Thomas Buergenthal helped tell the truth about El Salvador's civil war

Person: Thomas Buergenthal
Lived: 1934–2023
Field: International human rights law
From: American

The story

Thomas Buergenthal was born in Czechoslovakia in 1934 to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany. As a boy he survived the Kielce ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march to Sachsenhausen, where he was liberated in April 1945. He moved to the United States in 1951, studied law at New York University and Harvard, and became one of the leading figures in international human rights law, including twelve years as a judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

El Salvador's civil war, fought from 1980 to 1992 between the government and the leftist guerrillas of the FMLN, killed an estimated 75,000 people. Among its worst crimes were the 1981 massacre of nearly 1,000 villagers at El Mozote and the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests and two women in San Salvador. When the two sides signed peace accords under United Nations sponsorship, they agreed to a Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, and both promised to carry out its recommendations.

The UN appointed three outsiders to lead it: Belisario Betancur, the former president of Colombia; Reinaldo Figueredo Planchart, a former foreign minister of Venezuela; and Buergenthal, a former president of the Inter-American Court. Working from July 1992 to March 1993, the commission collected about 22,000 testimonies. It called in forensic experts, including the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, to exhume the remains at El Mozote, where they found the skeletons of at least 143 people and evidence that the victims had been summarily executed, confirming survivors' accounts that had long been denied.

Its report, From Madness to Hope, published in March 1993, concluded that about 85 percent of the abuses were committed by government forces, and it named more than 40 senior military officers, officials and guerrilla commanders. It recommended removing those responsible from the army and public office, reforming the courts, and paying reparations to victims. The government passed an amnesty law days later, and many recommendations were long ignored, but about 200 senior officers left their posts and a new criminal procedure code followed in 1996. In 2016 El Salvador's Supreme Court struck down the amnesty law, opening the way to prosecutions, and in 2010 President Mauricio Funes formally apologized for the state's abuses.

For Buergenthal, who had lived through the Holocaust as a child, the work was a chance to put on record crimes that their perpetrators wanted forgotten. He later reflected publicly on the value of truth commissions in his oral history for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and he carried the experience into his later work on the UN Human Rights Committee and the International Court of Justice.

Why it matters

The commission's report gave Salvadoran victims an official record of what happened to them and remains the foundation for prosecutions and reparations claims today.

About Thomas Buergenthal

Child survivor of Auschwitz who became a founding judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a UN truth commissioner for El Salvador and a judge of the International Court of Justice.

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Thomas Buergenthal

1934–2023 · International human rights law

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