Post #1

El Salvador has been plagued by violence for decades. Following the 1982 El Calabozo massacre of 200 rural residents by El Salvadoran soldiers an outcry for change was heard. This massacre marked the beginning of the end of the civil war within the country. The violence is still carrying over into today though. Recently, the remains of six people killed in the massacre were finally returned to the families they belong to. The bodies had finally been allowed to be returned at the end of 2019, and the process of getting the bodies back to their loved ones was set into motion. The massacre included the killing of mostly women, children and elderly that were taken hostage without resistance. One of the family members says, “They were massacred, it was a slaughter of innocent people.” Many, if not all, are still demanding justice for the deaths, even 38 years later. It’s truly disgusting to see massacres of innocents like this still going unpunished today. If something even remotely close to this happened in the United States, the consequences would be quick and severe, with little mercy, as our justice system proudly represents punitive justice as the ideal way of rehabilitating criminals. 

There is even more shocking information from the Associated Press article. The United Nations Truth Commission even said “there exists sufficient evidence that on Aug. 22, 1982 soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion deliberately killed more than 200 civilians, men, women, and children it had captured without resistance.” So even the council of the most powerful nations in the world have enough evidence that this happened, so why have no soldiers been punished or taken to court to answer for their crimes? It has to do with a “general amnesty” (Aleman) that was blocking the investigation in El Salvador. Until recently, these soldiers have been protected from justice because of the law protected them. Now the El Salvadoran Supreme Court has finally “declared the amnesty unconstitutional.” (Aleman) It’s sickening that the soldiers had been protected this long from justice. Who knows if most of them will even face justice as 30 years is ample time to move to a completely different continent, safe from any El Salvadoran prosecution. 

Perhaps the most hard hitting fact is that the same government that these soldiers were acting under was the same government that the President Carter and Reagan administrations were providing with $1-2 million per day and significant military training. Is the blood of these innocents on the United States hands? The civil war that plagued El Salvador in the 1980s, leftist revolutionaries were up against an “alliance of countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades.”(Bonner) This alliance ruled with power and fear and kept the peasants “illiterate and impoverished.”(Bonner) At least 75,000 Salvadorans were killed, including peasants, students, and union leaders. What a terrible stain this war has left on El Salvador, all in the interest of a anti-communist agenda. I agree the spread of communism must be stopped but if we just fight them with the same fire they use, are we any better than them? The tragedy of this war cannot be rewound. What is done is done. The least we could do for the Salvadorans is raise awareness to the gang violence and government corruption still present today.