El Salvador Opens Cultural Center in Site of El Mozote Massacre

El Salvador inaugurated Saturday a cultural center in the town of El Mozote, where the U.S.-backed military executed more than 1,000 people in 1981 in one of the bloodiest massacre's in the country's 12-year civil war.

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This site was built to "articulate culture as a right, where women and older adults generate wealth with their knowledge and remember their past so that the current generations know the injustices that were committed in the past and they won't happen again," said Secretary of Culture Silvia Regalado.

The initiative is part of the Integral Development Program of El Mozote, which has been preparing the cultural institution with the support of the Human Rights Association of El Mozote for three years, according to Regalado.

Soldiers from a U.S.-trained Salvadoran death squad "deliberately and systematically" tortured and executed 1,200 villagers, mostly women and children, in the small town of El Mozote and near villages between Dec. 11 and 13, 1981, according to the U.N. Truth Commission launched in 1992 after the signing of the peace accords. 

This massacre was the worst war crime of the country's civil war, and one of the largest attacks against civilians perpetrated by a Latin American army, according to the commission.

According to Regalado, one of the houses of El Mozote villagers will become a "memory center."

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At the end of 2016, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team analyzed 40 bones obtained in 19 excavations, which together with the results of genetic identification and ballistics tests, will be handed over to the State's Attorney, who will decide then whether to use it as evidence in a criminal proceeding reopened last September.

The Salvadoran civil war, from 1980 until 1992, left 75,000 deaths and 8,000 disappeared. The conflict confronted the U.S.-financed army and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, FMLN, which is now in power as a political party after being a guerrilla group. The villagers were accused of being sympathetic to the cause of the FMLN 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.