There is not much information as to what is actually happening in the courtroom. The trial is taking place some four-hour drive from the capital, San Salvador, through the serpentine roads of the Salvadoran countryside often infested with gang violence (El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world). Foreign governments and international organizations didn’t precisely race to shower local and international NGOs with funds to monitor this historic process. Public information about the trial is only circumstantial and rarely focused on legal issues. When there is some information, it is mostly in Spanish. This (not so) short entry is supposed to bring this case to some more attention of international criminal lawyers.
The El Mozote Trial is a purely domestic process tried before an ordinary, first instance, territorially competent criminal court in a remote North-Eastern Morazán Department of El Salvador. There are no specialized chambers, internationalized courts or international tribunals there. There is not even a state prosecutor in the lead role. The prosecution is conducted by private prosecutors instead of the Attorney General Office.
This is by no means a unique situation. In fact, these kind of prosecutions for gross human rights violations are fairly common (and successful) in Latin America. There are, however, some peculiarities when it comes to the justice system in El Salvador that make this state of affairs particularly bothersome.
First, there is nothing ordinary in the “ordinary workload” of a Salvadoran judge. El Salvador’s extraordinary murder rate has already been mentioned. Add to this systemic inefficiency of the justice system, and one gets a staggering backlog of unresolved cases. As a result, the conviction rate in El Salvador is extremely low – some estimate it at only 5%. At this point, one can only make a wild-guess as to how many cases, beside the El Mozote Massacre, the trial judge has in his docket. The fact that this is the nation’s (and by extension Judge Urquilla’s) first war crimes trial, makes it logical to assume that he could use some help both by relieving his docket and by providing him with some expert assistance. The former most certainly did not happen. The latter did, but only thanks to private initiatives through two amici curiae submissions – the first by the Due Process of Law Foundation (DPLF) and the other by the American University’s Academy for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (both are available only in Spanish).
Such a lethargic approach to this historic trial has its roots in moj database several factors. While there are no specialized polls examining the attitude of Salvadorans towards transitional justice and historical crimes trials, there are indications that the appetite for them is fairly low (for more detailed discussion see here). The local population is much more concerned with the current gang crimes and police brutality which are an immediate threat. The necessity of prosecuting historical crimes in order to break the circle of violence must seem a rather theoretical suggestion in a country where there is a murder committed every two hours. This, in turn, perfectly plays into the hands of the Salvadoran power structures which are more or less the same as during the civil war. Those who participated in atrocities were never meaningfully deprived of power, and they are obviously not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of going to jail.
In addition, the Salvadoran government is not under much international pressure to prosecute war crimes. Besides the activities of the Inter-American system, there is very little additional interest from the international community. The power most in a position to exert pressure, the United States, is too preoccupied with issues of immigration and MS-13 gang violence. Both of these issues are deeply connected with the situation in El Salvador. Finally, the trial remains off the radar of Europeans, who are much more vested in another process emanating from the Salvadoran civil war – the Jesuit murders for which a former Salvadoran colonel faces trial in Spain.
The support to the El Mozote Massacre trial is, therefore, confined to private initiatives of several NGOs acting either as representatives of the private prosecutors or as amici curiae. Both groups are doing great favor to the Salvadoran nascent process of transitional justice (or rather post-transitional justice as argued by some). The following discussion is the analysis of the El Mozote Case as informed by these efforts.