Three former officers in El Salvador’s military have been convicted for the killings of four Dutch journalists during the Central American country’s brutal civil war in 1982.
Former Minister of National Defence Colonel Jose Guillermo Garcia, 91, former police Colonel Francisco Moran, 93, and ex-infantry brigade commander Colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85, were found guilty late on Tuesday by a jury in the northern city of Chalatenango, a lawyer said.
The Diario El Salvador news outlet reported that the three former officers – none of whom was present in court – were sentenced to 15 years in prison each for the killings.
The four Dutch journalists, Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen, were killed while filming a television documentary on El Salvador’s civil war, which saw an estimated 75,000 civilians killed – mostly by United States-backed government security forces – between 1980 and 1992.
The journalists had linked up with leftist rebels and planned to spend several days behind the front lines reporting on the war. But Salvadoran soldiers armed with assault rifles and machineguns ambushed them and the rebels.
“We have clearly shown the level of responsibility of the accused,” said Oscar Perez, a lawyer for the Foundation Comunicandonos, which represents the victims.
“The entire organised power structure that intervened in the political-military decisions that led to the murder of the journalists,” he said.
A United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission in 1993 found that the journalists had walked into an ambush trap that was planned by Reyes, who still lives in the US, and with the knowledge of other officers.
The Salvadoran Supreme Court approved an extradition request for Reyes in March, but there has been no progress in his return from the US so far.
The ageing Garcia and Moran are under police surveillance in a private hospital in the capital, San Salvador.
García was deported from the US in 2016, after a US judge declared him responsible for serious human rights violations during the early years of the war between the military and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front fighters.
The prosecution of the men was reopened in 2018 after the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a general amnesty passed following the end of the civil war.
The case against the suspects moved slowly, but in March 2022, relatives of the victims and representatives of the Dutch government as well as the European Union demanded that those responsible for the journalists’ killing face trial.
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