El Salvador Perspectives

A few of the hundreds of small children who were victims at El Mozot e Thirty nine years ago, Salvadoran troops commenced a scorched earth operation in the remote, rural community of El Mozote and surrounding hamlets in the department of Morazan in northeast El Salvador.  Over the next few days, with savage brutality, they would slaughter almost 1000 civilians, including more than 400 children under the age of 12, in the worst single massacre in the history of Latin America.   As the 39th anniversary of the El Mozote massacre passes this week, there are prospects that year 40 might be the year that judgment is rendered in a Salvadoran court against the former high military command for its responsibility for this crime against humanity.  Since El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court overturned an amnesty law in 2016,  Judge Jorge Guzmán has been pushing forward in his courtroom in San Francisco Gotera with a criminal prosecution of those officers involved. If a tria...

A little less than nine months ago, the novel coronavirus arrived in El Salvador as part of the pandemic’s worldwide inexorable spread.   The country had a wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths which threatened to overwhelm its healthcare system during June and July before subsiding after the first week in August.   As the year nears an end and the country approaches Christmas parties and family gatherings, the number of cases is again beginning to gradually increase across the country.    According to the official statistics on the El Salvador’s COVID-19 website at covid19.gob.sv , there have been 40,551 confirmed cases of the virus in the country and 1168 persons have perished from the disease.  There are 2432 active cases as of today.   These statistics only include those cases and deaths which have been confirmed by a test administered by the government.  There are 4189 suspected active cases (persons with symptoms which h...

Wednesday, December 2 marks the 40th anniversary of the cold-blooded rape and murder of 4 US churchwomen in El Salvador by a military death squad.   It was 1980, a year which saw the assassinations of archbishop Oscar Romero and many other lay and religious workers engaged in the struggle for a just society in the opening bloody years of El Salvador's civil war.  Sisters Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, and lay missioner Jean Donovan were slaughtered for their commitment to El Salvador's poorest citizens.  An article just published on Znet titled  Martyred Missionaries: The Lives and Legacies of Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, and Dorothy Kazel offers a good refresher on the lives of these remarkable women and why the Salvadoran military regime sought to eliminate them.  The crime itself, like the murder of Oscar Romero, the Jesuit priests, the children of El Mozote and so many others remains unpunished and wrapped in impunity in El Salvador...