January 16, 2016
Names on memorial to the victims of the El Mozote Massacre
Today El Salvador marks 25 years since the signing of the peace accords ending 12 years of civil war that left 75,000 people killed and 8,000 disappeared, one of the darkest periods of the Central American nation.
Speaking at an event celebrating the anniversary, President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a former guerrilla leader during the civil war, announced a plan for 2017 to launch a “second generation of the accords” and called on Salvadorans to continue to “cultivate and defend” peace with hopes of moving the country forward from a bloody past.
The event, attended by victims’ organizations and regional authorities, commemorated the signing of the historic accords while acknowledging challenges El Salvador faces in realizing the full promise of peace. Relatives of those killed or disappeared during the civil planned to present to the government in writing a demand for justice for those who suffered brutal abuses and murder at the hands of the U.S.-back Salvadoran military.
“It is necessary to dignify the people that suffered state offenses and with whom we still have a debt,” said Sanchez Ceren.
United Nations representative Miroslav Jenka announced that the international body will be part of the new dialogue process in El Salvador to support the development of peace, one quarter of a century after the war officially ended.
“Violence and persistent inequality prevent Salvadorans from enjoying peace,” Jenka said during the event.
Sanchez Ceren added that dialogue on a new law of reconciliation and reparations for victims remains a key priority, adding that the government has already started planning for education on the “culture of peace” in schools.
The accords were signed on 1992 in Chapultepec, Mexico, after the talks first began in 1984 between the government and different political and guerrilla groups gathered under the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, which reorganized as a political party after the peace deal.
The FMLN came to power in 2009 with the election of former President Mauricio Funes after two decades of right-wing government, and has been the ruling party with a majority in the National Assembly every since.
As a former leader of the insurgency, current president Sanchez Ceren lead the end-of-conflict talks and signed the peace deal on behalf of the FMLN in 1992.
On Sunday, the government inaugurated the Monument to Reconciliation, a piece of public artwork to commemorate the peace agreements. The monument, made up of three figures, depicts a woman and man walking together. The woman represents the guerillas, and the man represents the army. Behind them, a third figure is a large woman that represents the Salvadoran people, according to the Ministry of Public Works.
The violence and bloodshed of El Salvador’s brutal civil war is epitomized perhaps most clearly in the case of the El Mozote massacre, which saw soldiers from a U.S.-trained Salvadoran death squard murder 1,200 villagers, mostly women and children, in the small town of El Mozote between Dec. 11 and 13, 1981.
The villagers had been accused of being sympathetic to the cause of left-wing rebels in the country, and 35 years later, the families of victims are still searching for justice.
El Mozote became a synonym for the United States’ government’s atrocities in a brutal campaign to stave off communism in Latin America and the rest of the developing world. A truth commission created by the United Nations in 1992 published a report that concluded that the El Mozote massacre was the worst war crime of the country’s civil war.
A Supreme Court decision last year to overturn the Amnesty Law, set up in 1993, protecting perpetrators of civil war-era human rights crimes and other abuses has opened the day for justice to finally be served for El Mozote and other cases after decades of impunity.
Many analysts have argued that El Salvador’s chronic and rampant violence, attributed to warring gangs and iron-fist policing, will not be resolved without tackling the systemic culture of impunity that has long overshadowed attempts to rein in violent crime.
Source: telesur