The striking down of El Salvador’s amnesty law is giving hope to thousands that justice for alleged human rights abuses committed during the Central American country’s 12-year civil war could now be within reach.
Others fear the Salvadorean Supreme Court’s scrapping of the law that protected the military, paramilitary groups and guerrilla fighters — some of whom are in the current government — could tear open old wounds in the still polarized country.
Even Salvadorean President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, who was part of the command structure of the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front during the war, could theoretically face prosecutions, legal experts said on Thursday.
Photo: AP
On a 4-1 vote on Wednesday, the Supreme Court overturned the amnesty law, which had been enacted in 1993, five days after a truth commission’s report blamed the military for the vast majority of abuses during the war. The ruling made clear that amnesty was lifted for not only those accused of directly committing crimes, but also the command structures of the military and guerrilla forces who gave the orders.
“Today is an historic day for human rights in El Salvador,” Amnesty International Americas director Erika Guevara-Rosas said. “By turning its back on a law that has done nothing but let criminals get away with serious human rights violations for decades, the country is finally dealing with its tragic past.”
The commission that investigated the war’s atrocities determined that more than 75,000 people were tortured, killed without justification or forcibly “disappeared.”
It estimated that government forces, paramilitary groups and death squads were responsible for 90 percent of the crimes and guerrilla fighters for just over 3 percent.
The amnesty law kept countless cases from being prosecuted.
Among them was the 1980 assassination of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero.
The commission said the mastermind was Major Roberto D’Abuisson, the now-dead founder of the conservative Republican Nationalist Alliance, which governed El Salvador until 2009.
Another pivotal case was the 1989 slaying of six Jesuit priests — five Spaniards and one Salvadorean.
In 1991, a Salvadorean court determined that the amnesty law prevented punishment of nine members of an elite battalion for the crime.
The same army unit was allegedly responsible for the 1981 massacre of 1,000 inhabitants of the El Mozote area.
In 2012, the Inter-American Human Rights Court condemned the incident and ordered El Salvador’s government to pay reparations to the families of those killed.
With the amnesty law ruled unconstitutional, “I think we’re going to start to see many more cases,” said Carolyn Patty Blum, senior legal adviser at the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, a group that has been pursuing cases against alleged Salvadorean war crime perpetrators in courts outside the country since 1998.
“My hope is that we will see a dramatic change and that these historic crimes will start to be investigated much more seriously and much more deeply, rigorously,” Blum said.
Blum, who is involved in a case against high-ranking Salvadorean officials in a Spanish court for the killing of the six priests, urged US President Barack Obama to order a large declassification of US documents related to El Salvador’s war that could aid in prosecutions.
However, others have criticized Wednesday’s ruling.
Former Supreme Court justice Ulises del Dios Guzman said in a local television interview that the decision “opens a spectrum of possibilities that could be really serious for the country” and could even reach the president.
“This drags us to the past and an unharmonious situation that could cause real confrontation and recriminations,” he said.
Salvadorean Minister of Defense General David Munguia Payes called the ruling “an error” that could lead to a “witch hunt” and turn the country upside down.
Salvadorean Human Rights Commission director Miguel Montenegro, who was himself tortured allegedly by government forces during the war, stood on the other side, calling the ruling “a joy.”
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