206. The State is also responsible for the violation of Articles 5(1), 5(2), 21(1) and 21(2) of the American Convention, in relation to Article 1(1) thereof, to the detriment of the next of kin of the victims who were executed, listed in Annex “C.” 207. Lastly, the State is responsible for the violation of Article 22(1) of the Convention, in relation to Article 1(1) of this instrument, and additionally in relation to Article 19 with regard to the children, to the detriment of the persons who were forcibly displaced within El Salvador and to the Republic of Honduras, listed in Annex “D.” Regarding the victims of this violation, the Commission indicated that, regarding the people who were displaced from their place of residence and had to leave the country to seek refuge in the Republic of Honduras, “it is believed that the real number of victims greatly exceeds the few people individualized by the evidence in the case file.” The representatives indicated that, in a context of extreme violence in which enforced displacement was constant, added to the scale of the massacre and the absence of official records on the origin and destination of the people, it was very difficult to document the specific circumstances of displacement of each individual affected. In this Judgment, the Court has described the problems encountered in fully identifying all the survivors and the next of kin of the victims, and this makes it impossible to know with certainty how many survivors were displaced in this case. Consequently, the Court can only assess this situation with regard to those who have proved this condition in these proceedings (supra para. 57). Nevertheless, the Court places on record that it has sufficient evidence to conclude that there must have been many other individuals who experienced this situation and, regarding whom, there is no evidence to identify them adequately in these proceedings. 208. To conclude, the Court considers that, in this case, the international responsibility of the State is aggravated owing to the context in which the facts of the massacres of El Mozote and nearby places were perpetrated, which relates to a period of extreme violence during the Salvadoran internal armed conflict that responded to a State policy characterized by military counterinsurgency operations, such as “scorched-earth” operations, intended to achieve the massive and indiscriminate destruction of the villages that were suspected of being linked to the guerrillas. The foregoing, by implementing the concept of “taking the water away from the fish” (supra para. 68). Thus, as has been proved, once the extrajudicial executions had been concluded, the soldiers proceeded to set fire to the people’s homes, belongings and crops and to kill their animals, which signified the permanent loss of the victims’ possessions and the destruction of their homes and means of subsistence, causing the enforced displacement from those places of the survivors. As has been established, entire family units were destroyed, and due to the very nature of the massacres, this altered the dynamics of the surviving next of kin and profoundly affected the community’s social tissue. Based on the preservation of the historical memory and the urgent need to prevent similar events from happening again, the Court emphasizes that the massacres of El Mozote and nearby places undoubtedly constitute an exponential example of this State policy, given the scale of the operation and the number of executed victims recorded.291 In addition, as will be analyzed below, since that time and to date, there have been no effective judicial mechanisms to investigate the grave human rights violations perpetrated, or to prosecute and, as appropriate, punish those responsible. All this results in the aggravated international responsibility of the respondent State. VIII RIGHTS TO JUDICIAL GUARANTEES, TO JUDICIAL PROTECTION AND TO FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION, IN RELATION TO THE OBLIGATION TO RESPECT AND GUARANTEE RIGHTS AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO ADOPT PROVISIONS OF DOMESTIC LAW AND ARTICLES 1, 6 AND 8 OF THE INTER-AMERICAN CONVENTION TO PREVENT AND PUNISH TORTURE AND 7(B) OF THE CONVENTION OF BELÉM DO PARÁ 209. The Court will now analyze the criminal proceedings initiated with regard to the facts of this case as a result of the complaint filed on October 26, 1990, in order to determine whether this has constituted an effective remedy to guarantee the rights of access to justice, to know the 291 Cf. Report of the Truth Commission for El Salvador, From madness to hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador, 1992-1993 (evidence file, tome II, annex 1 to the submission of the case, folio 1101). 66