What a 40-year-old massacre says about El Salvador today [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Elizabeth Hawkins
December 7, 2020

SAN SALVADOR — This country’s brutal civil war ended nearly thirty years ago, but it many ways, it still feels like a battleground here. Soldiers in combat gear patrol the streets alongside heavily armed police; razor wire runs atop many buildings. Those who can afford to live in gated communities with private security, while guards watch the entrance of many businesses. These days, however, they spend much of their time taking customers’ temperatures and directing them to hand sanitizer.

In February, soldiers occupied parliament at the direction of President Nayib Bukele in an attempt to pressure lawmakers into approving an increase in military funding. Weeks later, Bukele ordered one of the world’s longest and most restrictive pandemic lockdowns. Military checkpoints were set up around the country, and people deemed to be violating quarantine were arrested. When the legislature and courts attempted to block the moves, Bukele accused them of “being on the side of the disease,” refusing to follow court orders.

Human rights defenders who challenged the military’s actions were threatened, as were journalists who published investigative reports critical of the president and his cabinet.

Bukele was elected in June 2019, but the tensions are decades old. Scholars generally agree about the basic facts of El Salvador’s civil war, which lasted from 1980 until 1992: A small but powerful economic elite, supported by the military, resisted demands for reform and became increasingly repressive, prompting the left-wing opposition to organize and take up arms. As part of its Cold War “containment” policy, the United States provided funding and military support to El Salvador’s right-wing government.

Although both sides committed war crimes, the United Nations later found that US-backed Salvadoran government troops and their allies were behind most of them. Perhaps the worst atrocity—the massacre of around 1,000 innocent villagers in the hamlet of El Mozote on December 11, 1981—still looms large over society in El Salvador today, pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis and raising crucial questions about justice, memory and the country’s fragile institutions.

More:
https://www.icwa.org/what-massacre-says-about-el-salvador/