On Monday morning, crowds gathered in the community of El Mozote to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords that ended El Salvador´s 12-year-long civil war. At the solemn event, El Salvador’s first leftist president, Mauricio Funes, apologized for the state role in the 1981 El Mozote massacre and announced reparations for the victims and their families.

In the most recent issue of NACLA, anthropologist Howard Campbell examines how Ciudad Juárez became the world’s most violent city after Mexican President Felipe Calderón deployed thousands of soldiers and federal police to fight the cartels. Campbell, a professor at the University of Texas-El Paso spoke with NACLA to further explain the political, social, and economic forces that led to this hyper-violence in Mexico.

Since April 15th, members of the P’urhépecha indigenous community of Cherán, Michoacán have self-organized community defense committees to protect themselves from violence amidst Mexico’s drug war. On June 26th a small caravan set off from Cuernavaca, Morelos to bring food supplies to Cherán, to show support for the community, which is both suffering from and resisting the drug war model imposed by Mexican president Felipe Calderón soon after he took office in 2006.