La batalla por la justicia en el caso de la masacre más grande de América Latina se lleva a cabo en un pequeño juzgado rural al norte de El Salvador, lejos del interés nacional. Mientras un coro de voces recrea los tres días de horror que se vivieron en diciembre de 1981, la defensa de los militares tilda el juicio de espectáculo y llama a las víctimas “fantasiosas”. ¿Cómo sana una sociedad que ha enfrentado el trauma de la guerra en un silencio forzado? “Con justicia”, responden las víctimas.

[Institutional voice]: On January 16th, 1992, El Salvador signed a Peace Accord that ended 12 years of war.

(ALFREDO CRISTIANI’S DISCOURSE AUDIO ARCHIVE, FORMER SALVADORAN PRESIDENT ABOUT THE PEACE ACCORD)

[Institutional voice]: And on December 29th, 1996, it was Guatemala’s turn.

(ÁLVARO ARZÚ’S DISCOURSE AUDIO ARCHIVE, FORMER PRESIDENT OF GUATEMALA)

[Institutional voice]: After two decades, the war wounds are still open. Pie de página’s Ximena Natera and Radio Nacional de Colombia’s Lorena Vega present War witnesses: voices against impunity, stories of the battles for memory and justice in El Salvador and Guatemala.

***

(COURTROOM’S AUDIO, SAN FRANCISCO GOTERA, EL SALVADOR)

[Juez Jorge Alberto Guzmán]: Good morning. You may be seated. I hope you’ve had a nice journey.

[Ximena Natera]: We are in a San Francisco Gotera’s courtroom located in the north of El Salvador, where a 66-year-old farmer gets ready to take the stand and begin his testimony. He sits among the public and looks nervous about the lawyers’ presence.

[Lorena Vega]: The session has just started and the defense presents a petition that looks for the delay of the process. The judge denies it. 40 minutes later it’s the witness turn.

[Judge Guzmán]: I am going to ask Mr. Genaro Sánchez Díaz, if he is in this courtroom, to stand up.

[Ximena]: Genaro stands up, walks and sits in a chair next to the judge. The air conditioning is set in a freezing configuration and makes the courtroom contrast with the searingly hot street.

[Judge Guzmán]: Witness Genaro Sánchez… Do you swear to tell nothing but the truth?

[Lorena]: Genaro speaks quietly but answers affirmatively. He sits and officially starts his declaration.

[Judge Guzmán]: Firstly, witness… Would you give us your names, your age, and occupation?

[Ximena]: It is not the first time that Genaro appears before this court. When he was 49 years old during the heat of the Salvadoran Civil War on April 10th, 1991, the farmer denounced Atlacatl Battalion for the murder of one of his sons, his neighbors, and friends in the community of La Joya in what is known as El Mozote Massacre and nearby places.

That testimony was registered in a document that today, 26 years later, is read by the assistant judge.

[Assistant judge]: On December 10th, 1981, the Salvadoran Army entered La Arada Vieja located to the south of Jocoatique at 1 pm and started shooting towards La Joya. The gunfire was made by unknown troops and not a single badge was seen. He said that at the same time he saw how the helicopters were landing.

[Lorena]: Genaro told on his first declaration that he survived because he fled with his wife and 5 of his children when he heard the gunfire. He came back to the zone one week later just to recognize his dead son’s body as he couldn’t escape.

[Assistant judge]: 7 days later Sotero Guevara, Patricia Díaz and the declarant went to Sotero Guevara’s house and find it burned and the bodies of Petrona Chicas, Catalina Chicas, Justa Guevara, Jacinta Guevara, and the declarant’s 4-year-old son.

[Ximena]: Genaro was not the only survivor who went to court to denounce the massacre before the end of the civil war that left more than 75 thousand deaths in 12 years.

16 survivors denounced the massacre between 1990 and 1991. The first one was Pedro Chicas. The stories were full of violent details like the murder of newborn babies. These details were branded as lies by the officials and were archived.

The file is dusted off in this hearing and Genaro listens to his voice in other testimony two decades later.

[Judge Guzmán]: Now I want you to tell if that was the same declaration you gave in 1991.

[Genaro Guevara]: Yes, it is.

[Lorena]: Genaro now has the chance to add details to his declaration and answer the questions of the judge, the prosecutor and defense’s lawyers. But… What happened to a court case that was doomed to the impunity that now is back in the tribunals?

(MUSIC)

[Serafín Gómez]: Hi, Dorila lives here.

[Ximena]: With Serafin guiding us through Morazán’s communities, we look for one of the houses that withstood the Military raid in 1981.

[Ximena]: Is it in here?

[Lorena]: We enter the house’s yard and there she is.

[Dorila Márquez]: My name is María Dorila Márquez de Márquez.

[Ximena]: María Dorila has a great memory and remembers every detail of the Military’s arrival to his hamlet. She tells that on the firsts days of December a rumor started and it said that the Military was going to fight the Guerrillas in the area. Rumors also suggested that the inhabitants should reunite on El Mozote’s plaza to be safe.

[Dorila]: The Military told them that they should go to the plaza to be safe. The people from all those houses had left and we were left alone here in this house.

[Ximena]: Dorila, his husband and his two sons, one of them a baby, decided not to go to the plaza. They stayed in their home, the very same house in which we are today until the soldiers started to look in the nearby houses.

[Dorila]: My husband saw that they had burnt all those houses and asked me to go and see with him. We could see the house of my husband’s sister. There was one of his brothers that was with his pregnant lady and we saw when the soldiers arrived. We heard shooting. Later we saw a soldier running out of the house after a girl and boy crying. They went to the back of the house. We heard another shooting and after that, the girl’s crying no longer could be heard.

**[Lorena]: **Moved by the fear, the family decides to take the risk and flee. They tried to walk to the community known as Los Toriles but they couldn’t go very far.

[Dorila]: When we had already crossed all that plan, they made fire. It was the soldiers that were on the other hill where they were shooting the mortar and there I stood. I was with the baby and the other that walked beside me.

My husband was wearing a hat and raised his hand with the hat to show them we had no guns. I raised one hand too because with the other arm I was holding the baby

[Ximena]: They hid in a cornfield, and through the whistling of bullets, decided to go back home.

[Dorila]: When we were almost there my son told me: ”Ouch, mom, they hit me”. I told him that he probably stood over a spike and didn’t care much about it until we arrived here. There was a little bench where I sit and my son lied down on me. He raised his foot and I saw that it was true: they had shot my son.

[Lorena]: With the wounded boy the only choice left for the family was to wait. They never understood why the soldiers didn’t break into their house.

[Ximena]: They tried to flee for the second time the night of December 11th. They walked for hours but the full moon made the things difficult as it was hard for them to hide and this slowed them down.

**[Lorena]: **It was almost dawn when they arrived at Los Toriles. There they saw how the last houses were falling.

[Dorila]: My husband’s brother was murdered with all his family. There they killed all the people. We passed by and saw that the house was burning but as it was still dark, we didn’t saw them. It was a miracle that we didn’t step on them because after we passed, they left the bodies on one side of the road. There they murdered José, Marta, and the children.

[Ximena]: She didn’t lose only her husband’s family. In El Mozote’s plaza where the soldiers previously had concentrated the people, Dorila’s parents, brothers, and sisters died. Almost a thousand of Salvadorans were murdered by State forces between December 10th and December 13th of 1981 in eight Morazán communities.

[Lorena]: They came back to this house and El Mozote before January 16th, 1992, when the government and Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional’s guerrilla signed the Peace Accords in México.

[Ximena]: In November of that year San Francisco Gotera’s Judge was moved by the victims and ordered the firsts exhumations. This as part of the investigation that wanted to determine if the Salvadoran Army had committed a massacre. To El Mozote arrived The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team where they found 147 children’s bones.

[Dorila]: The DNA tests couldn’t be done to all the people that were exhumated, as there was not much of a help as it is today. They were just buried again in these mass graves. I don’t know where my father, my sister and my little brother ended.

[Lorena]: The government, FMNL, and the Legislative Assembly approved the Amnesty Law four months later on March 20th, 1993 interrupting the investigation.

This Law put a stop to all the legal processes that were investigating the conflict crimes and ignored the Truth Commission’s report that pointed the Salvadoran Army as main responsible of the massacre. It was a hard hit to the victims

[Ximena]: But the battle for justice didn’t stop there. Dorila and other survivors of the massacre created the El Mozote’s Human Rights Promoting Association. They’ve dedicated to collect testimonies of other inhabitants for years.

Wilfredo Medrano, one of the lawyers that leads the legal battle recognizes their efforts.

[Wilfredo Medrano]: It shows their persistence because the same people sometimes asked hopelessly what they could do. It was the people´s motivation that made us question ourselves what we were going to do with this archived case as the judges were not moving it.

(MUSIC)

[Lorena]: The massacre’s process was frozen in October 2003 when Jorge Alberto Guzmán assumed his seat as San Francisco Gotera’s First Instance Judge. We met him at his office and asked him: How is it possible that the court case of the biggest massacre of Latin America is in his chamber and not in a tribunal in San Salvador?

[Lorena]: Why El Mozote’s court case is held by you and not another judicial authority in the capital of the country?

[Judge Jorge Alberto Guzmán]: The complaint was raised in 1990 in these judicial headquarters, that’s why this was the right tribunal and still it is now.

[Ximena]: Judge Guzmán is a cautious man. He doesn’t give too many interviews and asks us not to take any pictures. He starts telling us that when he assumed as a judge, he was hamstrung by the Amnesty law.

[Judge Guzmán]: At that moment there were no accused individualized. The case judge issued the Nolle prosequi in a big manner so it could benefit anyone involved in the things that happened. From then on the process was completely paralyzed.

[Lorena]: The investigation stopped so early that it wasn’t even determined if the victims had died in a massacre.

[Judge Guzmán]: It was needed more proofs to determine if there was a massacre on that place (..) Collecting evidence is not enough, you must prove that these people died from acts of violence and until that moment that was not the case.

[Ximena]: The evidence that the judge didn’t consider was the 147 children’s dead bodies that were found by the Argentinian anthropologists.

The Mozote victims and the Dra. María Julia Hernandez Human Rights Association’s lawyers had been collecting proof of the massacre for years to raise it to international courts. It took them almost another decade to submit the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

[Dorila]: When we were going to the Court, they asked us 500 victims’ testimonies and 300 displaced persons’ testimonies. It was so hard because they didn’t want to talk and there are still people that don’t want to talk about because they are afraid. I just tell them that I am not afraid to be murdered because I am not telling lies.

[Lorena]: 1070 cases were documented.

(AUDIO ARCHIVE OF HEARING IN THE INTER-AMERICAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS AUDIO ARCHIVE)

[WOMAN IN THE I/A COURT H.R.]: Ladies and gentlemen, the Court.

[Lorena]: On April 23th 2012, 10 years after the Peace Accords, the Court sat in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The case was known as El Mozote and nearby places massacre vs El Salvador.

[I/A COURT H.R. JUDGE]: Please tell us your name.

[Ximena]: Three women testified in the hearing. María Dorila Márquez was one of them. María Dorila is the El Mozote’s Human Rights Association current president and from Ecuador, she gave the world her testimony.

(AUDIO ARCHIVE OF THE HEARING IN THE I/A COURT H.R.)

[Ovidio Mauricio González]: Has any person involved in the events been penalized?

[Dorila]: From what I know they have not.

[Ovidio]: How the lack of justice has affected you

[Dorila]: It has harmed me a lot because in El Salvador the laws have not been complied with. We are not talking about animals, we are talking about people getting murdered. Children, elderly, pregnant women that were killed and this was never investigated. There was no justice and this has harmed me a lot.

[Ximena]: According to Dorila, the Amnesty Law was the main reason behind the lack of justice.

[I/A COURT H.R. JUDGE]: Can you express how you feel to the fact that there is an Amnesty Law that protects the responsible of the events?

[Dorila]: It hurts me a lot and that’s what I am asking for. I want that law to be repealed so the investigations can continue. I don’t hate the people that did it but they deserve to be penalized. If there was a death penalty in El Salvador, it wouldn’t be enough. But I wouldn’t ask for that, as only God can take away people’s lives as they did with my family.

[Lorena]: Dorila’s testimony and the evidence that had been collected for 20 years by the Dra. María Julia Hernandez Human Rights Association and the survivors were enough for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In a landmark judgment, the Court sentenced the Salvadoran State for El Mozote massacre 6 months after the hearing.

[Ximena]: It concluded that El Salvador violated the right to life and the right to personal integrity and that the victims’ right to justice had been denied.

The Court ordered to start a reparation process, to perform the exhumations needed and to identify and return the mortal remains to the families. Particularly demanded that the Amnesty Law stopped being a hamper to the investigations.

[Lorena]: It took 4 years to the Salvadoran Justice to comply with the last part. Finally, the victims received the news they have been waiting for decades on July 13th, 2016.

(NEWS ARCHIVE)

[HOST]: The Salvadoran Supreme Court of Justice’s Constitutional room has declared unconstitutional the Amnesty Law of 1993, a year later after the Civil War ended, a law that consolidated peace.

[Ximena]: It was a controversial decision. The government led back then by FMLN’s political party, said that this court ruling endangered the Peace Accords’ achievements and the opportunity to look for justice for the past crimes polarized the country.

[Rosario Ríos]: If you search in here, there is nothing. There is little written record. There is just a little wall with names written on it but that’s it.

[Ximena]: In San Salvador, we met Santiago Nogales, a playwright and his wife, actress Rosario Ríos. They’ve been exploring historic memory through art for years. With Moby Dick, their theater company, they had staged unexplored topics for the country like torture or the 8 thousand people that were victims of forced disappearance in the armed conflict.

(Fragment of the theater play: ”Yo quiero la muerte en gracia, yo quiero un sepulcro, una fosa, una lápida aunque sea”.)

[Rosario]: There are many.

[Santiago Nogales]: There’s an absolute-oblivion.

[Rosario]: That they have no idea you are saying? Please… They’ve been killing each other and they were your grandpas… your parents.

[Santiago]: You’ve said it well. The best thing that can happen to a rotting wound is to stab it and take out all the crap so it can heal cleanly.

[Ximena]: But healing is so difficult for a country that has lived its traumas in silence. The Salvadoran State faded victims into oblivion as a requirement for peace. The parents silenced their wounds and the sons ignore the horrors. The only thing that seems to bound these generations is an impunity covenant: An armed conflict in the past and the gangs’ violence in the present.

(MUSIC)

[Lorena]: The Amnesty law’s end opened a space of hope. On September 30th, 2016 San Francisco Gotera’s Judge, Jorge Alberto Guzmán, reopened El Mozote’s court case.

The first step was to identify those allegedly responsible for the Tierra Arrasada Military raid.

[Judge Guzmán]: There were 32 accused but 13 had already passed away. So there are 18 persons subject to this court proceeding.

[Ximena]: Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, Atlacatl Battalion commander, was the man responsible for the massacre according to many people.

[Wilfredo Medrano]: There are lots of witnesses and survivors that saw him giving instructions and ordering how to torture the farmers to get information.

[Lorena]: Monterrosa was never penalized for his crimes and was murdered in a guerrilla attack in the heat of the armed conflict in 1984.

He was considered a national hero and even some memorials were raised to remember his heroism at the end of the Civil war.

In his name, 18 former Military members were called by Judge Guzmán. The highest ranked is General José Guillermo García, minister of defense between 1979 and 1981.

[Wilfredo]: Most of them are high ranked Military members. There are generals, lieutenants and a captain. All of them are between 60 and 80 years old but they are in perfect physical condition to be processed. They should not be exempt from their criminal responsibility as they had big power as high ranked Military members.

[Ximena]: Six months after the court case was opened, the former Military members appeared before the Tribunal. It was on March 29, 2017, and it is now stuck on Dorila Márquez’s memory as the day the Military members mocked of them again.

[Dorila]: When the Judge’s secretary was reading all the charges against them, they were giggling and making jokes among them. They looked at us and started talking privately. They were not paying attention to all the charges against them. Why the victims have to suffer the revictimization?

[Lorena]: That day the victims were hoping to see the Military members handcuffed and in their way to jail after all they were accused of 9 crimes: murderer, aggravated rape, aggravated deprivation of liberty, theft, aggravated damages, assault, acts of terrorism and propositive acts of terrorism.

But the judge didn’t consider necessary to incarcerate them.

[Judge Sánchez]: There’s still necessary to settle bigger participation of them. Because the only proof that we have right now is that they were leading the Military back then but that’s not evidence of them being on the places where the events happened.

(SAN FRANCISCO GOTERA’S COURTROOM AUDIO)

[Ximena]: The Military members’ disdain for the victims is so big that they have only shown once. The accused are not in the courtroom where Genaro Sánchez tells how he lived the massacre. The defense’s lawyers try to find contradictions on his words during his interrogation.

[Defense’s lawyer]: I asked with all due respect to the witness if he saw at that moment guerrilla members in the area.

[Lorena]: Genaro says that he didn’t. But with this query, the defense is trying to question the alleged closeness between guerrillas and the victims.

[Defense´s lawyer]: He said that he heard Radio Venceremos and he also said in his testimony that he was mobile so I ask him if he saw the people that were with Radio Venceremos.

[Ximena]: The alleged closeness between the witnesses and the guerrillas is a theory that Lisandro Quintanilla, an accused’s lawyer, tries to use to discredit the massacre.

[Lisandro Quintanilla]: Which is the evidence that tells us that these people were not guerrillas or that they were not assisting guerrillas? I don’t know (if there were children) but if there were… Who proves us that those children lived there? We’ve got the National Statistic Division’s population census. And we are going to use all of that. They are talking about thousands of deaths and that’s a lie. The population of those hamlets barely reached a hundred people.

[Ximena]: The witnesses have started to contradict themselves according to Quintanilla.

[Lorena]: How can they determine if a testimony has contradictions if they are not even listening to the people that after all these years have the chance to appear in court?

[Quintanilla]: Why should I go? What questions should I ask a lady that is narrating a gory story in which 50 persons were murdered? I am going to ask her: Did you saw Walter Salazar shoot? What is she going to tell me? These are sterile activities.

[Lorena]: During a year and a half of hearings, the defense’s strategy has not changed: They imply that the dead people were subversive guerrillas and that the mass graves, where the victims were found, were guerrilla’s cemeteries. But maintaining this argument convincing has been a hard task. Testimonies and forensic evidence contradict it.

On August 16th three experts from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team came to San Francisco Gotera to testify. They were the ones that did the firsts exhumations back in 1992.

[Lorena]: Anthropologists Mercedes Doretti, Patricia Bernardi and Silvana Turner took down the defense’s hypothesis. The evidence indicates that the mass graves were no clandestine cemeteries and they affirm that the victims didn’t die in an armed confrontation.

(MUSIC)

[Dorila Márquez]: We still have hope that there is justice but there is a lot of corruption…

[Lorena]: It will be a year since Dorila Márquez testified in the courtroom on October 13th

[Dorila]: I’ve been willing to give my testimony. I tell them that everything happened and it’s a reality and it deserves that we keep sharing it with the world. I don’t want that anything like this to be repeated. It is dreadful that the Salvadoran Army, the entity that should protect us, had done something like this… killing innocent people, children, elderly and pregnant women. What they’d done was an injustice.

[Ximena]: 46 witnesses have testified and there are still 12 unregistered survivors summoned by the prosecutors that have not been listened yet. This rural courtroom is little and is far away from the country’s capital and the national interests. With the exception of El Faro and Factum magazine that have been following closely the trial, there is little interest by the media.

A big contrast with the thousands of foreign reporters that at some point covered the conflict as one of the last shows of the Cold War

[Lorena]: El Mozote massacre is the first and only conflict trial. But the court case seems doomed to last for years. In early September a judge from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the court that condemned the State for the crime, visited the Morazán hamlets and demanded to the Salvadoran State more resources to the prosecutors and the court that reopened the case.

[Ximena]: The magnitude of this task is especially daunting as the file has more than 19 thousand pages and just 8 persons reviewing them.

[Wilfredo]: The people are conscious of what is going on. They are happy to see for the first time the accused sitting in a court. They thought that it would be only a dream to see the people that murdered their loved ones in a Tribunal. The other dream is that this continues and a penalizing sentence comes because this is proved… there is criminal participation.

[Lorena]: The survivors in El Salvador have waited for 36 years to tell the harm they lived, the infinite losses and the pain they have been experienced from that moment. However, their stories are also an example of resistance and organization as the fight to preserve the past is necessary to build real peace in the future.

[Ximena]: In our countries stories like the ones from Amadeo, Serafín, Dorila y Genaro could be a reflection of the wounds that our conflicts have caused. We believe that these stories are important for Mexico and Colombia where after years of violence a future of peace is considered. What can we learn from El Salvador’s experience that started to travel these roads 26 years ago?

[Lorena]: In Colombia where 60 years of war left 218 thousand deaths teaches us that:

The signature of a peace agreement doesn’t automatically lead to peace.

Reconciliation and forgiveness cannot be imposed.

And the media cannot be limited to register the war atrocities, instead, they should support the post-conflict years.

[Ximena]: In Mexico, after a decade of the public security’s militarization, the amount of victims is similar to any armed conflict in the continent.

Even though we are talking about the peace-building process, we are facing the task of reconciling a society that still lives in the violence.

It is key to understand from El Salvador the risks that bring institutionalizing forgiveness without a justice process for the victims.

(MUSIC)

***

On the next episode:

THE TESTIMONY OF GUATEMALA

Instititutional voice: There were horror days. We come to Guatemala to understand Creompaz process, the biggest case of forced disappearance of Latin America.

Instititutional voice:”War witnesses: voices against impunity” is a sound documentary series presented by Pie de Página and Radio Nacional de Colombia. This work was made thanks to the International Women’s Media Foundation’s initiative: Adelante.

Script and Investigation: Lorena Vega y Ximena Natera

Production in El Salvador: Víctor Peña, Juan Carlos, Jessica Ávalos, Julia Gavarrete and Jonatan Funes

Original Music: Santiago Flores

Sound Editor: José Luis Mantilla

Web: Cristian Anzola y Fernando Santillán

[Institutional voice]: On January 16th, 1992, El Salvador signed a Peace Accord that ended 12 years of war.

(ALFREDO CRISTIANI’S DISCOURSE AUDIO ARCHIVE, FORMER SALVADORAN PRESIDENT ABOUT THE PEACE ACCORD)

[Institutional voice]: And on December 29th, 1996, it was Guatemala’s turn.

(ÁLVARO ARZÚ’S DISCOURSE AUDIO ARCHIVE, FORMER PRESIDENT OF GUATEMALA)

[Institutional voice]: After two decades, the war wounds are still open. Pie de página’s Ximena Natera and Radio Nacional de Colombia’s Lorena Vega present War witnesses: voices against impunity, stories of the battles for memory and justice in El Salvador and Guatemala.

***

(COURTROOM’S AUDIO, SAN FRANCISCO GOTERA, EL SALVADOR)

[Juez Jorge Alberto Guzmán]: Good morning. You may be seated. I hope you’ve had a nice journey.

[Ximena Natera]: We are in a San Francisco Gotera’s courtroom located in the north of El Salvador, where a 66-year-old farmer gets ready to take the stand and begin his testimony. He sits among the public and looks nervous about the lawyers’ presence.

[Lorena Vega]: The session has just started and the defense presents a petition that looks for the delay of the process. The judge denies it. 40 minutes later it’s the witness turn.

[Judge Guzmán]: I am going to ask Mr. Genaro Sánchez Díaz, if he is in this courtroom, to stand up.

[Ximena]: Genaro stands up, walks and sits in a chair next to the judge. The air conditioning is set in a freezing configuration and makes the courtroom contrast with the searingly hot street.

[Judge Guzmán]: Witness Genaro Sánchez… Do you swear to tell nothing but the truth?

[Lorena]: Genaro speaks quietly but answers affirmatively. He sits and officially starts his declaration.

[Judge Guzmán]: Firstly, witness… Would you give us your names, your age, and occupation?

[Ximena]: It is not the first time that Genaro appears before this court. When he was 49 years old during the heat of the Salvadoran Civil War on April 10th, 1991, the farmer denounced Atlacatl Battalion for the murder of one of his sons, his neighbors, and friends in the community of La Joya in what is known as El Mozote Massacre and nearby places.

That testimony was registered in a document that today, 26 years later, is read by the assistant judge.

[Assistant judge]: On December 10th, 1981, the Salvadoran Army entered La Arada Vieja located to the south of Jocoatique at 1 pm and started shooting towards La Joya. The gunfire was made by unknown troops and not a single badge was seen. He said that at the same time he saw how the helicopters were landing.

[Lorena]: Genaro told on his first declaration that he survived because he fled with his wife and 5 of his children when he heard the gunfire. He came back to the zone one week later just to recognize his dead son’s body as he couldn’t escape.

[Assistant judge]: 7 days later Sotero Guevara, Patricia Díaz and the declarant went to Sotero Guevara’s house and find it burned and the bodies of Petrona Chicas, Catalina Chicas, Justa Guevara, Jacinta Guevara, and the declarant’s 4-year-old son.

[Ximena]: Genaro was not the only survivor who went to court to denounce the massacre before the end of the civil war that left more than 75 thousand deaths in 12 years.

16 survivors denounced the massacre between 1990 and 1991. The first one was Pedro Chicas. The stories were full of violent details like the murder of newborn babies. These details were branded as lies by the officials and were archived.

The file is dusted off in this hearing and Genaro listens to his voice in other testimony two decades later.

[Judge Guzmán]: Now I want you to tell if that was the same declaration you gave in 1991.

[Genaro Guevara]: Yes, it is.

[Lorena]: Genaro now has the chance to add details to his declaration and answer the questions of the judge, the prosecutor and defense’s lawyers. But… What happened to a court case that was doomed to the impunity that now is back in the tribunals?

(MUSIC)

[Serafín Gómez]: Hi, Dorila lives here.

[Ximena]: With Serafin guiding us through Morazán’s communities, we look for one of the houses that withstood the Military raid in 1981.

[Ximena]: Is it in here?

[Lorena]: We enter the house’s yard and there she is.

[Dorila Márquez]: My name is María Dorila Márquez de Márquez.

[Ximena]: María Dorila has a great memory and remembers every detail of the Military’s arrival to his hamlet. She tells that on the firsts days of December a rumor started and it said that the Military was going to fight the Guerrillas in the area. Rumors also suggested that the inhabitants should reunite on El Mozote’s plaza to be safe.

[Dorila]: The Military told them that they should go to the plaza to be safe. The people from all those houses had left and we were left alone here in this house.

[Ximena]: Dorila, his husband and his two sons, one of them a baby, decided not to go to the plaza. They stayed in their home, the very same house in which we are today until the soldiers started to look in the nearby houses.

[Dorila]: My husband saw that they had burnt all those houses and asked me to go and see with him. We could see the house of my husband’s sister. There was one of his brothers that was with his pregnant lady and we saw when the soldiers arrived. We heard shooting. Later we saw a soldier running out of the house after a girl and boy crying. They went to the back of the house. We heard another shooting and after that, the girl’s crying no longer could be heard.

**[Lorena]: **Moved by the fear, the family decides to take the risk and flee. They tried to walk to the community known as Los Toriles but they couldn’t go very far.

[Dorila]: When we had already crossed all that plan, they made fire. It was the soldiers that were on the other hill where they were shooting the mortar and there I stood. I was with the baby and the other that walked beside me.

My husband was wearing a hat and raised his hand with the hat to show them we had no guns. I raised one hand too because with the other arm I was holding the baby

[Ximena]: They hid in a cornfield, and through the whistling of bullets, decided to go back home.

[Dorila]: When we were almost there my son told me: ”Ouch, mom, they hit me”. I told him that he probably stood over a spike and didn’t care much about it until we arrived here. There was a little bench where I sit and my son lied down on me. He raised his foot and I saw that it was true: they had shot my son.

[Lorena]: With the wounded boy the only choice left for the family was to wait. They never understood why the soldiers didn’t break into their house.

[Ximena]: They tried to flee for the second time the night of December 11th. They walked for hours but the full moon made the things difficult as it was hard for them to hide and this slowed them down.

**[Lorena]: **It was almost dawn when they arrived at Los Toriles. There they saw how the last houses were falling.

[Dorila]: My husband’s brother was murdered with all his family. There they killed all the people. We passed by and saw that the house was burning but as it was still dark, we didn’t saw them. It was a miracle that we didn’t step on them because after we passed, they left the bodies on one side of the road. There they murdered José, Marta, and the children.

[Ximena]: She didn’t lose only her husband’s family. In El Mozote’s plaza where the soldiers previously had concentrated the people, Dorila’s parents, brothers, and sisters died. Almost a thousand of Salvadorans were murdered by State forces between December 10th and December 13th of 1981 in eight Morazán communities.

[Lorena]: They came back to this house and El Mozote before January 16th, 1992, when the government and Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional’s guerrilla signed the Peace Accords in México.

[Ximena]: In November of that year San Francisco Gotera’s Judge was moved by the victims and ordered the firsts exhumations. This as part of the investigation that wanted to determine if the Salvadoran Army had committed a massacre. To El Mozote arrived The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team where they found 147 children’s bones.

[Dorila]: The DNA tests couldn’t be done to all the people that were exhumated, as there was not much of a help as it is today. They were just buried again in these mass graves. I don’t know where my father, my sister and my little brother ended.

[Lorena]: The government, FMNL, and the Legislative Assembly approved the Amnesty Law four months later on March 20th, 1993 interrupting the investigation.

This Law put a stop to all the legal processes that were investigating the conflict crimes and ignored the Truth Commission’s report that pointed the Salvadoran Army as main responsible of the massacre. It was a hard hit to the victims

[Ximena]: But the battle for justice didn’t stop there. Dorila and other survivors of the massacre created the El Mozote’s Human Rights Promoting Association. They’ve dedicated to collect testimonies of other inhabitants for years.

Wilfredo Medrano, one of the lawyers that leads the legal battle recognizes their efforts.

[Wilfredo Medrano]: It shows their persistence because the same people sometimes asked hopelessly what they could do. It was the people´s motivation that made us question ourselves what we were going to do with this archived case as the judges were not moving it.

(MUSIC)

[Lorena]: The massacre’s process was frozen in October 2003 when Jorge Alberto Guzmán assumed his seat as San Francisco Gotera’s First Instance Judge. We met him at his office and asked him: How is it possible that the court case of the biggest massacre of Latin America is in his chamber and not in a tribunal in San Salvador?

[Lorena]: Why El Mozote’s court case is held by you and not another judicial authority in the capital of the country?

[Judge Jorge Alberto Guzmán]: The complaint was raised in 1990 in these judicial headquarters, that’s why this was the right tribunal and still it is now.

[Ximena]: Judge Guzmán is a cautious man. He doesn’t give too many interviews and asks us not to take any pictures. He starts telling us that when he assumed as a judge, he was hamstrung by the Amnesty law.

[Judge Guzmán]: At that moment there were no accused individualized. The case judge issued the Nolle prosequi in a big manner so it could benefit anyone involved in the things that happened. From then on the process was completely paralyzed.

[Lorena]: The investigation stopped so early that it wasn’t even determined if the victims had died in a massacre.

[Judge Guzmán]: It was needed more proofs to determine if there was a massacre on that place (..) Collecting evidence is not enough, you must prove that these people died from acts of violence and until that moment that was not the case.

[Ximena]: The evidence that the judge didn’t consider was the 147 children’s dead bodies that were found by the Argentinian anthropologists.

The Mozote victims and the Dra. María Julia Hernandez Human Rights Association’s lawyers had been collecting proof of the massacre for years to raise it to international courts. It took them almost another decade to submit the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

[Dorila]: When we were going to the Court, they asked us 500 victims’ testimonies and 300 displaced persons’ testimonies. It was so hard because they didn’t want to talk and there are still people that don’t want to talk about because they are afraid. I just tell them that I am not afraid to be murdered because I am not telling lies.

[Lorena]: 1070 cases were documented.

(AUDIO ARCHIVE OF HEARING IN THE INTER-AMERICAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS AUDIO ARCHIVE)

[WOMAN IN THE I/A COURT H.R.]: Ladies and gentlemen, the Court.

[Lorena]: On April 23th 2012, 10 years after the Peace Accords, the Court sat in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The case was known as El Mozote and nearby places massacre vs El Salvador.

[I/A COURT H.R. JUDGE]: Please tell us your name.

[Ximena]: Three women testified in the hearing. María Dorila Márquez was one of them. María Dorila is the El Mozote’s Human Rights Association current president and from Ecuador, she gave the world her testimony.

(AUDIO ARCHIVE OF THE HEARING IN THE I/A COURT H.R.)

[Ovidio Mauricio González]: Has any person involved in the events been penalized?

[Dorila]: From what I know they have not.

[Ovidio]: How the lack of justice has affected you

[Dorila]: It has harmed me a lot because in El Salvador the laws have not been complied with. We are not talking about animals, we are talking about people getting murdered. Children, elderly, pregnant women that were killed and this was never investigated. There was no justice and this has harmed me a lot.

[Ximena]: According to Dorila, the Amnesty Law was the main reason behind the lack of justice.

[I/A COURT H.R. JUDGE]: Can you express how you feel to the fact that there is an Amnesty Law that protects the responsible of the events?

[Dorila]: It hurts me a lot and that’s what I am asking for. I want that law to be repealed so the investigations can continue. I don’t hate the people that did it but they deserve to be penalized. If there was a death penalty in El Salvador, it wouldn’t be enough. But I wouldn’t ask for that, as only God can take away people’s lives as they did with my family.

[Lorena]: Dorila’s testimony and the evidence that had been collected for 20 years by the Dra. María Julia Hernandez Human Rights Association and the survivors were enough for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In a landmark judgment, the Court sentenced the Salvadoran State for El Mozote massacre 6 months after the hearing.

[Ximena]: It concluded that El Salvador violated the right to life and the right to personal integrity and that the victims’ right to justice had been denied.

The Court ordered to start a reparation process, to perform the exhumations needed and to identify and return the mortal remains to the families. Particularly demanded that the Amnesty Law stopped being a hamper to the investigations.

[Lorena]: It took 4 years to the Salvadoran Justice to comply with the last part. Finally, the victims received the news they have been waiting for decades on July 13th, 2016.

(NEWS ARCHIVE)

[HOST]: The Salvadoran Supreme Court of Justice’s Constitutional room has declared unconstitutional the Amnesty Law of 1993, a year later after the Civil War ended, a law that consolidated peace.

[Ximena]: It was a controversial decision. The government led back then by FMLN’s political party, said that this court ruling endangered the Peace Accords’ achievements and the opportunity to look for justice for the past crimes polarized the country.

[Rosario Ríos]: If you search in here, there is nothing. There is little written record. There is just a little wall with names written on it but that’s it.

[Ximena]: In San Salvador, we met Santiago Nogales, a playwright and his wife, actress Rosario Ríos. They’ve been exploring historic memory through art for years. With Moby Dick, their theater company, they had staged unexplored topics for the country like torture or the 8 thousand people that were victims of forced disappearance in the armed conflict.

(Fragment of the theater play: ”Yo quiero la muerte en gracia, yo quiero un sepulcro, una fosa, una lápida aunque sea”.)

[Rosario]: There are many.

[Santiago Nogales]: There’s an absolute-oblivion.

[Rosario]: That they have no idea you are saying? Please… They’ve been killing each other and they were your grandpas… your parents.

[Santiago]: You’ve said it well. The best thing that can happen to a rotting wound is to stab it and take out all the crap so it can heal cleanly.

[Ximena]: But healing is so difficult for a country that has lived its traumas in silence. The Salvadoran State faded victims into oblivion as a requirement for peace. The parents silenced their wounds and the sons ignore the horrors. The only thing that seems to bound these generations is an impunity covenant: An armed conflict in the past and the gangs’ violence in the present.

(MUSIC)

[Lorena]: The Amnesty law’s end opened a space of hope. On September 30th, 2016 San Francisco Gotera’s Judge, Jorge Alberto Guzmán, reopened El Mozote’s court case.

The first step was to identify those allegedly responsible for the Tierra Arrasada Military raid.

[Judge Guzmán]: There were 32 accused but 13 had already passed away. So there are 18 persons subject to this court proceeding.

[Ximena]: Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, Atlacatl Battalion commander, was the man responsible for the massacre according to many people.

[Wilfredo Medrano]: There are lots of witnesses and survivors that saw him giving instructions and ordering how to torture the farmers to get information.

[Lorena]: Monterrosa was never penalized for his crimes and was murdered in a guerrilla attack in the heat of the armed conflict in 1984.

He was considered a national hero and even some memorials were raised to remember his heroism at the end of the Civil war.

In his name, 18 former Military members were called by Judge Guzmán. The highest ranked is General José Guillermo García, minister of defense between 1979 and 1981.

[Wilfredo]: Most of them are high ranked Military members. There are generals, lieutenants and a captain. All of them are between 60 and 80 years old but they are in perfect physical condition to be processed. They should not be exempt from their criminal responsibility as they had big power as high ranked Military members.

[Ximena]: Six months after the court case was opened, the former Military members appeared before the Tribunal. It was on March 29, 2017, and it is now stuck on Dorila Márquez’s memory as the day the Military members mocked of them again.

[Dorila]: When the Judge’s secretary was reading all the charges against them, they were giggling and making jokes among them. They looked at us and started talking privately. They were not paying attention to all the charges against them. Why the victims have to suffer the revictimization?

[Lorena]: That day the victims were hoping to see the Military members handcuffed and in their way to jail after all they were accused of 9 crimes: murderer, aggravated rape, aggravated deprivation of liberty, theft, aggravated damages, assault, acts of terrorism and propositive acts of terrorism.

But the judge didn’t consider necessary to incarcerate them.

[Judge Sánchez]: There’s still necessary to settle bigger participation of them. Because the only proof that we have right now is that they were leading the Military back then but that’s not evidence of them being on the places where the events happened.

(SAN FRANCISCO GOTERA’S COURTROOM AUDIO)

[Ximena]: The Military members’ disdain for the victims is so big that they have only shown once. The accused are not in the courtroom where Genaro Sánchez tells how he lived the massacre. The defense’s lawyers try to find contradictions on his words during his interrogation.

[Defense’s lawyer]: I asked with all due respect to the witness if he saw at that moment guerrilla members in the area.

[Lorena]: Genaro says that he didn’t. But with this query, the defense is trying to question the alleged closeness between guerrillas and the victims.

[Defense´s lawyer]: He said that he heard Radio Venceremos and he also said in his testimony that he was mobile so I ask him if he saw the people that were with Radio Venceremos.

[Ximena]: The alleged closeness between the witnesses and the guerrillas is a theory that Lisandro Quintanilla, an accused’s lawyer, tries to use to discredit the massacre.

[Lisandro Quintanilla]: Which is the evidence that tells us that these people were not guerrillas or that they were not assisting guerrillas? I don’t know (if there were children) but if there were… Who proves us that those children lived there? We’ve got the National Statistic Division’s population census. And we are going to use all of that. They are talking about thousands of deaths and that’s a lie. The population of those hamlets barely reached a hundred people.

[Ximena]: The witnesses have started to contradict themselves according to Quintanilla.

[Lorena]: How can they determine if a testimony has contradictions if they are not even listening to the people that after all these years have the chance to appear in court?

[Quintanilla]: Why should I go? What questions should I ask a lady that is narrating a gory story in which 50 persons were murdered? I am going to ask her: Did you saw Walter Salazar shoot? What is she going to tell me? These are sterile activities.

[Lorena]: During a year and a half of hearings, the defense’s strategy has not changed: They imply that the dead people were subversive guerrillas and that the mass graves, where the victims were found, were guerrilla’s cemeteries. But maintaining this argument convincing has been a hard task. Testimonies and forensic evidence contradict it.

On August 16th three experts from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team came to San Francisco Gotera to testify. They were the ones that did the firsts exhumations back in 1992.

[Lorena]: Anthropologists Mercedes Doretti, Patricia Bernardi and Silvana Turner took down the defense’s hypothesis. The evidence indicates that the mass graves were no clandestine cemeteries and they affirm that the victims didn’t die in an armed confrontation.

(MUSIC)

[Dorila Márquez]: We still have hope that there is justice but there is a lot of corruption…

[Lorena]: It will be a year since Dorila Márquez testified in the courtroom on October 13th

[Dorila]: I’ve been willing to give my testimony. I tell them that everything happened and it’s a reality and it deserves that we keep sharing it with the world. I don’t want that anything like this to be repeated. It is dreadful that the Salvadoran Army, the entity that should protect us, had done something like this… killing innocent people, children, elderly and pregnant women. What they’d done was an injustice.

[Ximena]: 46 witnesses have testified and there are still 12 unregistered survivors summoned by the prosecutors that have not been listened yet. This rural courtroom is little and is far away from the country’s capital and the national interests. With the exception of El Faro and Factum magazine that have been following closely the trial, there is little interest by the media.

A big contrast with the thousands of foreign reporters that at some point covered the conflict as one of the last shows of the Cold War

[Lorena]: El Mozote massacre is the first and only conflict trial. But the court case seems doomed to last for years. In early September a judge from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the court that condemned the State for the crime, visited the Morazán hamlets and demanded to the Salvadoran State more resources to the prosecutors and the court that reopened the case.

[Ximena]: The magnitude of this task is especially daunting as the file has more than 19 thousand pages and just 8 persons reviewing them.

[Wilfredo]: The people are conscious of what is going on. They are happy to see for the first time the accused sitting in a court. They thought that it would be only a dream to see the people that murdered their loved ones in a Tribunal. The other dream is that this continues and a penalizing sentence comes because this is proved… there is criminal participation.

[Lorena]: The survivors in El Salvador have waited for 36 years to tell the harm they lived, the infinite losses and the pain they have been experienced from that moment. However, their stories are also an example of resistance and organization as the fight to preserve the past is necessary to build real peace in the future.

[Ximena]: In our countries stories like the ones from Amadeo, Serafín, Dorila y Genaro could be a reflection of the wounds that our conflicts have caused. We believe that these stories are important for Mexico and Colombia where after years of violence a future of peace is considered. What can we learn from El Salvador’s experience that started to travel these roads 26 years ago?

[Lorena]: In Colombia where 60 years of war left 218 thousand deaths teaches us that:

The signature of a peace agreement doesn’t automatically lead to peace.

Reconciliation and forgiveness cannot be imposed.

And the media cannot be limited to register the war atrocities, instead, they should support the post-conflict years.

[Ximena]: In Mexico, after a decade of the public security’s militarization, the amount of victims is similar to any armed conflict in the continent.

Even though we are talking about the peace-building process, we are facing the task of reconciling a society that still lives in the violence.

It is key to understand from El Salvador the risks that bring institutionalizing forgiveness without a justice process for the victims.

(MUSIC)

***

On the next episode:

(THE TESTIMONY OF GUATEMALA)

[Instititutional voice]: There were horror days. We come to Guatemala to understand Creompaz process, the biggest case of forced disappearance of Latin America.

[Instititutional voice]:”War witnesses: voices against impunity” is a sound documentary series presented by Pie de Página and Radio Nacional de Colombia. This work was made thanks to the International Women’s Media Foundation’s initiative: Adelante.

Script and Investigation: Lorena Vega y Ximena Natera

Production in El Salvador: Víctor Peña, Juan Carlos, Jessica Ávalos, Julia Gavarrete and Jonatan Funes

Original Music: Santiago Flores

Sound Editor: José Luis Mantilla

Web: Cristian Anzola y Fernando Santillán