El Salvador: Quest for Justice

[Judi Lynn]

El Salvador: Quest for Justice

More than 20 years after the end of its civil war, the country is ready to confront and redress its bloody past.

People and Power Last Modified: 22 Aug 2013 16:21

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The new drive for justice has been fueled by the discovery of a military document called the Libro Amarillo, the 'Yellow Book' - a 254-page book produced by the Intelligence Department of the Estado Mayor Conjunto, El Salvador's military high command during the civil war. It is the first list of human targets assembled by the military high command during the war to ever be publically revealed.

Since it was discovered in 2010, researchers have been carefully confirming the Yellow Book's authenticity and visiting the families of those in it, so the book is only now being revealed. Assembled between 1978 and 1987, the book contains photographs of nearly 2,000 civilians that it identifies as "delinquent-terrorists", and details their known or suspected leftist political affiliations.

"The majority were intellectuals, writers, journalists, professionals and union members. Some are also workers and campesinos," says Carlos Santos, a human rights activist who has been researching the book. So far, researchers have determined that about 200 people in the book were murdered and disappeared, many by death squads.
During the war, the Salvadoran military claimed that the death squads were independent groups. But, Santos says, "the Yellow Book is evidence that the Salvadoran state violated human rights systematically in this country".

William LeoGrande, who worked on El Salvador policy for the US Congress in the 1980s, agrees. "A document like this, I think, confirms what most people thought at the time, that the … intelligence unit of the high command was putting together the list of targets," he says. "And then those targets were being passed along to the special operations units, the death squads that would go out and kill them."

During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan made El Salvador one of the most important policy initiatives of his administration. As a result, El Salvador became the third-largest recipient of US aid - after Israel and Egypt - collecting more than $4bn in military and economic aid. But the administration needed Congress to sign off on military aid to El Salvador, and Congress asked for assurances that human rights conditions in the country were improving - particularly in relation to the death squads.

More:
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2013/08/201381310843483272.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. More from this useful, accurate article:

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"There were people who were tortured and were burned in a fire alive," says Rivas. "There were others who were pulled out of their homes, their heads were placed on a tree trunk and they were beheaded. That was their way to instill fear in the people."
Ochoa Perez attributes the accusations to partisan differences. "When one is at war," he says, "there are going be detractors and then you have those who praise you." He adds: "I have never been accused officially by the United Nations or anyone else of violating human rights."

The 1992 United Nation's Truth Commission on El Salvador only had the resources to investigate a few emblematic cases of atrocities committed during the war. Overall, it received more than 22,000 complaints of serious acts of violence. The Commission found that 85 percent of the cases were attributed "to agents of the state, paramilitary groups … and death squads". They also found that opposition guerilla groups, known as the Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front (or FMLN), were accused "in approximately 5 percent of the cases".

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On March 20, noted Spanish jurist, Baltasar Garzon, joined Cuellar in the Salvadoran capital, San Salvador, to announce their new cases involving atrocities. They used the date to mark the 20th anniversary of El Salvador's amnesty law, and to emphasise how the country remains an outlier in Latin America in seeking accountability for Cold War atrocities. On that same day, throngs of victims marched to the Salvadoran attorney general's office where they filed their cases seeking the investigation and prosecution of atrocities.

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US congressman Jim McGovern has worked on El Salvadoran issues for years, and even led a congressional task force that investigated the killing of six Jesuit priests by members of an American-trained unit.
"A lot of the people that were killed were killed with guns that we gave them," he says. "A lot of the perpetrators of some of these crimes were people we trained in the United States. I think we have a special responsibility to demand there be some accountability."

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As you know, Congressman Jim McGovern is a Democrat. We will never see the day a U.S. Republican EVER will have the faintest concern about the brutal, evil, utterly wrong atrocities which have been committed by US Gov't, using US citizens' own required tax dollars, operating in complete silence behind everyone's back in its efforts to control the lives of citizens outside our own borders. If it's evil, don't do it. Period.