The Atlantic

El Salvador Mocks the Victims of El Mozote

The Salvadoran assembly may move to protect its war criminals.
Source: Jose Cabezas / Reuters

During El Salvador’s “dirty war” in the 1980s, which pitted leftist guerrillas against an entrenched alliance of generals and oligarchs, the army committed atrocity upon atrocity with impunity. In one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history, in December 1981, soldiers from an American-trained battalion slaughtered nearly 1,000 peasants—women and old men and children, some too young to walk, average age 6—in El Mozote and the surrounding villages.

After a Sisyphean struggle, justice and accountability seemed within reach when in 2017 a judge began hearing evidence against 20 former

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic4 min read
Private Equity Has Its Eyes on the Child-Care Industry
Updated at 1:30 p.m. ET on February 22, 2024. Last June, years of organizing in Vermont paid off when the state’s House and Senate passed landmark legislation—overriding a governor’s earlier veto—that invests $125 million a year into its child-care s
The Atlantic5 min readSocial History
The Pro-life Movement’s Not-So-Secret Plan for Trump
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that he regards his party’s position on reproductive rights as a political liability. He blamed the “abortion issue” for his part
The Atlantic4 min readAmerican Government
How Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t
Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking

Related