We spent Monday morning at Medicina Legal, the center for Legal Medicine in San Salvador. Two forensic scientists spoke with us about their work in exhuming hundreds of bodies from the site of the El Mozote massacre. Mozote, in the northeastern part of the country, was the site of a military massacre of 794 civilians in December of 1981. Over half of the victims were younger than 12 years old. Shortly after the massacre, the government denied that it had occurred. Not until 10 years later did a formal investigation reveal the horrific evidence.
These scientists now work on current homicide and crime cases – there are an average of 13-14 homicides every day in El Salvador. The director of the toxicology lab told us that in the past 4 days they had received 80 new murder cases.

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