El Salvador Perspectives

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 perpetrato...

National Palace of El Salvador News that the government was tearing up part of the National Palace, located in San Salvador's historic center, started with pictures circulating on social media of piles of broken hydraulic tiles being removed from the National Palace. Esto es criminal. Baldosas victorianas de 100 años destruídas en el Palacio Nacional. Fotos @FRubio08 pic.twitter.com/b9tiWtZaZG — Mauro Arias Panamá (@mauroariasfoto) May 5, 2024 This is criminal. 100-year-old Victorian tiles destroyed in the National Palace Then came an article written by journalist Gabriel Labrador at El Faro describing how the refuse was being unceremoniously dumped into a canyon outside of the City.   El Ministerio de Cultura anunció el 10 de abril que el edificio permanecerá cerrado hasta nuevo aviso debido a “trabajos de mejora, mantenimiento y restauración”, sin especificar mayor información. Lee más detalles: 🖋️ @glabrador y @efrenlemus https://t.co/nNFnQpqreN — El Far...

Monument to Peace on highway south of San Salvador January 16 marks the 32nd anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords which ended El Salvador's  12 year long bloody civil war.   There is no official celebration of the end of that conflict by the government of Nayib Bukele, the country's president who labels the accords "a farce." Here is what I wrote on the 2021 anniversary of the Accords: So why is Bukele attacking the Peace Accords?   To celebrate the Peace Accords and the reforms they instituted would be to celebrate many of the norms which Bukele has begun to trample.   He cares little for the institutions of constitutional democracy.   The separation of powers checks him from acting freely.   He attacks those who would champion human rights.   While the Peace Accords intended to remove the military from domestic affairs, Bukele sends the military out into the country with ever more frequency to perform all sor...

While I am not a fan of beauty pageants, clearly others are .   This week the 2023 Miss Universe pageant is taking place in El Salvador.  It is another of the sweeping image-making projects of which president Nayib Bukele is so fond. The Miss Universe pageant came to El Salvador once before in 1975. At that time, the country was run by an unholy alliance of an oligarchy and the military.  The country brought in a contest of beauties with sights of sun and beautiful beaches in an attempt to improve its image during a year which saw massacres, repressions and unrest in the lead-up to the approaching civil war. As the New York Post wrote today: The last time that organizers held a Miss Universe pageant in El Salvador, in 1975, rioting students staged demonstrations that ultimately ended in a massacre and plunged the country into a brutal civil war.... Meanwhile, San Salvador locals are protesting the national government having spent a reported $12 million in public f...

Ninety years ago yesterday on January 22, 1932, mass executions of indigenous campesinos in El Salvador began after a failed uprising.  The military government in El Salvador headed by General Maximillian Hernandez massacred twenty thousand or more in an event which is known in Salvadoran history simply as “ La Matanza ” – The Massacre. Yesterday was also the day that the Roman Catholic church chose to celebrate the beatification of four of its martyrs, a formal step on the process of being declared saints of the Catholic church.  The four included Jesuit priest RutilioGrande, and two of his lay parishioners – 17 year old Nelson Lemus and the campesino Manuel Solorzano. These three were gunned down by the Salvadoran military as Grande drove towards El Paisnal to preside over a mass.   The fourth martyr beatified yesterday was Friar Cosme Spessotto , a parish priest from Italy, murdered in San Juan Nonualco, in similar fashion in 1980.  I don’t know if the chur...

On January 22, Father Cosme Spessotto, will be beatified by the Roman Catholic church in San Salvador along with the martyred Rutilio Grande.  Father Cosme, a Franciscan missionary priest from Italy. was killed on June 14, 1980 while preparing to say mass in the church where he served in the town of San Juan Nonualco.   I must confess that before the news that Spessotto would be beatified along with Grande this weekend, I knew nothing about this religious man who was one of the victims of El Salvador's conflict years.   His murder at the altar of his church came less than three months after the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero, at a time when the death squads of El Salvador were running rampant.     From Spessotto's  Wikipedia biography : Spessotto did not speak any Spanish when he arrived in El Salvador and so had to learn the language in order to speak and connect with the locals. After three years, he was assigned to serve as the p...

Sunday January 16 marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of Peace Accords which ended El Salvador's 12 year bloody civil war.  In the country there will again be no government sponsored celebration of the anniversary following the wishes of president Nayib Bukele who at the end of 2020 labelled the Accords a "farce."   This week the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly  voted  to eliminate the 1992 law which established January 16 as a day of celebration of peace and the Accords and voted to commemorate instead the victims of the armed conflict. On the 25th anniversary of the Peace Accords in 2017, a  Monument to Peace and Reconciliation  was erected on the western side of the capitol city.  The monument includes figures of a government and guerrilla soldier walking arm in arm with doves of peace overhead overseen by a figure of an earth mother goddess.  Today the Bukele government is in the process of  dismantling  it. Opponents to N...

December 2 marks the 41st 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.  It is a crime which remains unjudged and unpunished in El Salvador. In subsequent years, many in the US came to know the story through the 1982 documentary Roses in December , which profiles Jean Donovan.   Journalist Gene Palumbo covered El Salvador during those bloody years and wrote a review of Roses in December .  As he described in a 2010 note in Commonweal on the 30th anniversary of the murder of the churchwomen: When I arrived here in El Salvador as ...

Friday concluded an historic week of testimony in the El Mozote massacre case. The court heard from two expert witnesses regarding the responsibility of the military officer defendants.   While most of the prior testimony in this case has dealt with the horrific events of the days of December 1981 in the hamlet of El Mozote and surrounding communities, this testimony dealt with the command responsibility of the former military leaders now on trial and the broader context of the war against a civilian population being waged by the Salvadoran military. Importantly, this testimony also brought into sharp focus the important (and shameful) role of the US in motivating and covering up this massacre.   Conclusion of Karl testimony On her third day on the witness stand, Stanford professor Terry Karl faced questioning by the lawyers for all the parties. The morning session included questioning from the victims' representatives and the attorney general's office.  For th...

Starting Monday, April 26, important testimony will be offered in the court hearing the El Mozote massacre case.  The court in San Francisco Gotera will hear from two expert witnesses about the responsibility of military commanders in the Salvadoran armed forces for the 1981 massacre which killed almost 1000 children, elderly, women and others.   For the first time, the testimony will be broadcast live over the internet from San Francisco Gotera.  The hearings are scheduled all week and to run from 8:30-4:00 El Salvador time.   You will be able to find the feed at the Facebook page for El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court.   In addition, El Salvador Perspectives will also have the live feed on our Facebook page along with my real time comments. The testimony this week is important for pinning responsibility on individual members of the high military command and their specific responsibility.  For example, former minister of defense Guillerm...

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...

This essay first appeared in El Faro English with the title  New Fronts in the Battle over History in El Salvador on March 5, 2020. By Nelson Rauda Zablah In the first week of March, experts from the Attorney General’s office will resume digging a trench in the middle of the campus of the University of El Salvador—the largest and only public university of the country—searching for the bodies of students who were assassinated in the beginning of the war. The Salvadoran Civil War (which was fought from 1980 to 1992 and resulted in the death of 75,000 people and the displacement of around 750,000) ended almost three decades ago, but its legacy still reverberates throughout the country. Its memory, despite the best efforts of some of the most powerful war criminals, is still very much alive. During the last week of February, a PhD candidate asked me if El Salvador is “a reconciled country”—if it has come to terms with its past. It was a peculiar week to ask that question, but a...