Book Launch: Trails and Voices on the Río Sumpul Massacre Memorial

The launch of Río Sumpul Massacre Memorial: Trails and Voices, part of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador initiative, will take place on March 19, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. at the Church of St. John the Baptist at the Béguinage / Begijnhofkerk, in Brussels.

Developed through a multidisciplinary and international collaboration since 2017, the book documents the creation of the Río Sumpul Massacre Memorial in Las Aradas, Chalatenango, El Salvador. It centres the voices of survivors who have carried this history across decades and traces the memorial’s development from early sketches to completion. The book brings together testimonies, historical context, and reflections on participatory design.

The memorial commemorates the massacre of May 14, 1980, when approximately 600 civilians were killed near the Río Sumpul, on the border with Honduras, in one of the defining early atrocities of the Salvadoran Civil War. 

Rooted in the organizing of the Sumpul Association and local communities, the project also brought together a wider network of researchers, artists, architects, and institutional partners, including KU Leuven and Western University.

The event will feature a panel discussion with Gretel Mejía (Guatemalan lawyer and postdoctoral researcher at UGent’s Human Rights Centre), Amanda Grzyb (professor at Western University, Canada), Evelia Macal (urbanist, architect, and ceramicist, El Salvador/Belgium), and Thomas Montulet (engineer-architect at AgwA and PhD candidate at UCLouvain, Brussels), moderated by Hülya Ertas, curator and architecture critic at VAi.

The event is free, with registration available here.

The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Western University, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Research Fund.