Amnesty Magazine
A Glimmer of Justice for El Salvador
For the first time members of the Salvadoran high command have been held accountable for the human rights crimes that marked a decade during which the Salvadoran military—armed, trained, and funded by Washington—killed tens of thousands.
BY MICHAEL McCLINTOCK
Michael McClintock is the director of programs for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. From 1974-94, he was on the research team of Amnesty International's International Secretariat. He is the author of Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism 1940-1990. (Pantheon, 1992; see http://www.statecraft.org/).
It took two decades, but the result was a resounding victory for justice. In the first verdict, the question posed was, “Is José García legally responsible for the torture of Juan Romagoza?” The jury foreperson answered, “Yes.” “Is Eugenio Vides Casanova legally responsible for the torture of Juan Romagoza?” Again, “Yes.”
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 Neris González and Carlos Mauricio celebrate outside a Florida court where they won $54.6 million in damages from their torturers. (© Scott Wiseman) |
The jury also found the two Salvadoran commanders responsible for the torture of Neris González and found Vides Casanova alone guilty of the June 1983 torture of Carlos Mauricio because García had retired by that time.
Spectators in the packed courtroom gasped; many wept tears of joy. “For 23 years since the torture, I've been waiting for justice,” said González later. “On this day, we've achieved justice.” The tortures had occurred during the war that devastated El Salvador in the 1980s and accounted for some 70,000 mostly civilian casualties.
The July verdict against generals José Guillermo García and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova was the first of its kind. A Florida jury used the 1992 Torture Victims Protection Act and the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act to find the two retired Salvadoran officers responsible for torture and to award the victims $54.6 million in damages. García and Vides Casanova had both moved to Florida more than a decade ago. The plaintiffs—Neris González, Carlos Mauricio, and Juan Romagoza—are also long-time U.S. residents.
The verdict confirmed what the three victims had long claimed: Troops under García's and Vides Casanova's command detained and tortured them. And if the officers did not know about every instance, they knew about a persistent pattern of abuse and torture and they condoned it. García and Vides Casanova were respectively the minister of defense and the director of the National Guard from October 1979 to January 1983 when Vides Casanova took over as defense minister.
“The deciding factor was that they were generals in charge of the National Guard and generals in charge of the country,” jury foreman Arnie Esbin, 69, of Boynton Beach, told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. “It was a military dictatorship and they chose to do what they wanted to do.” Esbin described as self-serving and not credible the generals' claim that they didn't know their soldiers were committing atrocities.
The verdict comes less than two years after another jury agonized over García's and Vides Casanova's responsibility for the December 1980 murder of U.S. churchwomen by members of the Salvadoran National Guard. In that case the jury accepted the defense that the generals had been unable to control their troops.
ONCE AN AI RESEARCHER ALWAYS...
I was brought into the case because I'd covered El Salvador during much of my 20 years as a researcher and director with Amnesty International's International Secretariat, including the crucial years 1979-1983. Joshua Sondheimer, of the Center for Justice and Accountability which brought the case, called me in late 2000 to ask if I would be a witness. My role was to show that the generals knew that their subordinates had conducted torture and to demonstrate the seriousness of independent efforts to research, report, and act on torture reports, “disappearances,” and political killings in El Salvador during their tenure.
I was delighted to find that some of the same people I'd worked with in the 1970s and '80s were still with Amnesty. I called an old Colorado phone number for Scott Harrison and Ellen Moore of AIUSA's Urgent Action team and found they were still in their Rocky Mountain home coordinating Urgent Actions. I asked their help in finding documentation of our actions from 1979 to 1983, and within a week, thanks to additional help from intern Karen Alexander, I had it: 175 Urgent Actions and follow-ups, 36 Central America Special Actions, and a selection of actions taken by Amnesty's medical professionals and educators networks.
Most of the actions called for members to write letters and send telegrams or telexes (there were no faxes or e-mails in those days) to then-colonels García and Vides Casanova expressing concern about reports of torture or “disappearances.” The trove from Colorado even included letters from the colonels themselves acknowledging our appeals. Staffers at the International Secretariat in London also pored over microfilm to find copies of old correspondence with the Salvadoran government.
On the witness stand I testified about my Amnesty experience, describing the origins of the movement, its nonpartisan principles, its foundation in solid research and impartial reporting. I explained the range of membership actions—and that they centered on volunteers writing letters to foreign governments from living rooms across the country and around the world. I testified that each Urgent Action generated about 5,000 letters. (Salvadoran officials at the time joked that AI letters were overwhelming the local post office and turning the security forces into stamp collectors.)
The heart of my testimony concerned the actions we initiated on cases in El Salvador—backed by blowups of our original Urgent Action appeals and some of the signed responses we received. At one point, the plaintiffs' attorney, Peter Stern, asked me to read a letter from Vides Casanova thanking an AI member in Omaha, Neb., for “his interest” and denying that the victim was “registered.” Although AI had never initiated appeals on behalf of the three plaintiffs, the description of actions in hundreds of similar cases made clear that the generals had been put on notice that torture was routine on their watch.
LEGAL PRECEDENT : AN EXTRAORDINARY CASE
A combination of old and new U.S. laws made the jury's verdict and the award of damages possible. A federal law enacted in 1992, the Torture Victims Protection Act, allows victims of human rights abuses—or their survivors—to confront in U.S. courts, not only the direct perpetrators of the crimes against them, but also the officials who had the authority and responsibility to prevent them. The case was also heard under the Alien Tort Claims Act, adopted in 1789, which gives victims of serious human rights abuses, no matter where they were committed, the right to sue those responsible for the abuses in U.S. Federal Court.
The legal case was precedent setting. But the “disappearance” and torture in El Salvador of church worker Neris González, teacher Carlos Mauricio, and doctor Juan Romagoza were extraordinary on many levels.
First, they survived. The plaintiffs were tortured in the period between October 1979 and June 1983. During that same time, almost 30,000 other civilians either died during detention by the Salvadoran armed forces or were killed outright by them.
In late 1979 when González was eight months pregnant, uniformed National Guardsmen detained, beat, and raped her and then left her for dead in a pile of bodies. Her baby died soon after birth. The National Guard detained and interrogated Dr. Romagoza at their headquarters for 22 days, beating and binding him with wire cables and sexually assaulting him. He lived, not through an oversight, but because his brother, a high ranking military officer, interceded. The National Police detained and tortured Carlos Mauricio for nearly two weeks before releasing him.
Secondly, the three immigrated to the United States—where the men responsible for their torment enjoyed a comfortable retirement.
Finally, the three plaintiffs lived to see some measure of justice. For the first time members of the Salvadoran high command have been held accountable—either in El Salvador or anywhere else—for the gross and persistent human rights crimes that marked a decade during which the Salvadoran military—armed, trained, and funded by Washington—killed tens of thousands.
Can Amnesty International claim some small credit for this striking victory? I think so. Persistent membership action during and after the colonels' reign of terror in the 1980s and early 1990s helped create the conditions needed for this case to be brought and won in a U.S. courtroom. The documentary record of membership action helped show a West Palm Beach jury that torture by El Salvador's armed forces was neither occasional nor a matter of rogue elements. All in all, the trial showed that concerted membership action can contribute to the fight against impunity even in the face of catastrophic human rights abuse.
