Can El Salvador produce a judgment against impunity in the El Mozote massacre case?

There is possible movement towards resolution of the case of the 1981 El Mozote Massacre. A judge has ordered the case into its final phase against the military commanders who led during some of the bloodiest years of El Salvador's civil war.

The El Mozote massacre took place on December 10-11, 1981. All but one of the civilians taking refuge in the small village of El Mozote and in surrounding settlements, close to 1000 children, women, and men, were brutally killed by the Salvadoran 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. It is a tragedy the world must never forget.

The case to hold military leaders responsible for the massacre was reopened in 2016 after the country's Supreme Judicial Court set aside a 1993 amnesty law.  From 2019-2021 a court in the rural town of San Francisco Gotera received extensive exhibits, evidence and testimony including from soldiers who participated in the event, from persons living in the zone at the time, and from expert witnesses. The experts have included forensic anthropologists from Argentina, and Professor Terry Karl who described the military chain of command during public hearings streamed live in April 2021. The accumulated evidence has provided a detailed historical chronology of events resulting in the massacre of a thousand children, women and the elderly.

The prosecution, however, came to a standstill after president Nayib Bukele seized control over the Salvadoran judiciary in 2021, forcing out judges over 60 years old, including the courageous jurist who had been overseeing the case, Judge Jorge Guzman. In December 2024 advocates harshly criticized Guzman's replacement, Judge Mirtala Portillo, for " dilatory judicial criteria that have paralyzed the effective progress of the trial."

Two months ago, the court in San Francisco Gotera finally ordered that the case proceed to the remaining public trial phase against 13 defendants from the former high military command. Among the defendants is Guillermo García, the former Minister of Defense during the bloody civil war. This step forward could mean the end of impunity for those responsible for the massacre, although the defendants have appealed this order, and no start date for a trial is on the calendar. “It is like finding a small light in the midst of so much adversity,” Leonel Tobar, president of the El Mozote Human Rights Promotion Association, told AFP.

Still, one must wonder whether a final judgment can be reached while any of the defendants, who are in their eighties and nineties, are still alive.

Defendants in a 2017 hearing in San Francisco Gotera courtroom

The 92-year old Garcia has already been criminally convicted in El Salvador of one atrocity during the civil war. The US deported Garcia to El Salvador in 2016 to face charges in this country, finding credible evidence of his participation in human rights violations during the war. In June 2025, Garcia, along with two ex-Salvadoran army colonels, was convicted in the 1982 ambush and murder of four Dutch journalists. It is believed he is in custody in a private military hospital.

Still there are deniers of the historical facts of the El Mozote massacre. A report last month by IPS highlighted misinformation circulating in video reports in Salvadoran social media claiming that the massacre did not occur or was greatly exaggerated. The IPS report quotes Ivon Rivera, a media investigator at the UCA, who links these denials to the communication strategy of the Bukele regime to label El Salvador's peace accords a "farce" and events of the civil war part of a cynical pact between the leaders of ARENA and the FMLN and their foreign sponsors.

A new movie, Luciérnagas (Fireflies) en El Mozote, premiered in El Salvador, on December 9 on the 44th anniversary of the massacre. (Movie trailer).  More of an action movie than an attempt to provide context and understanding of the massacre, its filming in 2022 was supported by the Bukele government.  Read a review of the movie in El Faro here.

Since the time the massacre prosecution was reopened in 2016, human rights lawyers at Cristosal, along with Tutela Legal, have represented the families of the victims during the criminal proceedings. Earlier this month, with the latest development to potentially move the trial to its concluding phase, Cristosal stated:

Today, as the case advances to the plenary phase—in the year marking the 45th anniversary of the massacre—we are at a breaking point in El Salvador’s collective memory. Not only because, for the first time, there is a real possibility of prosecuting those who directed the military operation—the former Minister of Defense Guillermo García and more than a dozen officers from the Atlácatl Battalion—but because this progress refutes decades of state denial, from the concealment of military archives to the obstruction of court-ordered inspections.

Every step this case has taken represents a symbolic, political, and moral defeat for the structures of impunity that tried to erase it.

That is why this moment matters. It matters for the more than 140 victims who died without seeing justice. For the families who are still waiting. For a country that needs to reconnect with the truth that was denied to it. It matters because it reminds us that even in the darkest chapters of Salvadoran history, dignity can open a crack through which light enters.