The civil war in El Salvador has had an enduring impact on those academics who experienced and/or researched it. There is a rich literature on the war and its aftermath, and this book is one example. I read this revised and expanded edition of the author's original 1996 study of the El Mozote massacre as I myself was returning from a return visit to Chalatenango in El Salvador, where I had spent time in the war. The cruelty of the civil war and the extraordinary resilience and resistance of the civil population are part of the explanation for this enduring impact. And, perhaps also, this small, heavily populated country demonstrates – in one territory – the paradoxes and complexities of how local, national and global actors respond to massive human rights violations. This is one of Binford's main concerns. On the one hand, the book investigates the massacre itself at El Mozote in northern Morazán in 1981, in which over 1,000 civilians were killed by the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion. He explores the protracted process towards recognition of the events, the varied roles and experiences of villagers and ultimately the granting of reparations in 2012 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). On the other, he analyses the global discursive and actual responses to massacre, at the moment it occurred and through the course of time.

The book thus opens up a tangle of complexities around massacre and human rights violations, which remain sadly relevant today, when humanitarian efforts to protect civilians in war still fail and mass cruelty is cynically denied. A first issue is to ‘prove’ that a massacre took place. The importance of the first edition of Binford's study was to show how extraordinarily difficult it was to win acceptance that so many had been murdered in cold blood, including hundreds of children. It is painstaking efforts by survivors, human rights activists and social organisations which keep attention going. In the case of El Mozote, it was Tutela Legal – the human rights arm of the Catholic Church – which, ten years after the event and as the 1992 Peace Accords were under negotiation, won the case for inviting an Argentine forensic team to the area despite ongoing obstruction from the state. The extraordinary number of child skeletons is one of the brutal realities the team uncovered. Eventually, following some later excavations, it was agreed that half of the 1,061 remains were of children aged zero to 12. Even so, the 1993 Truth Commission report, which included reports of forensic experts, met with denials from the army and the political Right. There was little official state response to the role of the United States in training the Atlacatl Battalion and in failing to carry out a proper investigation of claims that the massacre had taken place in 1981. Nevertheless, El Mozote was converted into a symbol of US-backed repression in El Salvador, and became a site of solidarity visits and global attention.

Many details of the massacre remained, however, clouded in obfuscation until survivors organised and in 2011 (under the government of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN) the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights sent the case to the IACHR. In 2012 it found for the plaintiffs and ordered the State to provide both individual and collective reparations. That it took over three decades for this recognition does not surprise in the case of El Salvador. I was in Arcatao in Chalatenango in September 2017, where the peasants had just buried the remains of six children aged six to 11, victims of killings and massacres which took place during the ‘Cleansing Operation’ in the north-east part of the department from 27 May to 9 June 1982. They had been exhumed only in January of that year. Members of the peasant-organised Museum of Historical Memory of Arcatao told me how at last they could prove that children were targeted in the massacres. Here, too, I confirm Binford's argument of the importance of local people taking forward the struggle for memory and justice: it was only when a human rights association for El Mozote – composed of and driven by local people (and supported by international allies) – was formed that participation grew and led eventually to the Court decision.

So how do we explain decades of denial, obstruction and neglect on the one hand, and iconic global status on the other? What is important about Binford's book is that he captures the complexity of the explanations. The revised version enables him to look back and to analyse, with the hindsight of history, how so many factors intervened. Some of these are widely acknowledged: political factors, for example, such as the role of the United States and the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Nationalist Republican Alliance, ARENA) governments of 1989 to 2009, and even of the FMLN governments since then. While the FMLN was responsible for a relatively small percentage of human rights violations, it nevertheless backed the Amnesty Law until President Sánchez Cerén declared it was an impediment to justice in 2013; the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 2016. Binford also emphasises the way selective approaches to victims and victimhood in the international community give less weight to the lives of peasants and certain categories of victims. Constructions of mass violations tend to reduce victims to numbers or names with no histories or prior lives. This is the part of the book I value particularly – not only the reconstruction of these lives of victims and survivors, but also of the community of El Mozote itself, and why many blamed the guerrillas for the massacre. Here the carefully analysed evidence shows that El Mozote was not the ‘revolutionary village’ constructed by the army to justify massacre and later – for evidently different reasons – by some involved in solidarity. Actually, it was a village in a process of flux, with a small but dynamic trading/commercial sector, as well as a differentiated peasantry, with small landowners, land renters, and an impoverished day labourer class. There were tensions between the traditional and progressive Catholic clergy and the messages of conservatism or radicalisation they promoted. Despite suggestions that the village was a centre of evangelical Protestantism, there was not much evidence of this apart from in one hamlet. And given mixed messages in the rumours leading up to the massacre, many had left the area before it took place. Binford also traces the fear amongst survivors and those displaced from the massacre over the ensuing decade and explains why few came forward to give testimony. He shows, too, the complexity of the repopulation and how many sought to rebuild lives and livelihoods in a peace that offered little to rural El Salvador. So this is an important if gruelling read on the multiple facets of massacre as reality and social construction.