, the Vatican announced officially that Pope Francis has given final approval to several sainthood causes, including that of slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. As I discussed in the following article from 2014, this has been a long time coming.
- Christopher Dickey, March 7, 2018

One of the things that made Archbishop Oscar Romero so extraordinary, I realized long after I met him and long after he was murdered, was that at first he seemed to be so ordinary. When I went to interview him in early 1980, I was led to believe I'd be meeting a man who would change the world, or, at least, the little world of El Salvador. But he seemed on first encounter to be very gray, more a forgettable clerk than a firebrand cleric. Not a revolutionary, certainly. Not a martyr. Not a saint.

In his quiet, affable, good-humored way, he never seemed to want to be any of those things, in any case, and yet in the minds of millions of people, especially in Latin America, he became all of them.

Only the popes held out against him. For three decades the theological machinery of John Paul II and Benedict XVI prevented the martyred Romero from advancing toward the formal title of saint, a long process that was fast-tracked for John Paul II himself, and also for much less sympathetic figures like the founder of the wealthy and secretive order Opus Dei.

Yes, symbolic gestures were made. John Paul II twice visited Romero's tomb in the cathedral in San Salvador. But the conservative popes from Poland and Germany didn't like the way people fighting for the rights of the poor - some of whom were communists, many of whom were leftists wrapped up in what was called "the theology of liberation" - adopted Romero as a symbol. John Paul and Benedict both detested that current in the church, seeing it as a front for politics, not faith. As Benedict told reporters in 2007, "the problem was that a political party wanted to take [Romero] for itself as a flag, as an emblematic figure." Benedict conceded this was "unjust," but "for reasons of prudence," it was said, Romero's beatification was put on hold.

Last week, finally, Pope Francis, from Argentina, told reporters bluntly that the Salvadoran's path toward official sainthood had been blocked by his predecessors and "now it is unblocked."

Perhaps even more importantly, Francis suggested that once Romero moves forward on the way to formal sainthood, others who were even more closely identified with liberation theology than he was - and who paid with their lives - could follow on the same path.

One of those was a Jesuit, like the pope, named Rutilio Grande. In 1977 Grande gave a famous homily in Apopa, El Salvador, warning that "very soon the Bible and the Gospel will not be able to come across our borders. We will get the covers, nothing more, because all the pages are 'subversive.'" And if Jesus of Nazareth were to come to El Salvador, Grande told his flock, Christ would be arrested and "crucified all over again." Shortly afterward, Grande and two others with him were murdered.

The killing went on and on. In December 1980, four American churchwomen were raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran Guardia Nacional. In 1989, the widely respected rector of San Salvador's Universidad Centroamericana, along with five other Jesuits, a housekeeper and her daughter, were slaughtered by officers from the Salvadoran government that was, by then, getting heavy support from Washington.

These men and women who died for their faith must be at once inspiring and troubling for Francis, who identifies so closely with the poor himself that conservative Catholics have tied themselves in knots trying to portray him as a friend, or at least not the enemy, of capitalism. Certainly his personal warmth and humility is, in many respects, reminiscent of Romero's.

Francis was himself a witness to the dirty wars in Latin America in the 1970s and '80s that cost so many priests and nuns their lives. At the height of the violence he was the provincial superior of all the Jesuits in Argentina, which should have been an influential position. He has done penance since, feeling that he and his fellow churchmen did not speak out strongly enough against the atrocities taking place in the name of anti-communism.

So, Pope Francis makes a nod to the theological hurdles that martyrs must pass through to become saints on the roster of the Catholic Church: "For me Romero is a man of God, but the process has to be followed, and the Lord too has to give his sign." But there is no question where this pope's sympathies lie, and any believer who knows Romero's story would have to think that the Lord has given many signs.

Still, the Vatican will call in its experts. We will hear, no doubt, that Romero's blood, stored separately from his embalmed body, was still liquid years later. Indeed, a vial was given to John Paul. People will testify they were cured of dread diseases when they prayed to Romero. And there will be debates about whether or not Romero died in odium fidei, at the hands of those who hated his faith, which would make him a martyr more quickly eligible for sainthood. As Pope Francis said last week, "this is a task for the theologians." But it's likely the pontiff will give them guidance.

When I was covering the wars in Central America, all of us knew that the archbishop would be killed. After the murder of Rutilio Grande, who was his friend, Romero began to speak out ever more critically of the government and of the rich in a country where the gap between the wealthy and the poor - really, the oligarchs and the peasantry - was on a feudal scale. The gray cleric, who had been given the position of archbishop partly because he seemed so uncontroversial, began to articulate the hopes and dreams and finally the desperation of the dispossessed. Guerrillas with Cuban backing were making a bid for power. But Romero became the most visible and most important enemy of the oligarchs and of those in the military and on its margins who defended their interests.

One day a cameraman friend of mine went out to a rural community where Romero was performing a mass wedding ceremony for campesinos who had lived together for years as husband and wife, but had never had their marriage blessed by the church. On the way back, the cameraman ran into a group of men who looked like the thugs usually associated with the right-wing death squads. He struck up a conversation with them and realized that, indeed, they had been sent to kill the archbishop, but when his car approached and they saw him, and he stopped and talked to them, they could not do it.

Then on March 23, Romero delivered a truly impassioned homily. "I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and policemen: each of you is one of us," he said. "The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear a man telling you to kill, remember God's words, 'thou shalt not kill.' No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you; in the name of God I command you to stop the repression."

The next evening, Romero was saying mass in the chapel at the hospice where he lived in a tiny room near the infirm and the dying. A gunman on the road outside shot him through the heart.

At Romero's funeral a week later, tens of thousands of mourners turned out knowing there was a chance they might be killed, and at least 35 of them died when shooting erupted - whether by the military or the guerrillas or both remains disputed. Most of the dead were crushed in the panic. I was there, and I can tell you the miracle was that any of us survived.

Someday in the not too distant future, Romero will be beatified. And then, if Pope Francis is still with us, we may well see the leftist saints come marching in.

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Why Pope Francis Wants to Declare Murdered Archbishop Romero a Saint

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The pontiff who earlier denounced the "tyranny of capitalism" is now opening the way to sainthood for clergy killed because they were identified with "the theology of liberation" On Wednesday, the Vatican announced officially that Pope Francis has given final approval to several sainthood causes, including that of slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

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Photo compilation to remember the massacre

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Photo compilation to remember the massacre

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Traveling at night to avoid detection by Salvadoran troops, leftist guerillas eventually brought us to a small village - El Mozote. The horrifying sights of a massacre, even the smell of death, were unavoidable - burned bodies beneath collapsed, charred beams of destroyed houses; skulls; children's toys; makeshift graves. The only survivor, Rufina Amaya, recalled hearing from her hiding place the pleas of her young son before he and her three daughters were machine-gunned to death - one was only eight months old; her blind husband was also executed.

In 2001, on the 20th anniversary of the El Mozote Massacre, a member of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology team (EAAF) team team holds a photograph taken by Susan Meiselas shortly after the 1981 attack on the village. The team plans further exhumations at the site, which is marked only by the two story cement house in the background. El Mozote, El Salvador, 2001

The perpetrators were members of a U.S.-trained Salvadoran counterinsurgency unit called the Atlacatl battalion. Fresh from a skirmish with the guerillas, they had entered El Mozote in December 1981, and begun a systematic campaign of rape, plunder, torture and murder. In this village - little more than a Catholic church in a simple town square - more than two hundred men, women and children were killed; only Amaya had survived. Altogether, some 800 were killed in the area, making "El Mozote" a name that stands in infamy, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history.

The Salvadoran government denied the killings had occurred and the Reagan Administration insisted that The New York Times and The Washington Post reports of the massacre were gross exaggerations. As one Reagan official told a congressional subcomittee,"no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians."

But twenty years later, the United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador conducted a thorough investigation, and confirmed what we had reported. The commission wrote:

"During the morning, they [the Salvadoran soldiers] proceeded to interrogate, torture and execute the men in various locations. Around noon, they began taking out the women in groups, separating them from their children and machine gunning them. Finally, they killed the children. A group of children who had been locked in the convent were machine-gunned through the windows. After exterminating the entire population, the soldiers set fire to the buildings."

In 2012, the president of El Salvador acknowledged the government's responsibility. "In three days and three nights, the biggest massacre of civilians was committed in contemporary Latin American history," said President Mauricio Funes, wiping away tears while speaking to a crowd in El Mozote. "For this massacre, for the abhorrent violations of human rights and the abuses perpetrated in the name of the Salvadoran state, I ask forgiveness of the families of the victims."

Legal Recourse: a conversation with Carolyn Patty Blum, senior legal adviser, Center for Justice and Accountability

Additional Resources on This Topic:

Raymond Bonner is a contributing reporter to Retro Report. He is a lawyer turned journalist, who has worked as an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times and as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has also written for The New York Review of Books. He has received numerous awards, including the Louis M. Lyon Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University; the Latin American Studies Association Award for reporting from Central America; and an award for reporting from Rwanda from the New York Association of Black Journalists. He is the author of four books, his most recent, "Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong."

Susan Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. She is also the author of several books and monographs, including NICARAGUA, JUNE 1978-JULY 1979, and has co-directed two films: "Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family" (1986) and "Pictures from a Revolution" (1991). In 1997, she completed a six-year project curating a 100-year photographic history of Kurdistan, which resulted in the online archive of collective memory - www.akaKURDISTAN.com. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Hasselblad Foundation Photography Prize (1994) and the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award (2005), her work has been exhibited at the Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Art Institute of Chicago. Meiselas was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992. View her work at www.susanmeiselas.com.

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Remembrance of a Massacre - El Mozote | Retro Report

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Traveling at night to avoid detection by Salvadoran troops, leftist guerillas eventually brought us to a small village - El Mozote. The horrifying sights of a massacre, even the smell of death, were unavoidable - burned bodies beneath collapsed, charred beams of destroyed houses; skulls; children's toys; makeshift graves.

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Video on asylum process and comic book style story of the spike in immigration from the civil war in El Salvador

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Video on asylum process and comic book style story of the spike in immigration from the civil war in El Salvador

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This summer, the Trump administration ended its "zero tolerance" policy that separated children from their asylum-seeking parents at the southern border. This policy and the plight of hundreds of children still separated from their families, inspired many Americans to look closely at why so many asylum seekers from Central America are being detained.

[ Visit KQED Learn to see our collection of classroom resources and student discussion prompts on this topic]

The Above the Noise video gives an overview of the asylum process today, and how it got started after World War II. With the horrors of the Holocaust still fresh, world leaders wanted to protect people in the event they had to flee their own countries. The 1951 U.N. treaty specifically protects refugees with a credible fear of persecution or torture by their own governments based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or social group. In the United States, this means anyone with a credible fear can't be immediately deported. If they arrive seeking asylum and prove they have a credible fear during a border screening, their case must be decided in an immigration court. This put asylum seekers in a different category than those crossing the border in search of work or a better life. Undocumented economic migrants can be immediately deported without a hearing.

Today, gang violence rather than government persecution is driving many people out of the Northern Triangle of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But the two gangs threatening poor communities in those countries got their start in American cities like Los Angeles back in the 1980s. This year, the Trump administration told immigration courts to deny asylum claims of people escaping gangs. Gangs, some lawmakers argue, aren't governments, so people escaping gang persecution can't qualify for asylum. But asylum seekers say their own governments aren't doing anything to stop gang-related murder, sexual assault and extortion--and they fear they and their families will be the next victims.

This most recent spike in asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle echoes an earlier spikes the late 1980s and in 1995 related to decades of violent conflict in the region. A sharp uptick in asylum seekers in 1989 is attributed to the Nicaraguan Revolution, which ended in 1990 after 11 years. The next big increase wasn't until 1995 in the final days of a 36-year civil war in Guatemala and just three years after a 12-year civil war ended in El Salvador. Asylum seekers from Northern Triangle dropped significantly in the late 1990s, from a high of 104,228 in 1995 to just 21,599 by 1997. Advocates say this shows that fear of violence drives Northern Triangle residents to leave their home countries, not economic opportunity or other factors.

Read the graphic to learn more about the history of gangs like MS-13 and how decades-old immigration policies helped sow the seeds of violence plaguing the Northern Triangle. If you want to learn more after reading, check out this article and documentary from Frontline.

A Spanish language transcript of the Above the Noise video is also available.

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Why So Many Central Americans Are Seeking Asylum in the U.S. | KQED

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https://youtu.be/mQnem4VxlBQ This summer, the Trump administration ended its "zero tolerance" policy that separated children from their asylum-seeking parents at the southern border. This policy and the plight of hundreds of children still separated from their families, inspired many Americans to look closely at why so many asylum seekers from Central America are being detained.

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Subjects and topics in this lesson plan

Lesson Plan

Watch video at https://www.retroreport.org/education/video/reagan-foreign-policy-and-a-story-from-central-america-el-salvador/

About this Video

When four American churchwomen were killed by the anti-communist regime of El Salvador, the U.S. government was forced to confront longstanding Cold War tensions between support for human rights and support for its allies. This 13-minute video shows students why the killings caused a storm of protest in the United States, causing some Americans to question the Reagan administration's approach to fighting communism in Latin America. The video also documents how the U.S. and Salvadoran governments sought to prevent family members and the public from learning how and why the killings happened, and how justice was served decades later, in American immigration courts.

How the Reagan administration's foreign policy and Cold War strategy led to alliances with governments that were hostile to communism, but also hostile to democracy and human rights.

How and why Americans came to challenge assumptions about Cold War foreign policy.

How the Cold War affected everyday citizens caught in the crossfire between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union.

When Ronald Reagan, a strong anti-communist, took office as president in 1981, he was determined to assert America's power and put a stop to any Soviet influence around the world. This was the centerpiece of his foreign policy and impacted everything from U.S. military build up, to funding and covert military support for countries in Central America.

In El Salvador, the military-led junta government was fighting a civil war against the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of leftist groups that included guerillas, unions, peasants, and political activists.

FMLN was seeking social and political reforms in a country long known for chronic poverty, repression, and economic inequality: 10 percent of the landowners held 78 percent of the arable land.

The struggle for reform was supported by the Catholic clergy and lay workers, who were seeking social justice and the protection of human rights, especially in rural communities.

To quell the popular uprising, the government relied on the army, national police, and military-backed death squads to carry out a campaign of terror.

This posed a dilemma for the Reagan Administration, as Congressional approval of aid to El Salvador in the early 1980s depended on the government improving its disastrous record on human rights. And then four American churchwomen who were working in the country were killed.

Why were the American churchwomen in El Salvador? From their perspective, what were they trying to accomplish?

Why did the U.S. government not do more to seek justice for the killing of the churchwomen? From the government's perspective, what was more important than defending its own citizens?

How did the killings affect public attitudes towards America's Cold War policy in Latin America?

Did the U.S. government have a greater responsibility to the families of the slain churchwomen - or to its foreign policy goals?

Was it justified for the U.S. government to seek the destruction of communism by allying itself with anti-democratic governments?

Ultimately, did the U.S. goals justify the means in El Salvador?

To what extent should the U.S. incorporate human rights into its foreign policy objectives?

Investigate what has happened to the participants in this story. What do you think of the outcome?

Transcript for "The Murder of US Churchwomen in El Salvador That Exposed a Government Coverup" Retro Report

"Laying Out A Case for Deporting Human Rights Abusers" Retro Report

Audio Interview: "The Holy Killings That Rocked U.S. Foreign Policy" WNYC

Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem

Analyze a complex set of ideas or sequences of events and explain how specific individuals, ideas, or events interact or develop over the course of a text.

Evaluate public policies in terms of intended and unintended outcomes, and related consequences.

Analyze multiple and complex causes and effect of events in the past.

Analyze how historical contexts shaped and continue to shape people's perspectives.

Skill 3.C: Compare the arguments or ideas of two main sources.

Theme 5: Politics and power (PCE).

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Lesson Plan: Reagan: Foreign Policy and a Story from Central America (El Salvador) | Retro Report

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Subjects and topics in this lesson plan Lesson Plan Watch video at https://www.retroreport.org/education/video/reagan-foreign-policy-and-a-story-from-central-america-el-salvador/ About this Video When four American churchwomen were killed by the anti-communist regime of El Salvador, the U.S. government was forced to confront longstanding Cold War tensions between support for human rights and support for its allies.

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Credit: Jose Cabezas/AFP via Getty Images

The judge investigating the 1981 El Mozote massacre has been fired by El Salvador's government as the right-wing populist president, Nayib Bukele, consolidates power. For victims, survivors and their families, that means justice could never come.

In a makeshift courtroom on the second floor of a nondescript brick building in northeastern El Salvador, Judge Jorge Guzmán has spent the last six years painstakingly gathering evidence from the survivors of one of the worst massacres in the modern history of Latin America: the slaughter of a thousand old men, women and children by the Salvadoran army during the country's civil war.

Forty years after the massacre, former senior military officers, including the minister of defense at the time, have been facing charges ranging from kidnapping and rape to murder. The military and the Salvadoran elite have repeatedly sought to block any accountability for the massacre, and the current president, Nayib Bukele, a 40-year-old right-wing populist who is often compared to Donald Trump and reminds some of Hungary's Viktor Orban, may have just succeeded. He has made no secret of his desire to terminate the investigation.

On Aug. 31, the legislature, controlled by Bukele's party, fired every judge in the country older than 60. Guzmán is 61. Within El Salvador, the prevailing view is that one of the aims was to end the investigation.

Bukele's decimation of the judiciary is his latest move to increase his power and presents a challenge to the Biden administration. "Human rights will be the center of our foreign policy," the U.S. president declared in a speech on the same day, announcing the end of the Afghan war. It will be achieved through diplomacy, he said, not military might. The United States has had a long and complicated relationship with El Salvador for the past four decades, and it is not clear what sanctions Washington is prepared to invoke.

Bukele is not likely to buckle easily. In May, after the Supreme Court overturned several of his executive orders, the legislature dismissed five justices and replaced them with loyalists. In response, Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted that the United States had "deep concerns about El Salvador's democracy." Bukele answered with a string of tweets: "With all due respect," he wrote, "we're cleaning our house and this isn't your responsibility."

On Sept. 3, El Salvador's Supreme Court ruled that Bukele may run for reelection in 2024, despite a term-limits provision in the constitution. He also touched off another controversy last week by adopting bitcoin as an official currency; since 2001, it has been the U.S. dollar. Many observers believe that this move is designed to cushion El Salvador's economy in the event the Biden administration imposes financial sanctions.

The U.S. State Department condemned the "decline in democratic governance" in El Salvador and called on Bukele to respect "the separation of powers and the rule of law."

The assassination in March 1980 of the country's revered Roman Catholic prelate, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, by a right-wing death squad touched off a simmering revolution. Several leftist guerrilla and political organizations united under the banner of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) to bring to an end decades of rule by an alliance of the oligarchy and military. In the name of stopping the spread of communism, the United States backed the government, with hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid.

In December 1981, the Atlacatl, a Salvadoran army battalion, pillaged, plundered and raped its way through El Mozote and several other peasant villages in the northeastern part of the country. The soldiers summoned villagers to the square and forced them to lie face down in the dirt. The old men were taken away, tortured for information about whether their sons had joined the guerrillas and then executed. Women were raped and executed. A few women with infants, along with adolescents, were forced into the convent behind the Roman Catholic Church. The soldiers fired on them and threw grenades. A forensic exhumation years later found the bodies of at least 143 individuals, 90% of them under the age of 12; their average age was 6.

The massacre was exposed by reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post who arrived on the scene with a photographer weeks after it occurred. There were still bodies in the cornfields and in mud houses being chewed over by vultures. The Reagan administration denied that government troops had carried out the massacre. The American Embassy in El Salvador suggested that the guerrillas were to blame, and the administration's conservative supporters claimed it was "guerrilla propaganda." Classified U.S. documents released by the Clinton administration confirmed the role of the Atlacatl battalion.

The struggle for justice on the part of the survivors and the relatives of the victims has been arduous, marked by defeats, victories and more defeats. In 1991, the legal aid office of the Roman Catholic Church petitioned the court to conduct an investigation. When the court asked the Ministry of Defense for the names of the officers in charge of the operation, it was told "no information" about any "supposed operation" could be found.

Two years later, a peace agreement ended the decade-long civil war, and a United Nations Truth Commission concluded that the government was responsible for at least three-quarters of the 75,000 civilians killed during the war. Acting quickly, and without hearings, the National Assembly, controlled by the right-wing political parties, passed a sweeping amnesty law.

The victims challenged the law in the Salvadoran Supreme Court. They lost. In 2011, they filed a case with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In its 152-page opinion, the court said there was no dispute that "the Armed Forces executed all of those persons it came across: elderly adults, men, women, boys and girls, they killed animals, destroyed and burned plantations, homes, and devastated everything community-related." As for the amnesty law, the court found that it was in contravention of the Salvadoran government's "international obligation to investigate and punish the grave human rights violations relating to the massacres of El Mozote and nearby places."

Armed with this decision, the victims went back to the Salvadoran Supreme Court. In 2016, it ruled the amnesty law invalid. Guzmán reopened the investigation and began taking testimony from survivors. (Although the case is often referred to as a trial, it is roughly the equivalent of what in the United States is called a preliminary inquiry, at the end of which Guzmán can either dismiss the charges or recommend that the men be criminally prosecuted.) Because Guzmán is one of the only judges in the region and has had a heavy load of civil and criminal cases, the El Mozote investigation has proceeded slowly.

Amadeo Sanchez told the judge that he was 8 at the time of the massacre and had survived by fleeing into corn and sisal fields with his father. They heard the shooting and screams of young girls being raped. When Sanchez returned to the village, he found the bodies of his mother and two siblings as well those of aunts, uncles and cousins. In one adobe house, he testified, he saw the body of a woman who had been shot in the head. Next to her was a 1-day-old boy. His throat had been cut, Sanchez told the judge, making a slicing motion with his hand. On the wall, soldiers had scrawled, "Un niño muerto es un guerrillero menos" - "One dead child is one less guerrilla."

Another witness, Maria Rosario, told the judge that 24 members of her family had been killed, including her mother. When she testified, she looked at the defendants, who were sitting on folding chairs in rows. She wanted to scream "assassins," she said in a 2018 interview. "But I couldn't allow myself to do that because the judge was right in front of me. You just endure the pain that you feel."

Bukele has been as determined as his predecessors and the military high command to quash the investigation. When Guzmán sought to execute a search warrant at military bases for documents pertaining to the massacre, Bukele ordered the armed forces not to comply; soldiers were stationed at various bases to block the judge's entry. In a televised address to the nation last year, Bukele accused Guzmán of being a member of the FMLN, which has become a political party since the peace agreement. The claim is baseless.

He also accused the victims' lawyer, David Morales, of becoming a millionaire from his representation. The 55-year-old Morales began seeking justice for the victims when he was an intern in the legal aid office of the Roman Catholic Church; he now works for a nongovernmental human rights organization, Cristosal. Morales, who has finished presenting witnesses to the court, said that, before Bukele's dismissal of the judges, he had expected a ruling by Guzmán to be imminent. But unless domestic and international pressure forces Bukele to reverse his order, Morales now fears that the investigation is over.

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Survivors and Families of Victims of a 1981 El Salvador Massacre See Justice Slip Away Again

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The judge investigating the 1981 El Mozote massacre has been fired by El Salvador's government as the right-wing populist president, Nayib Bukele, consolidates power. For victims, survivors and their families, that means justice could never come.

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Ties in the use of propaganda in the media in relation to the conflict in El Salvador.

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Ties in the use of propaganda in the media in relation to the conflict in El Salvador.

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2 minutes
(if you need a username and password: 3555lbhs and nwaea)

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Newsela | Salvadoran immigrant writes poetry meant to get us talking

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Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora on uncertain immigrant life.

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15 minutes

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The relationship between the CIA and from the 1930s through the Salvadoran Civil War that broke out in 1979. In the time between those years, the nation had experienced minor conflicts, civil unrest, human rights violations, and increased El Salvador is complicated. The Central American country was controlled by military dictatorships guerrilla activity that ultimately led to the turmoil and full-blown civil war that ran through the early 1990s.

The Soviet Union and Fidel Castro's Cuba backed the left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and ran a covert program that supplied some 15,000 guerrilla rebels with 800 tons of modern arms and training - including the supply of western manufacturers to cover up the source of the weaponry.

When U.S. President Ronald Reagan assumed office the same month of the guerrilla general offensive and communist military intervention, El Salvador became the target of the largest counterinsurgency campaign since the Vietnam War. The U.S. had significant influence in Latin America, including training some of the most notorious dictators at the infamous School of the Americas , also known as the "School of Coups." For six decades, some 65,000 soldiers, dictators, assassins, and mass murderers counted themselves alumni of the school that was first created in Panama in 1946 to prevent the spread of communism in the Western hemisphere.

Among the more prominent alumni from El Salvador was Roberto D'Aubuisson, a death squad leader who murdered thousands and gained the sadistic nickname of " Blowtorch Bob " for his methods of torture. Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, the first commander of the - an elite paramilitary unit trained and equipped by advisors from the United States - also attended the school and was later fingered for directing the El Mozote Massacre , the bloodiest slaying of guerrilla sympathizers in the entire civil war.

"The Salvadoran military knew that we knew, and they knew when we covered up the truth, it was a clear signal that, at a minimum, we tolerated this," said American Ambassador Robert E. White at a hearing in 1993. Representative Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey, Democratic chairman of the House subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs, later commented, "It is now clear that while the Reagan Administration was certifying human rights progress in El Salvador they knew the terrible truth that the Salvadoran military was engaged in a widespread campaign of terror and torture."

Guevara in Bolivia and later served in Vietnam with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). Rodríguez went to El Salvador as a private citizen in 1985, motivated to continue fighting against communism. He taught Salvadorans "tree-top" flying techniques from Félix Rodríguez , a Cuban native, was known in El Salvador under the alias of Max Gomez. Rodríguez was a legendary paramilitary operations officer in the CIA who was involved in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion as a member of Brigade 2506. He also helped capture Che Huey helicopters like he did in Vietnam.

"By experience in Vietnam, we found out that going extremely close to the ground the guerrilla is not able to determine from what direction you are coming," Rodríguez told " "From the time they see you, they don't have many time to shoot you."

U.S. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North eventually recruited Rodríguez to participate in the illegal Iran-contra resupply operation into Nicaragua. Congress had signed the Boland Amendment into law, which banned "humanitarian aid" to the Contras (anti-Sandinista guerrillas) in 1984; however, the Reagan administration established a "private aid" network using old deteriorating airplanes behind Congress' back. The planes were equipped with "fuzzbusters" purchased from Radio Shack - a far cry from the state-of-the-art radar typically found inside CIA aircraft. The operation was doomed from the start and faced Soviet-made antiaircraft that Nicaraguan rebels employed against them.

On Oct. 5, 1986, Eugene Hasenfus , who worked for Corporate Air Services, a front for the Southern Air Transport , an air component of the CIA, parachuted safely from his C123K cargo plane that had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile. The incident exploded throughout the press and exposed the Iran-Contra Affair, which became one of the largest scandals of Reagan's presidency.

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A Brief History of the CIA in El Salvador During the 1980s

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The relationship between the CIA and from the 1930s through the Salvadoran Civil War that broke out in 1979. In the time between those years, the nation had experienced minor conflicts, civil unrest, human rights violations, and increased El Salvador is complicated.

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Loyola University's Special Collection - Articles and Video

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Loyola University's Special Collection - Articles and Video

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From 1979 to 1992, civil war ravaged El Salvador. The war pitted the government and military against leftist guerillas and ordinary civilians suspected of supporting them. Fighting produced great violence, most of it waged by counterinsurgency forces of the military. They destroyed entire villages and displaced thousands of people while paramilitary death squads targeted peasants, whom they believed to be to be organizing a revolution against the government. Much of this suspicion stemmed from leftist groups like the FMLN who waged war in and recruited from the countryside. Empathetic clergy, like Ellacuría, spoke out against the human rights atrocities committed by the Salvadoran government and were, eventually, targeted for supposedly aiding and abetting guerrillas.

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From 1979 to 1992, civil war ravaged El Salvador. The war pitted the government and military against leftist guerillas and ordinary civilians suspected of supporting them. Fighting produced great violence, most of it waged by counterinsurgency forces of the military.

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Center for Justice and Accountability article

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Center for Justice and Accountability article

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Roots of the Conflict

Since the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, a single resource has dominated El Salvador: land. Like its Central American neighbors, El Salvador was organized into a giant plantation for luxury commodities: cocoa, indigo and, in the 1800s, coffee. Independence only shifted control from the Spanish to Salvadorans of European ancestry. Indigenous peoples and mestizos, comprising 95% percent of the population, were reduced to virtual serfdom, while a small minority of landholders called the "Fourteen Families" ruled through a long series of military dictatorships. It is along these fault lines-between peasant and planter, European and native -that cycles of violence have erupted throughout El Salvador's troubled history. [1]

Prelude to a War: 1932-1980

"To be Salvadoran," wrote historian Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, "means knowing that something tremendous happened in late January 1932." [2] In the western part of the country, labor leader Agustin Farabundo Marti led a peasant revolt against the ruling dictatorship and the Fourteen Families. Within a few weeks, the revolt was crushed in a massive military reprisal called la matanza: the slaughter. An estimated 30,000 civilians were massacred, the majority of whom were indigenous people whose traditional dress and languages marked them for death. The Salvadoran military would dominate the government for decades to come. [2]

In a sense, the conflict between left and right wings never ended. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary death squads engaged in a deadly spiral of political violence. On October 15, 1979, a group of moderate officers ousted the dictator Carlos Humberto Romero and formed the Revolutionary Government Junta (JRG). In January 1980, right-wing violence broke out against the JRG, including bombings against government newspapers, kidnappings and murder. All of the JRG's civilian leaders resigned. At the same time, the U.S. State Department received warnings that right-wing death squads were allying with the military against the government. [1]

The JRG's main opponent on the right was a Salvadoran army officer named Roberto D'Aubuisson-also known under the sinister nickname "Blowtorch Bob." D'Aubuisson was the mastermind behind an attempted coup against the JRG and the 1980 assassination of the renowned human rights defender Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Although D'Aubuisson was arrested along with other senior officers responsible for Romero's murder, a wave of right-wing terrorist attacks compelled the government to release him. He went on to found the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance party (ARENA) in September 1980, and remained a key leader of the right-wing death squads throughout the war.

Civil War: 1980-1992

The assassination of Archbishop Romero tipped the sporadic political violence of the 1970s into full-scale civil war. When 250,000 mourners gathered for his funeral, snipers attacked the crowd, killing 42 and wounding over 200. A BBC reporter captured the terror: "Tens of thousands of mourners who had gathered for Romero's funeral Mass in front of the cathedral in San Salvador were filmed fleeing in terror as army gunners on the rooftops around the square opened fire...One person who was there told us he remembered the piles of shoes left behind by those who escaped with their lives." [3]
%media%
In September 1980, the five major leftist revolutionary organizations merged to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The FMLN fielded a guerilla army to oppose government and right-wing paramilitary forces.

A few months later, in December 1980, four American churchwomen were raped and murdered by military and paramilitary forces. U.S. President Jimmy Carter responded by temporarily cutting off aid to El Salvador. But U.S. policy took a dramatic shift with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. Asserting a hemispheric-wide national security strategy, the Reagan administration considered the Salvadoran government-its atrocities notwithstanding-a friend in the Cold War. [4]

When the FMLN launched an all-out attack on the government on January 10, 1981, the United States came to the Salvadoran government's assistance and provided them with substantial military aid and advisors. Much of this aid went to the formation of the Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalions, the same groups identified by the UN Truth Commission as "the primary agents of war crimes." Still, U.S. policy towards El Salvador was not monolithic; many U.S. officials denounced the atrocities committed in the counter-insurgency. Former ambassador Robert White, who was posted in El Salvador in 1980-1981 until his recall by Reagan, was an outspoken critic of the Salvadoran government and paramilitaries. He referred to D'Aubuisson as a "pathological killer." [5]

Throughout the 1980s, the war between government, guerilla and paramilitary forces continued to produce systematic human rights violations, subjecting civilians to torture, mutilation, forced disappearance, extrajudicial killing and mass rape. Some 75,000 Salvadorans were killed by massacres, summary executions, landmines and indiscriminate bombing. [6]

Despite the election of the centrist José Napoleón Duarte in May 1984-El Salvador's first elected civilian leader in 50 years-negotiations between the FMLN and the government remain stalled. In 1989, Duarte was replaced by Alfredo Cristiani of the right-wing ARENA party, under whom the conflict underwent a major escalation.

But on November 16 1989, a gratuitous act of violence finally shocked the world's conscience. The Atlacatl Brigade, a rapid deployment counterinsurgency unit, entered the campus of the University of Central America and dragged six prominent Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter from their beds and murdered them. The Atlacatl Brigade had perpetrated an arc of atrocities beginning with the infamous El Mozote Massacre in 1981. [7]

The Moakley Report and the United Nations Truth Commission: 1989-1993

The Jesuits Massacre persuaded the U.S. Congress to create a special investigative task force in 1989, led by Congressman Joseph Moakley. The findings of Moakley's Task Force revealed that the upper echelon of the Salvadoran officer corps had been responsible for the murders of the Jesuits, and that 19 of the 26 Salvadoran officers responsible had received military training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA). The report set in motion an international process to end the conflict. [8]

The FMLN's final offensive in late 1989 demonstrated that the conflict was at a stalemate; neither side seemed capable of attaining a strategic advantage. At the same time, world events were stripping away the foreign support that had sustained both warring parties. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union signaled the loss of crucial allies for the FMLN. At the same time, the end of the Cold War shifted U.S. policy in the region: there was no longer a compelling interest for the U.S. to support the unsavory Salvadoran counterinsurgency. This reality, combined with the aftershock of the Jesuits murders, pushed the U.S. to press for a peace settlement.

On January 16, 1992, the signing of the United Nations-brokered Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico City ended 20 months of negotiations. As part of the settlement, the Salvadoran government and the FMLN agreed to the establishment of a U.N.-appointed Truth Commission to investigate the abuses committed during the war. The Truth Commission's report attributed the overwhelming majority of the human rights abuses to the Salvadoran armed forces and the paramilitaries.

"In examining the staggering breadth of the violence that occurred in El Salvador, the Commission was moved by the senselessness of the killings, the brutality with which they were committed, the terror that they created in the people, in other words the madness, or locura, of the war."

-Reinaldo Figueredo, U.N. Truth Commission [9]

An Enduring Problem of Impunity: 1993-2009

On March 20, 1993, five days after the U.N. Truth Commission report was released, the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly, dominated by the ARENA party, adopted a blanket amnesty law that shielded all military and guerilla forces from prosecution for human rights abuses committed during the war. Later, in a 1999 report concerning El Salvador's failure to prosecute those responsible for the 1989 Jesuits Massacre, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights declared the amnesty law a violation of international law. [10]

This lack of accountability persists today. The right-wing ARENA party continued to govern from 1989 to early 2009. During this time, the FMLN was demobilized and transformed itself into the party of opposition. But in a profound way, both sides have practiced electoral politics as a continuation of war by other means. To this day, the ARENA party anthem still vows that the nation will be "the tomb where the Reds meet their end." [11]

In 2009, FMLN won the presidential elections. Former journalist Mauricio Funes now serves as the president. While this is a hopeful sign for the normalization of the political process, the Amnesty Law still stands, so the human rights violations of the civil war have not yet been fully addressed.

CJA's criminal cases against high-ranking Salvadoran officials in Spain and our civil litigation in the U.S. have emerged as a central component of this struggle.

Notes

[1] El Salvador: A Country Study, Ed. by Richard A. Haggarty, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, November 1988. available at: http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/svtoc.html Accessed: August 16, 2009.

[2] Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton and the Politics of Historical Memory, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007, 253.

[3] "Requiem for Romero", Maurice Walsh, BBC News, March 24th, 2005. Available at: http://www.soaw.org/newswire_detail.php?id=777 Accessed: August 16, 2009.

[4] El Salvador: War, Peace, and Human Rights, 1980-1994, Special Collection, The National Security Archive, December 1996. Available at: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/elsalvador2/index.html Accessed: August 16, 2009.

[5] "Roberto D'Aubuisson, 48, Far-Rightist in El Salvador" (obit.)
Richard Severo, New York Times, February 21, 1992. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/21/world/roberto-d-aubuisson-48-far-rightist-in-salvador.html Accessed: August 16, 2009.

[6] From Madness to Hope: The 12-year war in El Salvador, Report of the U.N. Truth Commission on El Salvador, 1 April 1993
http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/salvador/informes/truth.html Accessed: August 16, 2009.

[7] "The Truth of El Mozote", Mark Danner, Institute of International Studies, U.C. Berkeley, December 6, 1993. Available at: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Danner/1993/truthelmoz01.html Accessed: August 16, 2009.

[8] "Statement of Representative Joe Moakley Chairman of the Speaker's Task Force on El Salvador", November 18, 1991.

[9] "The peace process in El Salvador: hearing before the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, first session, March 16 and 23, 1993," Available at: http://www.archive.org/stream/peaceprocessinel00unit/peaceprocessinel00unit_djvu.txt Accessed: August 16, 2009.

[10] Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report Nº 136/99, Case 10.488 Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J.; Segundo Montes , S.J.; Armando Lopez, S.J.; Ignacio Martin-Baro, S.J.; Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, S.J.; Juan Ramon Moreno, S.J.; Julia Elba Ramos; and Celina Mariceth Ramos, El Salvador, December 22, 1999. Available at: http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/99eng/Merits/ElSalvador10.488.htm Accessed: August 16, 2009.

[11] "Elections in El Salvador Invoke Rivalries of Civil War Years" Elisabeth Malkin, New York Times, March 11, 2009. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/americas/12salvador.html Accessed: August 16, 2009.

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Since the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, a single resource has dominated El Salvador: land. Like its Central American neighbors, El Salvador was organized into a giant plantation for luxury commodities: cocoa, indigo and, in the 1800s, coffee. Independence only shifted control from the Spanish to Salvadorans of European ancestry.

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Timeline Explanation of El Salvador - 9 embedded questions

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Timeline Explanation of El Salvador - 9 embedded questions

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6 minutes

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Image Slideshow with Spanish text explanations

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Image Slideshow with Spanish text explanations

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5 minutes

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Veteranos de la guerra civil de El Salvador

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Los Primeros Pobladores del Territorio Salvadoreño

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Video - An artists work and how fleeing during the civil war influenced it

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Video - An artists work and how fleeing during the civil war influenced it

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The artist Guadalupe Maravilla was brought to the United States by a coyote (or human trafficker) as an undocumented eight-year-old, fleeing civil war in El Salvador. Hear from the artist and from assistant curator Marcela Guerrero about how this experience informed his series, "A requiem for my border crossing.". Created by Smarthistory.

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Guadalupe Maravilla, Requiem For My Border Crossing (video) | Khan Academy

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Video by Whitney Museum of American Art Requiem for my border crossing and my undocumented father's #6, 2016-2018, inkjet print with graphite pencil and ink, sheet: 19 15/16 × 29 7/8in. (50.6 × 75.9 cm) The artist Guadalupe Maravilla was brought to the United States by a coyote (or human trafficker) as an undocumented eight-year-old, fleeing civil war in El Salvador.

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1 minute
(if you need a username and password: 3555lbhs and nwaea

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Academic Journal Article - Children Soldiers

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Academic Journal Article - Children Soldiers

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23 pages

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2 minutes

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Oscar Romero a Victim of El Salvador's Bloody Civil War

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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Article on post-war trials of civil war massacre

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Article on post-war trials of civil war massacre

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Illustration Credit: Otto Meza
This week, new developments came to light in the decades-long saga of the El Mozote massacre, one of the most high-profile incidents of human rights abuses in modern Central American history. During pretrial hearings for charges against the now-disbanded Atlacatl Battalion, Stanford University political scientist Terry Karl testified that a U.S. military attaché was near El Mozote, El Salvador at the time of the massacre. Karl described the efforts of the Reagan administration to conceal the attaché's presence in the vicinity of El Mozote as part of a deliberate, "sophisticated cover-up," undertaken in order to ensure that generous American military and economic aid could continue to flow unencumbered to the anti-communist Salvadoran regime. Karl, alleging a much cozier relationship between the U.S. and one of the most notoriously savage units of the Salvadoran military, noted that "[t]he documents and sworn statements suggest that [the military attaché] could have been aware beforehand of what was to come, though there is no implication that he supported the decision of the Salvadoran officers to kill civilians in any of these cases."

The massacre was carried out on December 11, 1981, during the Salvadoran Civil War, when the Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Army-an elite commando unit trained in counter-insurgency tactics at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia-descended upon the small, rural hamlet of El Mozote in northeastern El Salvador. Allegedly seeking to unearth sympathizers of left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerillas, the men of the Atlacatl Battalion instead brutally murdered upwards of 1,200 civilian campesinos, residents of El Mozote and refugees displaced from surrounding communities by military and paramilitary fighting. Later forensic investigations would reveal that at least 248 sets of human remains uncovered at El Mozote belonged to victims under six. While correspondents for The New York Times and The Washington Post would publish accounts of the mass killings as early as January 1982-the American journalist Mark Danner would eventually publish the definitive account of the massacre, his seminal book The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War, a decade later, in 1994-both the Salvadoran military dictatorship and the administration of then President Ronald Reagan vociferously denied such allegations, accusing journalists of propagating pro-FMLN narratives and harboring communist sympathies.

After peace between the FMLN and the Salvadoran regime was finally negotiated in 1992, the United Nations organized a Truth Commission for El Salvador to investigate human rights abuses that occurred during the civil war-and in particular, the massacre at El Mozote-thus commencing the arduous process of trials and investigations that has continued until today. The Truth Commission found conclusive evidence that the massacre had, in fact, occurred; nevertheless, the Salvadoran government once again rejected the Truth Commission's conclusions, offering amnesty to any former government or military personnel implicated in such investigations. In 2005, based on forensic evidence collected at the site of the massacre by Argentine investigators, the Organization of American States opened its own investigation in order to discern whether orders for the slaughter at El Mozote had originated from the Salvadoran high command. In 2011, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights filed a case against the government of El Salvador, resulting in its issuance of a formal acknowledgment and apology for its role in the massacre. One year later, in 2012, the Inter-American Human Rights Court ordered the Salvadoran government to conduct its own investigation into the massacre, urging that all implicated parties be held responsible for their actions in 1981 and over the course of ensuing cover-ups.

In 2016, the Supreme Court of El Salvador ruled that the blanket amnesty granted to individuals named in UN reports, originally issued in 1993, was unconstitutional, opening the doors for further prosecution and accountability. Since 2016, 16 former members of the now-disbanded Atlacatl Battalion have been brought to trial in an ongoing case; in 2019, the judge presiding over the case expanded the charges faced by the 16 defendants to include torture, forced displacement, and forced disappearance. Retired Salvadoran general Juan Rafael Bustillo admitted in testimony that high-ranking military officers, and in particular the infamous Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa-who himself was killed in 1984-had ordered the killings at El Mozote.

The ongoing trial proceedings, already delayed for over a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, have also been hindered by multiple attempts made by the defense to force presiding Judge Jorge Guzmán to recuse himself, as well as to restrict access to sensitive government and military archives.

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New revelations about the El Mozote massacre

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Illustration Credit: Otto Meza This week, new developments came to light in the decades-long saga of the El Mozote massacre, one of the most high-profile incidents of human rights abuses in modern Central American history. During pretrial hearings for charges against the now-disbanded Atlacatl Battalion, Stanford University political scientist Terry Karl testified that a U.S.

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Video - The short film Making it in America documents the life and worldview of a Salvadoran immigrant and her experience transitioning to life in the United States. Alma Velasco fled to the U.S. as a teenager during the Salvadoran Civil War.

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Video - The short film Making it in America documents the life and worldview of a Salvadoran immigrant and her experience transitioning to life in the United States. Alma Velasco fled to the U.S. as a teenager during the Salvadoran Civil War.

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About Oscar Romero but all in Spanish - 14 embedded questions

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About Oscar Romero but all in Spanish - 14 embedded questions

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approx 2 minutes
(ps I have no idea what any of this is saying so I don't know if it is good or not.)

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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Post Civil War Commentary - 3 embedded questions

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Post Civil War Commentary - 3 embedded questions

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2 minutes

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!