El Salvador: War Tours
Cristian Figueroa, 23, and his wife, Mariana Cunadas Figueroa, 26, embrace at the memorial in El Mozote, El Salvador, to the victims of the 1981 attack by an army unit in which up to 900 people were raped, tortured and massacred. (Don Bartletti / LAT)
Fidel Castro Santos sits below an air vent in a room used as a rebel hospital when Castro was a guerrilla fighter. Castro helps maintain a war-related site above the mountainside hamlet of La Montanona in Chalatenango province. (Don Bartletti / LAT)
Geralod Suarez is flanked by fellow ex-rebels Javier Martinez and Mardo Queo at the ruins of a church in Suchitoto that was destroyed by the Salvadoran army in the 1980s. Suarez is one of 10 former rebels who last year opened a bar and small hostel in a rehabilitated mansion that once belonged to a prominent military family. (Don Bartletti / LAT)
Jessica Lopez, 24, poses with a civil war-era mortar at the Museum of the Salvadoran Revolution in Perquin, El Salvador. She and her family traveled three hours to visit the museum for the first time. (Don Bartletti / LAT)
Children play in a yawning crater caused by a 500-pound bomb was dropped on a guerrilla camp in Perquin, the site of a museum about the Salvadoran civil war. An unexploded and defused bomb is displayed on the wooden cradle. (Don Bartletti / LAT)
A display titled reasons for the war features photographs of poverty, underemployment and protest marches against the government at the museum in Perquin. (Don Bartletti / LAT)
Former guerrilla Gertrudis Martinez, left, talks to visitor Marlon Figueroa outside a destroyed house in El Mozote that still shows bullet holes from the army’s 1981 raid on the pueblo. Figueroa was a child when his family fled to Guatemala to escape the war. (Don Bartletti / LAT)
Catalino Gomez Arguetta carries a smudged black-and-white snapshot to show visitors what he looked like as a 22-year-old guerrilla fighter in 1985. (Don Bartletti / LAT)
Visitors arrive at the Museum of the Salvadoran Revolution in Perquin. An assault rifle points the way to the Ex Guerrilla Camp. Admission is 60 cents for Salvadorans and $1.20 for foreigners. (Don Bartletti / LAT)
