SAN SALVADOR, May 15 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A rights group in El Salvador called Tuesday for “justice and reparations” 44 years after 600 people were massacred by the military while fleeing the country’s civil war.
On May 14, 1980, more than 600 children, women and elderly people were slain in Las Aradas, a village on the banks of the Sumpul River on the border with Honduras, north of San Salvador.
A UN Truth Commission investigation found in 1993 that the military “deliberately killed” the non-combatant civilians who were trying to swim to safety in Honduras.
The UN report also found that “the massacre was possible due to the cooperation of the Honduran Armed Forces, which prevented the passage of Salvadoran residents” to Honduras.
“There have been 44 years of impunity in the Sumpul massacre — and there is a lack of will to win justice and reparation measures,” lawyer Alejandro Diaz, from the NGO Tutela Legal, which represents victims of the 1980-1992 civil war, said.
Legal Tutela has blamed the killings on the army, the defunct National Guard and the Nationalist Democratic Organization (Orden), a paramilitary group that helped the armed forces in the fight against leftist guerrilla.
The UN report also found that “there was a cover-up of the facts by the Salvadoran military authorities” and that the massacre constituted “a serious violation” of humanitarian law.
While the NGO seeks justice, a group of retired generals said in a statement last week on the bicentennial of the Salvadoran army “that no soldier should be judged, criticized or questioned for having fulfilled the mission of defending El Salvador.”
At that same event, retired general Humberto Corado, minister of defense in 1993-1995, asked for a pardon for all soldiers.
Miguel Montenegro, director of the nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of El Salvador, in turn has voiced regret that a congressional committee dominated by President Nayib Bukele’s party shelved a bill to punish those responsible for crimes during the civil war.
“They want to continue protecting the perpetrators and not the victims,” Montenegro said.
The Salvadoran civil war left more than 75,000 dead, thousands missing and devastated the national economy.
In 2022, Bukele launched a crackdown on gang violence, imposing a state of emergency that suspended the need for arrest warrants, among other civil liberties.
While he is widely credited with reducing homicides to the lowest rate in three decades, his tactics have prompted outcry over human rights violations and lack of due process. — NNN-AGENCIES
