El Mozote Massacre - Investigation Reopened

Investigation Reopened

On March 7, 2005, the Organization of American States's Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reopened an investigation into the El Mozote massacre based on the evidence found by the Argentine forensic anthropologists. As of December 2011, activists continued to lobby the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to hear the case.

In a January 2007 report in The Washington Post, a former Salvadoran soldier, José Wilfredo Salgado, told of returning to El Mozote several months after the massacre and collecting the skulls of the youngest victims, whose remains were exposed by recent rains, for "candleholders and good-luck charms."

In December 2011, the Salvadoran government formally apologized for the massacre in a ceremony in the town. Foreign Minister Hugo Martinez, speaking on the government's behalf, called the massacre the "blindness of state violence" and asked for forgiveness.