When 93-year-old Don Tacho Pereira took the stand this June in the rural town of San Francisco Gotera, El Salvador, he made history. Don Tacho lost seven family members in the December 1981 massacre of El Mozote; he only survived because he was away from home during the three-day killing spree that many still consider

Thanks to the funds from the Benjamin Linder Justice Award, I was able to travel to El Salvador for three weeks to support and learn about the work of Asociación Pro-Búsqueda, an organization that investigates cases of children who were disappeared or separated involuntarily from their families in the context of the armed conflict in El

On the fifth anniversary of the founding of the UW Center for Human Rights’ Freedom of Information project in June 2017, the University of Washington Libraries have published a collection of declassified United States government documents which the Center obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. UWCHR Research Fellow Emily Willard shares the history

UWCHR Director Angelina Godoy recently spoke about our work supporting efforts for justice in El Salvador and historic advances in the trial for the infamous El Mozote massacre with Mike McCormick on Seattle radio station KEXP. She also touches on the history of the Center, what we do, our projects and updates including developments in

A message from our Director, Angelina Godoy Dear friends, For the first time in history, eleven survivors of the El Mozote massacre have been summoned to give testimony in a Salvadoran courtroom in the reopened case against former members of the military high command. The stakes couldn’t be higher: these are elderly men and women who

As part of the Unfinished Sentences project, UWCHR Director Angelina Snodgrass Godoy accompanied a recent delegation to El Salvador, which resulted in a commitment by the government of El Salvador to form a national commission to search for people disappeared during the armed conflict. Read the following report from the delegation by the Due Process of Law

In 1993, the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador estimated that some 10,000 Salvadoran civilians were forcibly disappeared during the country’s armed conflict. To this day, no meaningful inquiries have been launched to recover their remains or identify those responsible for these crimes. In El Salvador, relatives of the disappeared have been demanding justice for

I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Ball at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group office in San Francisco during the summer of 2016. This training proved indispensable as I worked to process and publish a number of datasets on human rights violations during the El Salvador Civil War as part of a collaboration between

A message from UWCHR Director, Prof. Angelina Snodgrass Godoy Dear friends, With UW’s fall quarter now underway, our offices at the Center for Human Rights are once again abuzz with activity. We’ve spent the past few weeks laying out plans for the year ahead, training our new undergraduate researchers, and welcoming back our seasoned grad

On August 15, 2016, United States Congressional Representatives Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Norma Torres of California delivered a letter to President Barack Obama, signed by 26 Members of Congress, calling for the declassification of U.S. military and intelligence files relating to forced disappearances and human rights abuses during the Salvadoran civil war. Additionally, Representatives