El Mozote Massacre: Why is there not a single Salvadoran military convicted?

Few massacres are spoken and written about as much as the one that the Armed Forces of El Salvador carried out in El Mozote, which these days commemorates 40 years of the horror that the people of El Mozote lived through. Almost a thousand unarmed civilians were killed, most of them boys and girls. Much is said and written, but in four decades there has not been a single condemned person because of that infamous massacre: not a soldier, not a captain, not a general.

«Something like this can only be explained by the null political will of the governments that we have had in these 40 years, and no one is saved here, not even the current one», says Ovidio Mauricio, a 62-year-old lawyer, who began working on the case of El Mozote in the late eighties, before the end of the civil war, explains journalist Roberto Valencia for RT.

Another Salvadoran lawyer very involved is David Morales, 55, who openly calls what has happened in these four decades as «institutionalization of impunity»: «There is a political position to deny and cover up those responsible for human rights violations in the Armed Forces, perhaps with the false criterion of protecting the institution».

Mauricio and Morales are the lawyers representing the El Mozote Victims Human Rights Promotion Association (APDHEM) in the trial that takes place in the San Francisco Gotera Investigating Court, reopened in 2016. But their accompaniment to the victims goes much further back.

The two worked for María Julia Hernández, a close collaborator of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, and perhaps the person who was most and best involved in the defense of human rights in the war and in the postwar period, as director of the defunct Legal Guardianship of the Archbishopric .

In 1990, after collecting testimonies from survivors, María Julia Hernández had the infinite courage to denounce the massacre in court, when what happened in December 1981 was continued to be officially denied, minimized or attributed to the FMLN guerrilla.

She passed away in March 2007, with El Mozote as a synonym for impunity. Little has changed since her death.

«All governments after the peace accords [1992] have been militaristic, and they defend the privileges that the military power has», says David Morales. «Although I know it is a very difficult position to understand outside of El Salvador», he adds.

In the 40 years that have elapsed since the Atlacatl Battalion stormed El Mozote and surrounding towns, El Salvador has succeeded governments of the right (the ARENA party, between 1989 and 2009), of the supposed left (the FMLN party, 2009-2019) , and the current one, led by Nayib Bukele, marked by a strong authoritarian drift.

Perhaps the most incomprehensible thing is that the two five-year terms of the ex-guerrilla of the FMLN at the head of the Executive did not alter the privileges of the Armed Forces. Lawyers Mauricio and Morales agree on the why: although less than the Army, the guerrillas also had ‘corpses in their closets’ due to excesses during the war, and they opted for complicity.

“The strategy is to delay, delay and delay. How many of the soldiers who participated in the massacre have not already died in peace, in their homes? And how many of the victims and survivors?», asks Alejandro Díaz, 45 years old and president of Tutela Legal María Julia Hernández, the NGO that tries to keep the activist’s ideals alive.

Ovidio Mauricio is part of this association, one of the two that act as a private prosecutor in the El Mozote case. The other is Cristosal, of which attorney David Morales is the head of the Transitional Justice Unit.

«The justice system in El Salvador, both the courts and the Attorney General’s Office, have been complicit in the impunity (that surrounds this case)», Morales concludes.

Episodes of hope after the massacre

Forty years is many years. While impunity continues to set the El Mozote case on fire, there have been two moments when it seemed that it could be different. The first occurred at the end of 2012, when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned El Salvador for the cover-up.

The ruling forced the State to accept that the Armed Forces committed the massacre, to apologize to the victims, to make investments to improve living conditions in El Mozote, and to pay compensation to the survivors.

The second moment came in July 2016, when the Constitutional Chamber declared the Amnesty Law approved a year after the end of the war, in March 1993, unconstitutional, precisely to avoid prosecuting the human rights violations committed.

That resolution is what allowed Judge Jorge Guzmán to reopen the case in San Francisco Gotera, the capital of Morazán, the department in which El Mozote is located. For the first time, generals and colonels of the Salvadoran Army sat in the dock and had to look the survivors of the massacre in the eye.

However, five years after the case was reopened, the controversial reform to the judicial career that the Legislative Assembly related to President Bukele approved on September 1, resulted in Judge Guzmán being separated from the case.

Bukele was five months old when El Mozote occurred and his Defense Minister, René Merino Monroy, barely 17. The victims’ lawyers believe that it was the ideal setting to turn the page and end impunity, but that is not happening.

“Bukele has denied information, has denied inspections of military archives, and has politically attacked Judge Guzmán, whom the regime has finally removed from office. It has been a government that has become radicalized in its position of not collaborating and covering up (the massacre), despite the fact that neither the president nor the minister come from generations active in the war”, says David Morales.

In this year, 2021, the same is happening as in previous years, perhaps accentuated by the ‘round number’ (40) of the anniversary of the massacre. Commemorative reports in international media, survivors recounting the hell they experienced, visits by officials and international organizations to the village, beautiful words and empty promises. But the truth is that it is now 40 years and there is not a single person condemned for that massacre. It is hard to understand. It costs more to explain.

«You have been in this case for more than 30 years. Are there reasons for optimism? Will there be justice?», I asked the lawyer Ovidio Mauricio to close the interview. «I no longer have that optimism, but I cannot convey what I feel to the victims, because there is frustration. The fight must be followed to the end», he replied.