"Race, Massacre, and Historical Memory" Lecture

Due to the lack of International Events last semester, I'm doing a few extra this semester to catch myself up.

On the docket this week was Dr. Salvadó's talk, "Race, Massacre, and Historical Memory." While the discussion focused on Guatemala, I found numerous parallels that tie in to El Salvador, a country which I'm studying in-depth in my Latin American Refugees course with Dr. Hines.

One of the memoirs we read this semester was Roberto Lovato's Unforgetting. The title alone suggests how harmonious the messages of the book and lecture are—this motif of "undoing" and "remembering" pervades nearly every Latin American revolution that I've studied so far.

Far example, the Salvadoran amnesty laws, only recently declared unconstitutional helped provide legal solace for the perpetrators of the human rights violations of the '80s-'90s. In an attempt to "heal" the nation, human rights violations are swept under the rug. Don't ask, don't tell. A series of American journalists traveled to El Salvador (like the forensic scientists of Salvadó's lecture) to document the crises, but few were able to do so. Thus, egregious massacres like that of El Mozote have flown under the public radar, buried by soil and time, unmentioned by those in power.

The idea of unforgetting is important because it emphasizes the conscious choice that many have made to let these violations slip through the cracks. Only recently (as of January 2020) are members of the Atlacatl Battalion in El Salvador speaking out against their supervisors. Even now, they testify anonymously, for fear of lethal retaliation. El Salvador, like Guatemala, is determined to remain forgetful.

This is why scholars like Salvadó are vital—they help (literally and figuratively) dust off the memories of those who have fallen victim to brutal repression throughout Latin America. To uncover the bones of those who perished is to name them, to acknowledge them, to honor their experiences.