GIS and Massacre Mapping
Members of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador team from Asociación Sumpul and Western University have been collaborating with massacre survivors, witnesses, GIS specialists, and filmmakers Shawn Robertson (Toronto) and Christian Figueroa (San Francisco) to document civilian massacres and other war-era human rights violations across the departments of Chalatenango, Cuscatlán, Cabañas, and Morazán. Our methodology includes hiking to remote massacre sites with survivors and witnesses; obtaining high resolution GPS coordinates for massacre sites, mass graves, sites of torture and sexual violence, the remains of destroyed villages, and other significant locations; recording audio and video testimonies; obtaining drone footage of the area of the massacre; and conducting research to obtain additional archival materials documenting the massacres. In 2023, our massacres map had 185,000 views and our video testimonies have had more than 200,000 views on YouTube. You can access the map here (Chrome browser recommended).
The mapping was initiated in Chalatenango in 2018 with a small team consisting of Felipe Tobar, Reynaldo Hernández, and Amanda Grzyb. The project quickly expanded and the fieldwork team also now includes: Shawn Robertson, Genaro Guardado, Marta Tobar, Miriam Ayala, Julio Rivera, Nicolas Rivera, Zack MacDonald, Adriana Alas, Liz Sutherland, María Laura Flores Barba, Felipe Quintanilla, Fatima Perez, Christian Figueroa, Ana Rugamas, Giada Ferrucci, Jaime Brenes Reyes, Tila Ayala, Fran Mejia, Heidi Calderon, Edith Cruz, Teofilo Cordova, and others. The transcription, translation, and video editing team includes: Yarubi Diaz Colmenares, María Laura Flores Barba, Farah Shohib, Daniel Zapata, Tata Mendez, David Heap, Bianca Moreno Rivera, Lorena Moncada de Meza, Andre Melo, Angel Grandes-Rodriguez, Reeno Moreno, and others. The mapping work is supported by equipment and infrastructure funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Ontario Research Fund (ORF), Research Western, and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University.
