Back to top

This series commemorating El Mozote is a collaboration between the Chicago Presents! concert series, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, with support from the family of the late Dr. Robert H. Kirschner.

El Mozote, El Salvador: In December 1981, the U.S.-trained Salvadoran Army massacred over 1000 peasants, including 400 children, in one of the most brutal human rights violations in modern Latin American history. Shortly after the tragic event, some brave foreign journalists, photographers, and forensic investigators brought the story to the world. El Mozote inspired U.S. opposition to the Reagan Administration's support of the brutal Salvadoran government and moved religious and community leaders to offer sanctuary to Salvadoran refugees.

The UChicago commemoration events include:

October 23, 12:00 Noon | Photographers and Human Rights:
A lunchtime discussion with photographer Susan Meiselas

October 30, 12:00 Noon | WBEZ Worldview Interview about El Mozote 

November 1, 3:30 PM | Lessons from El Mozote:
A pre-concert roundtable

November 1, 7:30 PM | David Little's "Haunt of Last Nightfall"
Performed by the Third Coast Percussion

 The family of the late Dr. Robert H. Kirschner, a founding faculty member of the Center for Human Rights, is supporting this program in honor of Dr. Kirschner's work as one of the original forensic investigators at El Mozote. Learn more about his work here.

Photographers and Human Rights
A lunchtime discussion with photographer Susan Meiselas

Thursday, October 23, 2014 | 12:00-1:15PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Seminar Terrace Room 801
915 E. 60th Street, Chicago 

Award-winning Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas was one of the first American journalists to reach El Mozote just weeks after the massacre walking into Morazan Province from Honduras with New York Times reporter Ray Bonner. Meiselas's photographs were published with Bonner's account in January 1982 and proved to be an indisputable record of the massacre, recording the changes of two decades in the lives of the people. Meiselas's El Mozote photographs will be displayed on screens in the Logan Center lobby before, during, and after the November 1 concert.

WBEZ Interview about El Mozote
Thursday, October 30, 2014 | 12:00-1:00PM

Listen in to Worldview with Jerome McDonnell on WBEZ to hear a conversation with panelists from our El Mozote event on November 1 (see below), including Oscar Chacon (NALAAC), Eric Stover (UC-Berkeley, UChicago Pozen Visiting Professor of Human Rights), and PFCHR Executive Director Susan Gzesh. For more information, visit the WBEZ Worldview website.

Lessons from El Mozote: A pre-concert roundtable
Saturday, November 1, 2014 | 3:30 - 5:00PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Seminar Terrace Room 801
915 E. 60th Street, Chicago 

This roundtable will discuss the relevance of El Mozote today. Panelists include:

Oscar Chacon, Executive Director of the National Alliance of Latin American & Caribbean Communities (NALACC). Oscar Chacon came to the US as a refugee from El Salvador in the early 1980s. In the 1980s he was active as an organizer in the refugee community; in the 1990s, he directed Centro Presente, a Salvadoran-founded community service and advocacy center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He moved to Chicago in 2001 to direct Enlaces America, a project of Heartland Alliance, later founding NALACC as an independent coalition of immigrant-lead organizations active in migration policy discussions in the US and the region.

Joaquin Chavez, Assistant Professor of History, University of Illinois at Chicago. Joaquin Chávez's work focuses on modern El Salvador, revolutionary movements, and the Catholic Church. He received his doctorate in 2010 from New York University. His scholarship centers on the revolution in El Salvador, with special emphasis on the coalition of peasant leaders and left wing intellectuals—many of whom were inspired by the teaching and social mission of the Catholic Church—who worked together to overthrow the dictatorship during the 1970s and 80s. Chávez has been deeply engaged in peace and reconciliation work in his native El Salvador as well as in other hot spots including Nepal. 

Eric Stover, Director of the Human Rights Center and Adjunct Professor of Law & Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. Eric Stover is the Pozen Visiting Professor Human Rights at the University of Chicago this autumn quarter. Stover previously served as the Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights and the Director of the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on several forensic missions to investigate mass graves as an "Expert on Mission" to the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In the early 1990s, Stover conducted the first research on the social and medical consequences of land mines in Cambodia and other post-war countries. Stover was involved in the original investigation of the El Mozote massacre in the early 1980s and is currently working on a reopened investigation ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. 

Susan Gzesh (moderator), Executive Director of the Family Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago and Senior Lecturer in the College. An attorney, Susan Gzesh was active in the 1980s in the defense of Salvadoran refugees and counseled religious organizations in the Sanctuary Movement.  She directs the Center for Human Rights and teaches.  She is currently involved in a petition to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights to protect the due process rights of Central American & Mexican child migrants.  

Haunt of Last Nightfall 
Performed by Third Coast Percussion, composed by David Little
Saturday, November 1, 2014 | 7:30PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Performance Hall
915 E. 60th Street, Chicago 
Cost: $25 / $5 students 

Chicago-based contemporary music ensemble Third Coast Percussion will present a concert which includes David Little's "Haunt of Last Nightfall," a piece composed as a commemoration of the 1981 massacre of Salvadoran campesinos in El Mozote, Morazan, El Salvador. The Third Coast concert is organized by Chicago Presents! and the Logan Center for the Arts.

Some references about Dr. Robert Kirschner's work at El Mozote:

Andrew Skolnick, “Bearing Witness for the Dead: A Pathologist’s Quest for Justice,” Med-Hunters. Winter 2001 (an interview with Dr. Robert Kirschner, p. 14)

John McClintock, “Trying, Against Odds, for National Reconciliation Pursuit of Past Can Jeopardize Peaceful Future,” Baltimore Sun, December 13, 1992:   “Tuesday, El Salvador's Marxist rebels are to surrender the last of their arms bringing to a close a 12-year civil war that cost more than 70,000 lives and more than $4 billion in American taxpayers' money. In the days before the historic moment, Dr. Robert Kirschner, the deputy Cook County medical examiner, was putting together a puzzle of skull and bone.”

Tracey Wilkinson, “Massacre Forces Salvador to Come to Terms with Past,” Los Angeles Times,  January 3, 1993 (quoting Dr. Robert Kirschner on the fact that almost all the skeletons excavated in 1992 for the Truth Commission were the bodies of children). 

Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Case of the Massacres of El Mozote and Nearby Places versus El Salvador, Judgment, October 25, 2012 (citing Dr. Robert Kirschner’s work in the 1992 excavations in its 2012 order to the government of El Salvador to finish the excavations and compensate the families).