El Mozote massacre anniversary


Today is the 43rd anniversary of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in which close to one thousand civilians were killed by a US-trained elite unit of El Salvador's army.  Most of the dead were children, women and the elderly. Of the documented victims, 553, or 57%, were under 18 years of age and 477 were 12 and under.

This year's anniversary saw some different visitors to the massacre site:

Representatives from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center (HRVWCC) traveled to El Salvador this week to remember the victims of the largest single massacre of civilians in modern Latin American history and commemorate the Dec. 10 United Nations Human Rights Day. The ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)-led HRVWCC brings together criminal investigators, attorneys, intelligence analysts, criminal research specialists and historians from various sectors of the federal government to investigate global atrocities and pursue the perpetrators of human rights violations and war crimes for prosecution.

The HRVWCC has been responsible for the removal from the Untied States of various retired Salvadoran military leaders accused of war crimes during the Salvadoran civil war, including former minister of defense Jose Guillermo Garcia.

Despite Guillermo Garcia's removal to El Salvador, neither he nor other military high commanders has ever been fully tried in a Salvadoran court room for their crimes.  A trial had been underway in a courtroom in the town of San Francisco Gotera to assess the criminal responsibility of Garcia and other military leaders for the El Mozote massacre.  Unfortunately, since Nayib Bukele and his Nuevas Ideas party gained control of the court system, all progress has ground to a standstill.

Human rights lawyers representing the victims' families issued a statement denouncing the stagnation of the judicial process:
[There have been] recurrent violations of due process by Judge Mirtala Portillo, who for the past three years has applied dilatory judicial criteria that have paralyzed the effective progress of the trial. Among them, the promotion of various investigative measures that are repetitive with respect to facts already proven, which are carried out without the presence of the parties and without a prior court order for their realization.

On the other hand, the case has been hindered by the incorporation of an investigation for facts other than the massacre and disappearances, related to the criminal prosecution of former deputies to whom the approval of the 1993 amnesty law is attributed, delaying the process for at least a year. Such prosecution was ordered under inconsistent legal criteria and in any case should have been processed separately.

The stagnation of the judicial process occurs in a context of serious failures by the Government to implement the reparations ordered by the Inter-American Court 12 years ago, as well as the refusal of the Legislative Assembly to process the Special Bill for Transitional Justice for Victims of the Armed Conflict in El Salvador, presented last October 29, by victims’ groups and human rights organizations. At least 143 victims of the massacre have died since the filing of the original complaint, without having had access to justice.

Therefore, we publicly demand full compliance with the Inter-American and constitutional rulings that order justice and reparations for the victims of the El Mozote massacre and surrounding sites. We especially demand that the judicial delay of the case cease and that it proceed to the plenary, public hearing and sentencing phase.
For more background on the El Mozote massacre and the quest for justice, see my eight-part series written for the 40th anniversary of the massacre in 2021:

Comments

Post a Comment