El Salvador Mocks the Victims of El Mozote
The Salvadoran assembly may move to protect its war criminals.
During El Salvador’s “dirty war” in the 1980s, which pitted leftist guerrillas against an entrenched alliance of generals and oligarchs, the army committed atrocity upon atrocity with impunity. In one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history, in December 1981, soldiers from an American-trained battalion slaughtered nearly 1,000 peasants—women and old men and children, some too young to walk, average age 6—in El Mozote and the surrounding villages.
After a Sisyphean struggle, justice and accountability seemed within reach when in 2017 a judge began hearing evidence against 20 former
