Two El Mozote 1981 massacres' survivors in El Salvador. Image: www.cejil.org
When arriving at the plaza of El Mozote on Thursday, August 30th, it was difficult to conceive everything that had occurred there. In the same place where about a thousand people had been executed at the hands of the Salvadoran army, today, a stage was being prepared. In a few moments, a local band would play to welcome the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) that was visiting for the first time one of the villages where the largest documented massacre in the recent history of Latin America took place, 37 years ago.
Everything had been prepared in a marathon production. This town, which has no more than two paved streets and is located in the middle of the mountains, was the point of attraction for an international meeting. The objective: to identify what had changed in El Mozote and its surroundings based on the sentence that the IACHR Court issued in 2012.
