El Mozote, El Salvador – Juan Antonio Pereira knows who killed his wife and children. But nearly four decades later, the men responsible continue to walk free.

On the day of the massacre – December 12, 1981 – Pereira, 43 at the time, was at home in the Salvadoran village of Los Toriles with his wife. He was worried. The country was in the early years of a brutal civil war between the Salvadoran military and left-wing guerrillas. He had been hearing a steady stream of gunshots since the day before and he went next door to check in on his mother. While walking back to his home, he saw soldiers approaching and decided to hide.

Pereira, recalling the event 37 years later, said from where he hid, he saw the soldiers murder his wife Natalia, their 10-year-old son Mario and 14-year-old daughter Maria. Fourteen of Pereira’s family members were shot dead that day, including his mother and both brothers.

Nearly 1,000 people – mostly women and children – were killed in the nearby El Mozote and the surrounding towns from December 11 to 13, 1981 in what has been deemed one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history.

“It hurts my soul still to remember it,” Pereira, now 80 years old, told Al Jazeera while sitting in his niece Sofia’s house in El Mozote. They are two of a small group of remaining survivors of the Pereira family.

In the years that followed the massacre, no one would be punished for the grave human rights abuses committed on that day. But with a case against 18 military officials set to resume this week, justice seems within reach.

“The law will punish for the crimes,” Pereira said.

Divided into groups, raped and killed

The case against the officials was only made possible in 2016 after the Supreme Court struck down a 1993 amnesty law that prohibited the prosecution of crimes committed during the war, which ended with a peace accord in January 1992. 

The amnesty law came five days after the UN published a truth commission that detailed atrocities in El Mozote and many other towns.

According to the truth commission, Salvadoran soldiers part of the Atlacatl Battalion arrived in El Mozote on December 10, ordering the residents to stay inside their homes or be shot. The next day, they forced the men, women and children to separate into three groups.

Survivors later reported hearing the screams of women and young girls being raped. The soldiers then gunned down each group and burned the homes, the church and convent where the families were being held. On December 12, the battalion moved on to the town of Los Toriles where Pereira lived. They shot dead residents there as they had done in El Mozote. The mass shootings continued until December 13.

“There was no compassion,” Pereira said, recalling the scene he witnessed that day.

After the massacre, Pereira and other survivors fled to a town near the border with Honduras. “We had to flee without having committed any crime,” he said. They stayed there until they believed it was safe to come back to El Mozote in 1990.

That same year, Pereira and a group of other survivors, launched an investigation into the perpetrators of the massacre with the help of Tutela Legal Maria Julia Hernandez, a local human rights organisation.

The group’s independent investigation compiled dozens of testimonies and ordered exhumations of the area to create a timeline of the massacres and detail how they were carried out. 

But the amnesty law three years later blocked any real hopes of justice.

“Supposedly that was the end of it,” said Ovidio Mauricio Gonzalez, director of Tutela Legal. “But we kept doing exhumations and we kept pressuring for an investigation into the participants of the acts.”

‘God sees everything’

In 2012, the Inter-American court ordered the Salvadoran government to recognise the massacre in El Mozote and provide reparations for the victims.

Six years later, the amnesty law was struck down. A year later, the government published a list of 978 names of the victims of the massacre. More than half were children. Lawyers of Tutela Legal reopened the case against the perpetrators, which continues today.

The military maintains the deaths were the result of a confrontation between guerrilla fighters and the battalion. But extensive testimonies, along with forensic evidence showing the age and gender of the victims, strongly contradict the state narrative. The truth commission reported it was a common military practice to kill residents of rural villages near where the guerrilla operated to “cut off their lifeline”. 

In 2011, the country’s leftist government apologised for the killings.  

“Every person has a right to access justice and this right can’t be denied because of a manipulation by the state, especially when it comes to crimes against humanity and war crimes,” Tutela Legal’s Gonzalez said. “It’s about recognising the dignity of the victims who were massacred for the simple fact of living in a place that was of guerrilla influence.”

The responsibility for the crimes extends beyond the Salvadoran state, Gonzalez said. The US embassy was aware of the massacre as early as January 1982, but worked to cover up the horrid events, according to a 1993 investigation by The New Yorker.

The Atlacatl Battalion had been trained by the US before it was sent to El Mozote to rid the area of guerrilla presence. The US had also sent billions of dollars to the Salvadoran government during the country’s 12-year civil war to fight communism. The US government has yet to recognise its role in the El Mozote massacre.

They want to cover the sun with their finger, but we were witnesses. Some people are telling the truth and some people are lying. But God sees everything.

Juan Antonio Pereira, survivor

“The US should also recognise that it has its share of participation in these acts,” Gonzalez said.

For now, though, survivors and rights advocates hold on to the case against the 18 officers. The trial was suspended in August 2018 to await results of exhumations ordered by the judge. It is set to resume on Friday and will likely continue for six months to a year.

“They want to cover the sun with their finger, but we were witnesses,” Pereira said. “Some people are telling the truth and some people are lying. But God sees everything.”

Gonzalez added that carrying out justice “would show that this country has really changed. And that this type of conduct isn’t tolerated.”

“We are the Greenpeace of the nationalist right,” Aurelien Verhassel, the leader of far-right group Generation Identity, told me during an interview. I had to make a real effort not to laugh out loud. The comparison to the prominent environmental organisation is ridiculous, I thought. What could activists who struggle to protect the environment have in common with those who call for the expulsion of French Muslims?

A couple of months later, in the spring of 2018, Verhassel and his followers occupied the Col de l’Echelle mountain pass in the Alps, which falls on the route many migrants and refugees take to get from Italy to France. Amid the snow-capped mountains, around 100 activists from Generation Identity set up a bright-red fence along the France-Italy border.

It was a perfect photo-op: They wore extravagant blue uniforms and drove around in shiny four-by-fours. Two helicopters, emblazoned with the logo of their movement, were flying around.

It struck me how close the idea behind this whole operation was to Greenpeace’s modus operandi: A publicity stunt, filmed and carefully presented to the world to ensure maximum effect and engagement. For Generation Identity, it didn’t matter that they didn’t stop any migrants that day, the mission was still a resounding success. Nearly all major French media outlets reported on their operation. On social media, their propaganda videos were shared thousands of times.

Generation Identity has its own mission within the far-right circles. Their goal is to force issues of identity onto the media and the political agendas of mainstream parties.

The movement does not participate in elections – they leave that to the far-right National Front. It also sets itself apart from other radical far-right groups, such as the Defence Union Group (GUD) or the now-dissolved French Work (L’Oeuvre Francaise) – by trying to “de-demonise” itself.

Among Generation Identity’s ranks, you won’t find any skinheads, nor any revealing tattoos; they very much make an effort to present themselves as decent, hard-working young people concerned with the problems of their society. 

The movement has also abandoned anti-Semitic rhetoric, references to World War II or colonialism. Its main battleground is the public space. To showcase an ideal image of themselves, Generation Identity followers host all sorts of activities: they open bars, set up gyms, and distribute food to the homeless.

But these activities are nothing other than another way to spread their political ideas. Their bars glorify “regional identities”. Their boxing classes teach “native French people” how to defend themselves from  “the lowlifes” (read: black and Arab youths). Their charity towards homeless people is reserved solely for white people, because, as far as they are concerned, “non-European” homeless people are in a privileged position and receive benefits from the state.

There are just a few hundred activists who participate in these actions, but that’s not the point. Social media serves as an echo chamber for their actions and amplifies their message far beyond their immediate political circles. This identitarian soft power is akin to that of the American alt-right, which helped bring Donald Trump to power.

The terror attacks of 2015 and 2016 in France directly fed into Generation Identity’s discourse of hatred. Its activists have maintained the idea that there is a civil war between the “native French people” and the Muslims of France. They warn of what they call the “great replacement” or the “Islamisation of Europe”.

Their political programme is focused on one ultimate goal: “remigration” or the forced departure of “non-Europeans” from France, and more specifically the Muslims. In essence, they are calling for ethnic cleansing.

Generation Identity’s ambition is to force the concept of “remigration” onto the French political mainstream. They are building up to it, gradually introducing various other ideas.

In the summer of 2017, for example, they launched an intense media campaign, accusing the volunteers who rescued migrants in the Mediterranean Sea of being “human traffickers”. One year later, this argument was taken up by Emmanuel Macron when he accused the German NGO Lifetime of “playing into the hands of smugglers”. That was a major victory for the Identitarians.

Since its creation in 2012, Generation Identity has shed a great number of members to the National Front, the most famous of them being one of its founders, Philippe Vardon. He is now an adviser to NF leader Marine Le Pen.

Generation Identity is the right arm of the National Front: it has brought the party’s strategy of de-demonisation of the far right to perfection. But it is also its weakness. As soon as you scratch the surface, their slick image starts to chip away.

As the Al Jazeera documentary Generation Hate has shown, their members engage in racist assaults and veneration of Nazi Germany. Exposing their true face remains one of the best ways to combat their racist ideas and neutralise their toxic effect on French society.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Image: NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images