Decades After Atrocities During US-Backed Dirty Wars, Nations Take Promising Legal Steps
Decades After Atrocities During US-Backed Dirty Wars, Nations Take Promising Legal Steps
El Salvador says will make arrests over notorious massacre of Jesuit priests; Guatemala arrests over a dozen former officials for rights abuses
by Andrea Germanos, staff writer
Published on Friday, January 08, 2016
by Common Dreams
[font size=1]
A memorial to the people who died in the civil war in El Salvador. (Photo: Celine Massa/flickr/cc)
[/font]
In promising and long-awaited developments, Guatemala and El Salvador, where U.S.-backing and training helped the military forces commit crimes against humanity, this week took legal steps towards justice for victims.
In El Salvador, more than 25 years after members of the U.S. backed-Salvadoran military forces killed six Jesuit priests, the government has said it would arrest 17 former soldiers accused of the committing the notorious massacre.
According to reporting by Reuters on Wednesday:
The government made the announcement after a Spanish judge sent a new petition to international police agency Interpol on Monday, ordering the soldiers' capture for the 1989 murders of the priests, their housekeeper and her daughter. Five of the priests were Spanish and one was Salvadoran.
"We consider compliance with international arrest warrants to be mandatory, and we must proceed with immediate implementation by the Salvadoran authorities," Agence France-Presse quotes Salvador's human rights ombudsman David Morales as saying late Wednesday.
The Center for Justice and Accountability, which has sought legal remedy on behalf of the families of the murdered Jesuit priests, offers this background on what happened on the day of the massacre, November 16, 1989:
As summarized in the United Nations Truth Commission report, a feature of the post-conflict peace accords, on the night of November 15, 1989, then Colonel René Emilio Ponce, in the presence of General Juan Rafael Bustillo, Colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda, Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano and Colonel Francisco Elena Fuentes, ordered Colonel Guillermo Alfredo Benavides to kill Jesuit Father Ellacuría and to leave no witnesses. Later that night, Benavides in turn ordered Lt. Espinoza Guerra, a member of the elite Atlacatl Battalion, to carry out this order.
Espinoza Guerra and his platoon of Atlacatl troops arrived at the Universidad Centroamericana ¨José Simeon Cañas¨ (UCA) in San Salvador in the early hours of November 16, 1989 and made their way to the Pastoral Center. When the priests came out to see what the commotion was about, they were ordered to go into the garden and lie face down on the ground, while the soldiers searched the building. At this point, Lieutenant Espinoza Guerra gave the order to kill the priests. By the end of the massacre, six priests, their housekeeper and the housekeeper's daughter were brutally murdered.
Lieutenant Espinoza Guerra and his troops attempted to cover up their role in the massacre by making it look as if the killings had been carried out by members of the FMLN.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/01/08/decades-after-atrocities-during-us-backed-dirty-wars-nations-take-promising-legal
