El Salvador: War Tours

Fidel Castro Santos sits below an air vent in a room used as a rebel hospital when Castro was a guerrilla fighter. Castro helps maintain a war-related site above the mountainside hamlet of La Montanona in Chalatenango province.  (Don Bartletti / LAT)

Geralod Suarez is flanked by fellow ex-rebels Javier Martinez and Mardo Queo at the ruins of a church in Suchitoto that was destroyed by the Salvadoran army in the 1980s. Suarez is one of 10 former rebels who last year opened a bar and small hostel in a rehabilitated mansion that once belonged to a prominent military family.  (Don Bartletti / LAT)

Jessica Lopez, 24, poses with a civil war-era mortar at the Museum of the Salvadoran Revolution in Perquin, El Salvador. She and her family traveled three hours to visit the museum for the first time.  (Don Bartletti / LAT)

Children play in a yawning crater caused by a 500-pound bomb was dropped on a guerrilla camp in Perquin, the site of a museum about the Salvadoran civil war. An unexploded and defused bomb is displayed on the wooden cradle.  (Don Bartletti / LAT)

A display titled “reasons for the war” features photographs of poverty, underemployment and protest marches against the government at the museum in Perquin.  (Don Bartletti / LAT)

Former guerrilla Gertrudis Martinez, left, talks to visitor Marlon Figueroa outside a destroyed house in El Mozote that still shows bullet holes from the army’s 1981 raid on the pueblo. Figueroa was a child when his family fled to Guatemala to escape the war.  (Don Bartletti / LAT)

Catalino Gomez Arguetta carries a smudged black-and-white snapshot to show visitors what he looked like as a 22-year-old guerrilla fighter in 1985.  (Don Bartletti / LAT)

Visitors arrive at the Museum of the Salvadoran Revolution in Perquin. An assault rifle points the way to the “Ex Guerrilla Camp.” Admission is 60 cents for Salvadorans and $1.20 for foreigners.  (Don Bartletti / LAT)