Nearly 20 years after the Salvadoran army killed six Jesuit priests in one of the most notorious events of El Salvador’s civil war, a criminal complaint filed in the Spanish High Court has revived hopes that those behind the massacre could face trial.
Human rights lawyers filed a complaint on Thursday against then-Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani Burkard and 14 former members of the Salvadoran military, as well as two female employees, for their roles in the killings of the priests and in the official cover-up that followed. International outrage over the murders proved to be pivotal in sapping US support for military assistance to the Salvadoran army.
“We hope this case helps to reawaken the memory and the conscience of El Salvador’s people,” said Almudena Bernabeu, a lawyer for the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, a human rights law center, which filed the case along with the Spanish Association for Human Rights.
PRECEDENT
The crusading Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon made legal history in 1998 when he secured the arrest in Britain of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet using a Spanish legal principle that crimes against humanity can be prosecuted anywhere. Pinochet narrowly escaped extradition to Spain by pleading ill health.
In the early hours of Nov. 16, 1989, members of the Salvadoran army forced their way into the Jesuit priests’ residence on the campus of the Central American University in San Salvador. They ordered five of the priests to lie face-down in the garden, shot them and then searched the house, killing another priest, the housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter. But another housekeeper witnessed the attack.
A 1991 report by a UN-sponsored Truth Commission said General Rene Emilio Ponce, then army chief, ordered the killing of one of the priests, Ignacio Ellacuria Bescoetxea. Ponce ordered soldiers to leave no witnesses to the murder of Ellacuria, who had promoted peace talks between the right-wing military government and Marxist guerrillas.
The complaint filed on Thursday accuses Cristiani of helping cover up a crime against humanity. It accuses Ponce and the 13 others of crimes against humanity, murder and state-sponsored terrorism for their involvement in the slaughter.
FRUITLESS EFFORTS
Despite the witness account, the investigations and circumstantial evidence, efforts to make El Salvador’s military account for the killings have been largely fruitless. In a 1991 trial held in El Salvador, two military officials were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The two were released under a 1993 amnesty.
Even if the suspects were not extradited, the Spanish case could force a trial in El Salvador, Bernabeu said. Any prosecution would serve as some form of justice and strengthen calls for a repeal of the country’s controversial amnesty law, said Gisela de Leon, a lawyer with the Center for Justice and International Law in Costa Rica.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS