MILITARY ATROCITIES: El Salvador
MILITARY ATROCITIES: El Salvador
By Megan Boehnke
Posted April 14, 2013 at 4 a.m.
In a 1981 civil war between the conservative government and leftist guerrillas, the United States backed the Revolutionary Government Junta of El Salvador, which rose to power following a coup detat two years earlier.
In December 1981, U.S.-backed troops visited the village of El Mozote, raping women and girls and interrogating the men using torture before slaughtering more than 800 people. The soldiers buried the bodies and burned down the buildings.
While The New York Times and Washington Post reported the massacre in January 1982, the U.S. and El Salvador governments dismissed the reports as biased and exaggerated and the journalists faced criticism from peers and conservative media-watch groups. In 1992, however, the Chapultepec Peace Accords included a United Nations-sanctioned Commission on Truth for El Salvador to investigate potential human rights abuses committed during the war. The Argentine forensic team began excavations that year, confirming the journalists earlier reports.
In 2011, the Salvadoran government formally apologized for the atrocity. In 2012, the inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered the local government to investigate the massacre and bring those responsible to justice, ruling that amnesty laws do not apply.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/apr/14/military-atrocities-el-salvador/
(Short article, no more at link.)