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- THE WEEK, Page 16WORLDThe Truth Unearthed
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- Investigators find evidence of El Salvador's worst civil-war
- massacre
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- Government officials and their U.S. patrons repeatedly denied
- it. But when a team of forensic anthropologists excavated
- nearly 60 of several hundred battered skeletons from around a
- demolished church in what was once an F.M.L.N. guerrilla
- stronghold, they found convincing evidence of what some
- journalists and human-rights activists have said for years: as
- many as 800 civilians, most of them women and children, were
- mutilated, burned and murdered in and around the remote
- northeastern town of El Mozote in 1981, by soldiers from the
- Salvadoran army's U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion.
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- The victims' relatives want those responsible tried for
- murder, even though a new amnesty law prevents any of the
- perpetrators from having to serve time for political crimes.
- They would also welcome the final dissolution of the notorious
- battalion, as was stipulated under the current peace plan signed
- by both the government and the rebels last January. But the San
- Salvador government has indefinitely suspended the battalion's
- disbanding, claiming the F.M.L.N. has yet to demobilize its
- troops according to the schedule. The former rebels claim that
- despite advances in political, police and land reform, they will
- not meet the Oct. 31 disarmament deadline because judicial and
- electoral reforms are lagging, and rebel leaders are still
- targets of violence. To break the deadlock, the U.N. proposed
- a six-week extension for compliance.
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