El Salvador’s Monument to Memory and Truth

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‘It looms solemnly over the shady corner of a city park, an incongruous emblem of pain amid a happy clamor of picnicking families and children chasing scuffed soccer balls,’ writes the Times’ Ken Ellingwood from El Salvador.

‘A granite echo of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, the 300-foot-long lead-colored monument serves as a kind of giant gravestone for the civil war that ripped El Salvador apart in the 1980s.’

‘Engraved with nearly 30,000 names, the Monument to Memory and Truth is a roll of dead and disappeared from the conflict, which ended in 1992. It is incomplete. Officially, the fighting between leftist guerrillas and the right-wing military government killed 75,000 and left thousands more missing. Not all the names of the war’s victims were available when the monument project began, so the list is growing.’

Read on about the Monument to Memory and Truth in El Salvador here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City