In the 1980s, during the conflict that confronted the people of El Salvador, three individuals were known for leading large-scale massacres and human rights violations, and to this day they are still at large. But the landscape has changed and today they are finally facing justice.
Luis Beatón
This is the first case in which high-ranking military commanders, allegedly guilty of the ambush murders of four Dutch journalists during the 1982 war in El Salvador, are on trial.
The trial, which was announced for 23 April last. And it is against ‘the warlords, as they called General Guillermo García, Minister of Defence, Colonel Mario Reyes Mena, head of the 4th Infantry Brigade, and Colonel Francisco Morán, head of the Treasury Police, which was army intelligence’, Óscar Pérez, president of the Fundación Comunicándonos and one of the promoters of the fight against impunity in the so-called ‘Tom Thumb’ of America, told the press.
These soldiers enjoy their freedom ‘due to the lack of political will prevailing in the country’.
The four Dutch journalists – Jan Kuiper, Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Johannes Willemsen – were ambushed and killed by the army of El Salvador on 17 March 1982. They were working for Ikon, a Dutch public television station (1976-2026).
At that time, in 1980, the war began and ended with the peace accords signed in Mexico in 1992.
In the 1980s there was a big initial offensive, there were times of serious human rights violations, and those people who spoke out against the regime were simply eliminated, captured and disappeared, he said.
There was, he explains, the action of the death squads or any of the three security forces of the right-wing governments.
There was a voice that denounced all these horrors, that of Monsignor Arnulfo Romero, ‘the voice of the voiceless’, who every Sunday, during his homily, would say ‘I have been informed’ that ‘they tortured so-and-so and he has disappeared, in such-and-such a community the army came to kill 200 people, 50 people’.
People were paying attention to that homily because it was like being informed about what was happening in the country, and the right wing didn’t like that, and that’s why they had him killed, Pérez says.
Today, despite the evidence and all the reports of the Truth Commission, Romero’s assassination 45 years ago remains unpunished, as do other massacres such as that of El Mozote (1981) and that of the Dutch television crew.
For Koos Koster, who was the head of the murdered Dutch journalists, Monsignor Romero was a source of information and when he wanted to interview someone to talk to him about the reality of the country or human rights, he went to the prelate, he said. So, ‘the case of the Dutch has some connection with Romero’. Pérez explains that the case of the Dutch journalists is the first case from the Truth Commission report to go to trial. ‘This is the first time in the history of this country that high-ranking military commanders will be tried, since only Colonel Orlando Montano was tried in Spain for the Jesuits case, but not here in El Salvador, because there has been no transitional justice process,’ he says.
He considers that it is difficult to develop a process in a country when the perpetrators are friends or are still close to political and military power.
Given the absence of a Transitional Justice Law and the Legislative Assembly’s delay in approving any of the proposals made for this purpose, ‘there is only one explanation: lack of political will.
It is a problem of lack of political will’.
In the trial of the alleged murderers of the journalists, ‘we hope that it will first lead to an exemplary sentence for those people who go around killing journalists, and who also go around killing half of humanity and justice never catches up with them’. PL
(Translated by Cristina Popa – Email: gcpopa83@gmail.com) – Photos: Pixabay
.jpg)
