Could a trial finally be in the works for El Salvador's Jesuits-massacre case?
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
While El Salvador prepares for the imminent beatification of slain Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose assassination in 1980 marked an unofficial start to the country's dozen-year internal conflict (1980-1992), legal authorities in Spain and the US are turning their attention to another prominent war-era crime: the 1989 murders, by Salvadoran soldiers, of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter.
A judge with Spain's Audencia Nacional, operating under the principle of universal jurisdiction, has worked for years to bring the presumed perpetrators of the infamous Jesuits-massacre case to trial. Obstacles have abounded. For one thing, Judge Eloy Velasco has been unable to get any of the 20 ex-military officials he indicted in 2011 on to Spanish soil. One died just before the indictments were issued (NotiCen, July 28, 2011). Most of the others are in El Salvador, where they enjoy legal protection under a 1993 amnesty law that continues to hold sway despite repeated calls for its repeal by rights groups and international bodies (NotiCen, Sept. 29, 2011). Complicating matters even more is a reform that Spain's conservative leadership pushed through early last year limiting the use of universal jurisdiction, which holds that some crimes are so horrendous they can be tried anywhere (NotiCen, Dec. 11 2014).
But it recent weeks, legal developments in both Spain and the US have provided a sudden burst of momentum for the bogged down Audencia Nacional case, which Velasco first took up in 2008 at the behest of a pair of human rights groups: the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) in San Francisco, California, and the Asociacion Pro Derechos Humanos de Espana (APDHE), a Spanish organization.
On May 6--less than three weeks before Romero's highly anticipated May 23 beatification ceremony--Spain's Tribunal Supremo determined that Velasco could proceed with his Jesuits-massacre investigation despite the 2014 legal reform. The high court based its ruling on the fact that five of the murdered priests had Spanish, in addition to Salvadoran, citizenship and on the demonstrated unwillingness of Salvadoran courts to properly pursue the matter. El Salvador's sole attempt to try the case, in 1990-1991, lacked "necessary guarantees regarding independence and impartiality," the Tribunal Supremo stated. "The criminal procedure that was followed in El Salvador didn't really try to punish the people responsible but was instead meant to shield...
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