\n Twenty-nine years ago, as she was preparing the ground to rebuild her family home in El Mozote, El Salvador, Miriam Nunez found the bones of her in-laws scattered all over the property.\n<\/p>\n
\n They were among the nearly 1,000 people -- half of them children -- massacred ten years earlier by government soldiers who accused the village of aiding leftist guerillas in El Salvador's bloody 1980-1992 civil war.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"I had to collect all the teeth of the little girls, small bones... fingers... and put them in a bag,\" Nunez told AFP, forty years after the massacre for which no one has yet been held accountable.\n<\/p>\n
\n The El Mozote massacre, which took place over five days in December 1981, was one of the deadliest in Latin American history.\n<\/p>\n
\n Nunez, now 63, recalled coming across the bloodied dress of a little girl called Yesenia, then 18 months old, who would have become her sister-in-law, as well as the dentures of her mother-in-law.\n<\/p>\n
\n In all, Nunez's husband Orlando Marquez lost 15 family members in the mass killing -- the worst episode of El Salvador's internal conflict, which in total left more than 75,000 dead and more than 7,000 people missing.\n<\/p>\n
\n Three of Marquez's murdered relatives were children.\n<\/p>\n
\n - Children slashed -\n<\/p>\n
\n In 1981, the residents of El Mozote were living a peaceful life in the midst of war, raising beans, corn, sugar cane and cows among green hills some 200 kilometers (124 miles) east of the capital San Salvador.\n<\/p>\n
\n Unbeknownst to many, a leftist rebel guerilla group was operating in the area.\n<\/p>\n
\n Then on December 9, the country's military arrived in the region. Five days of bloodshed followed.\n<\/p>\n
\n The deadliest day was the 11th, in El Mozote.\n<\/p>\n
\n Soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion -- a counter-insurgency command trained by the United States -- burnt homes, raped women and killed all the villagers they could find.\n<\/p>\n
\n Some children were thrown in the air and slashed with machetes, according to survivor accounts.\n<\/p>\n
\n At the time, Miriam Nunez lived in Lourdes, near San Salvador, and her husband survived as he was away, studying in the capital.\n<\/p>\n
\n Another survivor, Maria de la Paz Chicas, who was 11 at the time, was visiting a nearby village with her father.\n<\/p>\n
\n When they tried to return home, \"they (soldiers) would not let us enter. This is what saved us.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n Chicas, now 51, lost six brothers and 17 cousins.\n<\/p>\n
\n - No verdict yet -\n<\/p>\n
\n In 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights blamed the Salvadoran government for the El Mozote massacre and ordered reparations.\n<\/p>\n
\n Four years later, the country's Supreme Court ruled that a blanket amnesty for people accused of war crimes during the conflict was unconstitutional.\n<\/p>\n
\n Charges were brought against soldiers accused of involvement, but no verdicts have yet been passed.\n<\/p>\n
\n The long-dragging trial suffered another setback this year, when presiding judge Jorge Guzman resigned in solidarity with colleagues who were fired in a controversial judicial reform.\n<\/p>\n
\n Ovidio Gonzalez, a lawyer for the victims, accuses the government and army of seeking \"to delay the process and prevent the conviction of the soldiers responsible.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Forty years later, we want to tell the Salvadoran state: 'look, enough of continuing to want to cover up this case',\" added Leonel Tobar Claros, president of the Association of Victims of El Mozote.\n<\/p>\n
\n Now 43, he lost two dozen family members as a toddler.\n<\/p>\n
\n - 'Collecting skulls' -\n<\/p>\n
\n Nunez and her husband returned to El Mozote a decade after the massacre, at the end of the civil war in 1992, to rebuild the family home.\n<\/p>\n
\n Chicas returned at about the same time, and recalls that the once-happy village had become an overgrown refuge for coyotes.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"When we got there we started collecting skulls, bones.... we kept them,\" and later gave the body parts to forensic investigators, she said.\n<\/p>\n
\n Bones were found all over the town.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"My sister, we found in the convent. She was six months pregnant\" when she was killed aged 27, next to her four-year-old son, said Chicas.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"She never let go of the boy.\" He was also killed.\n<\/p>\n
\n The residents of El Mozote are now trying to build a new life on a foundation of pain.\n<\/p>\n
\n As part of reparations, the government has paved roads and built a memorial near a cemetery for the victims.\n<\/p>\n
\n The site includes a mural decorated in mosaic tiles, which Chicas said reminds her of \"hearts shattered to pieces.\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twenty-nine years ago, as she was preparing the ground to rebuild her family home in El Mozote, El Salvador, Miriam Nunez found the bones of her in-laws scattered all over the property. They were among the nearly 1,000 people -- half of them children -- massacred ten years earlier by government soldiers who accused the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-85381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n