El Salvador's civil war pitted a US-backed military government and allied paramilitary death squads against the FMLN guerrilla coalition from 1979 until the 1992 Chapultepec peace accords. The conflict included mass atrocities such as the 1981 El Mozote massacre, in which the army killed close to 1,000 civilians, and displaced roughly a million people, about a fifth of the population, many fleeing to the United States and forming the basis of large diaspora communities. The UN Truth Commission (1993) found that state security forces and allied paramilitaries were responsible for roughly 85% of documented human rights violations and the FMLN for about 5%.
The US-backed Salvadoran military government, allied death squads, and the FMLN guerrilla coalition fought a 12-year civil war marked by massacres such as El Mozote
United Nations and World Bank series put El Salvador's population at about 4.6 million in 1979-80; the war's displacement is conventionally split into roughly half a million refugees who left the country, chiefly for Honduras, Mexico and the United States, and a comparable number displaced internally.
The range is the 95% confidence interval of the multiple-systems estimate by Rendón, Ball and colleagues (Demographic Research 41:27, 2019, with HRDAG), whose point estimate is 71,629 civilians killed or disappeared 1980-1992; Britannica's summary of 'more than 75,000' dead is a whole-war figure including combatants, and the 1993 UN Commission on the Truth registered only ~22,000 direct complaints, attributing about 85% of acts of violence to state agents and roughly 5% to the FMLN — an attribution the Salvadoran military and its political allies have long contested.
The UN Commission on the Truth for El Salvador (1993) documented extrajudicial killings, disappearances and torture, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2012) found massacre, rape of women, scorched-earth burning of homes and forced displacement at El Mozote.
El Salvador, United States of America, Honduras