29/1/10 - day 51.

up at half 6 for breakfast as i had to be down the road for haf 7 to catch a bus to nearby El Mozote. El Mozote is a really tiny, and eerily quiet, village that the army wanted to make an example of during the war. in december 1981, virtually the whole village was massacred and in the early 1990's they started finding human remains in mass graves, and i think the count is over 800 people, about half of which were children. there was only 1 known survivor who died in 2007.

they have a memorial deicated to it with the names of all those that were murdered, and there's a mural on the side of a chapel below which are the names of the children that were killed. there´s also 'el jardin de los inocentes' which is a garden created to remember but also the site of where remains of 164 people were found, 160 of which were under 12 years old.

i was shown around all these things by a local lad when i got off the bus. he showed me the plaques with the childrens names and ages and 1 of them was 3 days old with many just a few months, and i wished id been able to understand more of what he was saying. so, all in all, quite an emotive place and the reason all this has been set up because the whole thing was denied for a long time by governments, but now they want to keep the memory alive and they say "nunca mas" (never again).

got a bus back to perquin at 10ish and walked back up the hill to the hotel. really stupid idea. it was so hot and it took me 45 mins. had another shower when i got back and chilled out (recovered) there for a bit, had lunch then used the net for a while til the hottest part of the day was over. at this point, i went back up to where the museum was i went to yesterday to go up to a lookout point which has various sized trenches and bomb craters along the way up, along with a former medical facility to treat the injured and a small tunnel they took cover from bombs in.

when i got back to the hotel i fell asleep and woke up about 11pm. mildly peeved that id missed dinner, i went back to sleep.