Victims renew calls for justice as El Mozote trial moves ahead

Recent hearings reveal new details about 1981 massacre of civilians in northeast El Salvador during country’s civil war.

Expert testimony delivered in El Salvador this week has revealed significant new details about what many consider to be the most brutal massacre of the country’s 12-year civil war decades ago. Victims, experts and lawyers say the five days of hearings in the El Mozote trial uncovered new information about the extent of the United States’s knowledge of the 1981 massacre of nearly 1,000 civilians by US-trained Salvadoran forces, as well as the Salvadoran chain of command. “The fact that there are experts giving professional testimony reiterating and corroborating the truth that the victims have maintained during all these years, is a form of reparations, of clarifying the truth and of sending an echo through the international community,” Eduardo Guerrero, a lawyer with the victims’ legal team through the Costa Rica-based Center for International Justice and Law (CEJIL), told Al Jazeera in a phone interview.