Implementation of Reparative Measures: El Salvador
The report required the public apology to the victims for the crimes done to them, but there
has been no such move. Even two years after the Salvadoran Truth Commission report was
released, the new Defense Minister, General Humberto Corado, denied fault and reason for
concession to the victimized Salvadoran population: “The armed forces have nothing to
apologize for, since their conduct was consistent with the principles of a war in which a
clandestine enemy attacks regular military patrols. 9210 Margaret Popkin notes that “an official
acknowledgement of past wrongdoing by state agents is unlikely to come from the same
government responsible for many of those violations while it remains in power.
211
Though
three presidents and three elections have passed since the release of the TC report, the party in
82power has not changed since the beginning of the conflict in 1980. Each one of these presidents
was an ARENA party member, the party implicated in massive-scale abusive war policy.
Families have not been compensated through any reparations program. Salvadoran NGOs
have called for the government to provide medical assistance and to investigate disappearances
from the conflict but action has yet to be seen. 212
An important recent development honoring the memory and dignity of the victims of the
Salvadoran civil conflict is the recently constructed Monument to Memory and Truth in the
Parque Cuscatlan in the capital, San Salvador. 213 Inaugurated in 2003, it is an 85-meter wall of
black granite engraved with the names of more than 25,000 innocent girls, boys, women, and
men victims. The inscription reads: “A space for hope, where we can continue dreaming and
build a more just, human and equitable society.”
214
Unfortunately, the government did not take it
upon itself to build the national monument, as the TC recommendations had obliged it to do.
Instead, it was the Comite Pro Monumento de las V1ctimas Civlies de violaciones de Derechos
Humanos (Committee in favor of the Monument to the Civilian Victims of Human Rights
Violations), a conglomeration of twelve Salvadoran NGOs, that initiated the project and financed
the building of the monument. 215