Decades after the infamous massacre of El Mozote, the fight for accountability continues. The massacre of El Mozote was committed during “Operation Rescue,” a counterinsurgency operation spearheaded by the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion in December of 1981 in the department of Morazán in northeastern El Salvador. Over several days, the Salvadoran military killed at least 978

Español On Monday, December 11, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights filed a lawsuit in federal district court against the U.S. Department of Defense and two of its subagencies – the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) – under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The UWCHR is seeking

In the New York Review of Books, journalist Jonathan Blitzer profiles UWCHR Director Angelina Godoy and draws on research by our Unfinished Sentences project documenting retired Salvadoran Colonel Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez’s command of army units implicated in war crimes: Godoy is the director of the university’s human rights center, a small, interdisciplinary body run by a few

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