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El Salvador’s supreme court ruled by ten to two on 24 August that it will not order the arrest of nine former military men charged with the murder of six Jesuit priests in 1989. The nine men had handed themselves in voluntarily at a military base in El Salvador in early August, but are not under arrest. The supreme court said it would consider an extradition request from Spain if one was forthcoming. This would be a groundbreaking case because those guilty of human rights abuses have been shielded from prosecution by a general amnesty law, passed by a right-wing government in El Salvador in 1993.
The murders of the six Jesuit priests (five of whom were Spanish) and their housekeeper and her daughter, were second only to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 for notoriety during El Salvador’s bloody 1980-1992 civil war. A Spanish judge, Eloy Velasco Núñez, charged 20 Salvadorean former military officers on 30 May for the murders under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, championed by Spanish courts, which maintains that some crimes are deemed to be so serious they can be prosecuted outside of the country in which they were committed [RC-11-06]. They are charged with murder, terrorism and crimes against humanity. Judge Velasco Núñez also issued arrest warrants through the international police agency (Interpol).
Interpol issued a “red notice” in early August saying that the former military men should be “located, with a view to their arrest”. So far so good. The problem is on 24 August El Salvador’s supreme court ordered that they should be freed from detention, adding that it would not order the arrest of the men unless it received a formal extradition request from Spain. At that point, the supreme court said, it would be prepared to consider the extradition request. Conversely, the Spanish high court argues that no formal extradition request can be made to El Salvador for the nine men until it receives notification that they are under arrest.
A total of 20 former soldiers, including the defence minister at the time of the massacre, General Rafael Humberto Larios, were indicted by the Spanish court. Larios was one of the nine who handed themselves in. Of the remaining 11 defendants, General René Emilio Ponce, the former head of the armed forces joint chiefs of staff, died on 2 May; the other ten men are still at large. Ponce is accused of ordering the Atlacatl battalion to carry out the killings at the campus of the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in San Salvador where the priests taught, and instructed troops to leave no witness alive.
Farce?
The supreme court judge who spoke to the press, Ulisés del Dios Guzmán, gave the strong impression, however, that the extradition request would not be viewed favourably. He said El Salvador’s Policía Nacional Civil (PNC) “cannot proceed to capture the military men because this would imply executing a foreign judicial ruling (which) would damage national sovereignty.” He added: “Here, for us, the case is closed.”
The head of the human rights institute at UCA (IDHUCA), Benjamín Cuéllar, said the ruling was just “one more chapter in the farce” and a sign that the justice system had not changed despite 20 years having elapsed since the end of the civil war. The implication of Cuéllar’s remarks is that the men would never have turned themselves in to the military base in the first place without some form of assurance from the Salvadorean judicial system that they would not be extradited, or at least that the military sought this assurance for them.
The president of the legislative assembly, Sigfrido Reyes, of the ruling left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), said elliptically that the ruling “merely closes one chapter, but history never ends”. Spanish Judge Velasco argues that the military command targeted the Jesuits because it adjudged that they were ‘colluding’ with the FMLN guerrillas to push for a peace accord, which it was keen to prevent for fear of a loss of power and possible future prosecutions.
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