Truth Commission for El Salvador

El Salvador, report published March 1993. Appointed through the United Nations after the civil war, the commission's report, From Madness to Hope, laid the great majority of the war's crimes at the door of state agents, paramilitary groups and death squads, with a smaller share attributed to the FMLN guerrillas. Its cases included the army's massacre at El Mozote, now marked by a memorial. The sobering lesson is what came next. An amnesty bill went to the Legislative Assembly within hours of publication and was ratified seven days later, shielding those responsible from prosecution for more than two decades. Only in 2016 did the Supreme Court's Constitutional Chamber strike the law down. A case of how quickly a truth can be neutralized.