It’s published •update
A Salvador court sentenced three former senior military officers to 15 years in prison for killing four Dutch journalists in 1982.
Jan Kuiper, Koos Koster, Hans Ter Laag and Joop Willemson were ambushed by Salvadra forces in northern Charatenango filming a documentary about the civil war of the Central American country that ran from 1980 to 1992.
At the end of Tuesday, five ju judges at the Charatenango Court found that three former top military officials had committed crimes against their deaths after a trial that was closed to the public.
The men convicted were former Treasury Secretary Francisco Moraan, 93, former Army commander of the 4th Infantry Brigade in Charatenango, and former Treasury Secretary Francisco Moraan, 93, and Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena.
Garcia and Molan remain under police officers at a private hospital in the capital of San Salvador, and Reyes Mena lives in the United States. The Salvador Supreme Court began extradition proceedings in March to bring him back to justice.
Garcia was deported from the United States in 2016, and a US judge declared himself responsible for serious human rights abuses during the Salvador civil war.
Oscar Pérez, an attorney for the comunicandonos foundation, which represents the victims’ families, said the prosecutors sentenced all three men to a minimum of 15 years in prison.
What happened in 1982?
Shortly before they were killed, four Dutch reporters who were making an Icon TV documentary filmed behind the enemy lines along with the guerrillas.
Armed with assault rifles and machine guns, Salvadoran soldiers ambushed them and the guerrillas.
Perez told reporters there was “sufficient evidence” that “intentional and well-planned military action” led to the murder of Dutch journalists. The same assessment was also made by the United Nations Truth Committee on El Salvador after the end of the Civil War.
The lawyer added that the judge in the case also denounced the Salvador government and ordered President Naib Bukere to publicly apologize to the victims in his role as the country’s military commander.
Juan Carlos Sánchez of Ngo Mesa Contra La Impunidad said the trial was “a transcendental step that the victims had been waiting for forty years.”
In 2018, military officials’ prosecutions resumed after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that general postwar pardons were unconstitutional.
In March 2022, relatives of the victims, representatives of the Dutch government and the EU demanded that the suspects be brought to trial.
Several of the men accused of being involved in the murders had already been dead, including Mario Canisares Espinoza, who was believed to have led the patrols that carried out the massacre.
Around 75,000 Salvador civilians were killed during the Civil War, most of whom died at the hands of US-backed government security forces.
Additional sources •AP
