Introduction
The 1981 massacre of civilians by government soldiers in the village of El Mozote, El Salvador and its impact on the contemporary human rights movement were the topics of a forum at OSI's New York office on September 4, 2003. The forum also marked the concluding days of an OSI photography exhibit by Pedro Linger-Gasiglia about the forensic exhumation of mass graves in El Mozote, which was initiated in 1992 by a team of Argentinian specialists.
Forum panelists included Mark Danner, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (Vintage, 1994); Maria Julia Hernandez, founding director of Tutela Legal, the human rights office of the Archbishop of San Salvador (El Salvador's capital); Susan Meiselas, an award-winning photographer and a member of Magnum Photos who produced some of the first images of the massacre; David Morales, deputy director of the Office for Human Rights Ombudsman in El Salvador; and Anne Nelson, international program director at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and former director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. The panel was moderated by OSI President Aryeh Neier, who, as executive director of Human Rights Watch in the 1980s, led efforts to stop U.S. government support for governments in El Salvador that systematically abused human rights.
Background
In December 1981, Salvadoran soldiers trained in counterinsurgency tactics by U.S. military advisors carried out anti-guerrilla operations in the province of Morazon in northeastern El Salvador. On December 10, they entered the village of El Mozote. Although the army did not regard El Mozote as a town that harbored or was sympathetic toward the guerillas, the troops rounded up men, women, and children from El Mozote and several nearby villages over the next four days and then tortured and executed them. A UN Truth Commission, established in 1992 after a peace agreement ended the civil war, concluded that at least 500 civilians were killed at El Mozote. Judicial investigations into the massacre started in 1990 have yet to result in any prosecutions. The investigations have been marked by interference from the armed forces and the president of El Salvador's Supreme Court.
Despite lack of progress in prosecuting those responsible for the massacre, human rights advocates consider El Mozote a turning point for the human rights movement because it marked the first time that an investigative approach was used to document abuses. (Previous efforts had relied largely on individual testimony.) In addition, the massacre prompted the first-ever use of the Geneva Conventions for assessing human rights abuse in Central America, and the reporting and investigations that followed El Mozote helped focus debate on U.S. responsibility for massive human rights abuses through its continued support for El Salvador's military. Currently, human rights advocates in El Salvador have been challenging the country's 1993 amnesty law and examining recent Supreme Court rulings for opportunities to prosecute those responsible for the massacre at El Mozote.