El Salvador Mocks the Victims of El Mozote

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. It is called the National Reconciliation Law, but as readers of Orwell might have guessed, it is anything but.