El Salvador's brutal civil war: What we still don't know

I have a new post up at Al Jazeera on El Salvador's brutal civil war: What we still don't know. The commentary is based off a conference I attended in mid-February in San Salvador. We hope to have a book out on the conference proceedings sometime this year.

From 1980 to 1992, civil war ravaged the Central American state of El Salvador, claiming the lives of approximately 75,000 Salvadorans.

For three days this February, scholars from around the world gathered in El Salvador to assess the state of our knowledge of that country's civil war, 20 years after peace accords were signed that ended the conflict.

The seminar - "History, Society and Memories: the armed conflict on the 20th anniversary of the Peace Accords" - was organised by the Unit of Investigations about the Salvadoran Civil War (UIGCS) of the Universidad de El Salvador. In the largest meeting of researchers on the civil war in El Salvador, participants from Spain, Costa Rica, Mexico, France, Germany, Holland and the United States joined local academics in sharing what we have learned about the 12-year-long war.

According to Jorge Juárez of UIGCS, the seminar's goal was to "make known to the public a version [of the war's history] without passions, without ideology, that presents the simple truth of the facts".