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A court in El Salvador has sentenced three former senior military officers to 15 years in prison for the killing of four Dutch journalists in 1982.
Jan Kuiper, Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemson were killed in an ambush by the Salvadoran army in the northern province of Chalatenango while filming a documentary about the Central American country’s civil war, which lasted from 1980 until 1992.
Late on Tuesday, a five-person jury in a Chalatenango court found three former top military officials guilty over their deaths after a trial that was closed to the public.
The convicted men were former Defence Minister José Guillermo García, 91, former Treasury Police Director Francisco Morán, 93, and Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85, the former army commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade in Chalatenango.
García and Morán remain under a police guard at a private hospital in the capital San Salvador, while Reyes Mena lives in the US. The Salvadoran Supreme Court started extradition proceedings in March to bring him back to face justice.
García was deported from the US in 2016, with a US judge declaring him responsible for serious human rights violations during the Salvadoran civil war.
Óscar Pérez, lawyer for the Foundation Comunicandonos that represented the victims’ families, said prosecutors had requested a minimum 15-year prison sentence for all three men.
What happened in 1982?
Shortly before they were killed, the four Dutch reporters, who were making a documentary for Ikon TV, had joined up with guerrillas to film behind enemy lines.
Salvadoran soldiers armed with assault rifles and machine guns then ambushed them and the guerrillas.
Pérez told reporters that there was “sufficient proof” that “deliberate and well-planned military action” led to the Dutch journalists’ killings. The same assessment was also made by the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador after the end of the civil war.
The lawyer added that the judge in the case also condemned the Salvadoran government, ordering President Nayib Bukele to apologise publicly to the victims in his role as head of the country’s armed forces.
Juan Carlos Sánchez, from the NGO Mesa Contra la Impunidad, said the trial was a “transcendental step that the victims have waited 40 years for”.
The prosecution of the military officials was relaunched in 2018, after the country’s highest court ruled that the general post-civil war amnesty was unconstitutional.
In March 2022, relatives of the victims as well as representatives of the Dutch government and the EU demanded that the suspects be tried.
Some of the men accused of being involved in the killings had already died, including Mario Canizales Espinoza, who was believed to have led the patrol that carried out the massacre.
Some 75,000 Salvadoran civilians were killed during the civil war, most of whom died at the hands of the US-backed government security forces.
Additional sources • AP
