In a makeshift courtroom on the second floor of a nondescript brick building in northeastern El Salvador, Judge Jorge Guzmán has spent the last six years painstakingly gathering evidence from the survivors of one of the worst massacres in the modern history of Latin America: the slaughter of a thousand old men, women and children by the Salvadoran army during the country’s civil war.
Forty years after the massacre, former senior military officers, including the minister of defense at the time, have been facing charges ranging from kidnapping and rape to murder. The military and the Salvadoran elite have repeatedly sought to block any accountability for the massacre, and the current president, Nayib Bukele, a 40-year-old right-wing populist who is often compared to Donald Trump and reminds some of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, may have just succeeded. He has made no secret of his desire to terminate the investigation.
On Aug. 31, the legislature, controlled by Bukele’s party, fired every judge in the country older than 60. Guzmán is 61. Within El Salvador, the prevailing view is that one of
— source propublica.org | Raymond Bonner, Nelson Rauda | Sept. 13, 2021