Two Trials Against
Human Rights Abusers
Contents:
I. Against
Honduran Lt. Col. Juan Lopez Grijalba
From This Site:
Introduction
Press Release
From the Center for
Justice and Accountability
Website:
Background
Trial
Update
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II. Against Salvadoran Generals Vides
Casanova and Jose Guillermo
Garcia.
From this Site:
Introduction
7/ 8 & 9 Testimony of
Professor Terry Karl
Cross Examination
Redirect
7/10 Testimony of Neris
Gonzalez
7/11 Defendants' Opening
Statements
From the Center for Justice and
Accountability
Website:
Background
Trial
Update
Contact Center for Justice and
Accountability
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I. Against Honduran Lt. Col. Juan Lopez Grijalba
Introduction
Lawsuit for Torture, Disappearance, and Summary Execution Filed
Against Honduran Intelligence Officer Residing in Florida San
Francisco, July 15, 2002 The victims’ lawsuit, filed by the San
Francisco-based Center for Justice & Accountability (CJA),
claims that former Honduran military intelligence chief Lt. Col.
Juan López Grijalba controlled a secretive battalion responsible
for widespread human rights abuses in the early 1980’s. A 1994
report by Honduras’ National Commissioner for the Protection of
Human Rights found that it is “beyond question” that the unit,
known as “Battalion 3-16,” engaged in a “systematic program of
disappearances and political murder” between 1981-84.
Note from the Inter Religious Task Force in Cleveland: John Negroponte, former US Ambassador to Honduras
(1981-85) is President Bush's appointee as US Representative to the
Security Council of the United Nations (confirmed by the Senate
9/14/01). Who is Negroponte: A CIA inquiry (1997) found that
Negroponte was aware of Honduran military involvement in death squad
activities. Negroponte concealed from Congress the murder, torture
and kidnapping abuses of the CIA-equipped and trained Honduran death
squad called Battalion 3-16. Victims of human rights abuses in
Honduras claim that Negroponte created a climate in which Honduran
officials knew they could act with impunity. From Honduras,
Negroponte helped propel the Contral War against the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua.
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Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Joshua
Sondheimer, Litigation Director Matt Eisenbrandt, Staff Attorney.
(415) 544-0444
Lawsuit for Torture, Disappearance, and Summary Execution Filed
Against Honduran Intelligence Officer Residing in Florida
San Francisco, July 15, 2002
A high-ranking Honduran military officer living in Florida since
1998, is responsible for the torture and disappearances of Honduran
civilians, charges a lawsuit filed today in a Miami federal court by
two torture victims and relatives of two of the disappeared.
The victims’ lawsuit, filed by the San Francisco-based Center for
Justice & Accountability (CJA), claims that former Honduran
military intelligence chief Lt. Col. Juan López Grijalba controlled
a secretive battalion responsible for widespread human rights abuses
in the early 1980’s. A 1994 report by Honduras’ National
Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights found that it is
“beyond question” that the unit, known as “Battalion 3-16,”
engaged in a “systematic program of disappearances and political
murder” between 1981-84.
“The United States should not be a safe haven for foreign
officials who ordered or allowed their subordinates to commit
torture and political killings,” said CJA attorney Joshua
Sondheimer. “Officials responsible for human rights abuses in
their countries should know that if they come to the United States,
they can be held accountable in our courts,” he said.
The six plaintiffs in the lawsuit, four of whom are now U. S.
citizens, include Oscar and Gloria Reyes, abducted by soldiers
wearing black masks in
1982 and subjected to electric shock and beatings in a clandestine
torture facility, and Ricardo and Zenaida Velásquez, the son and
sister of Manfredo Velásquez, who was abducted by Honduran soldiers
in 1981 and has never been seen since. Velásquez is presumed to
have been killed, one of the 179 or more civilians “disappeared”
in Honduras during the 1980’s, according to the National
Commissioner’s report. Velásquez was a student at the time of his
disappearance in 1981.
Velásquez’ sister Zenaida, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit,
came to the United States in 1988, and is now a naturalized U. S.
citizen. She is now a social worker in Northern California. Velásquez’
son Ricardo, also a plaintiff, was eight years old at the time of
his father’s disappearance, and remained in Honduras with his
mother and two sisters. He is now a university student in Honduras.
Plaintiff Oscar Reyes earned a master’s degree in communications
from the University of Minnesota in 1976, and founded and served as
director of the school of journalism at the National Autonomous
University of Honduras. Reyes and his wife were forced into exile in
1982 to secure their release from prison. Reyes and his family have
lived in the United States since that time, and all are naturalized
U. S. citizens. Reyes currently lives with his family in northern
Virginia, and is the director of a Spanish-language newspaper
serving the Washington, DC area.
The plaintiffs’ lawsuit is based on two federal laws -- the
213-year old Alien Tort Claims Act, and the 1991 Torture Victim
Protection Act -- that allow U. S. courts to assess damages against
perpetrators of serious human rights violations committed abroad.
Federal courts can hear these cases when the alleged perpetrator is
living or traveling in the United States.
The Center for Justice & Accountability, which represents
plaintiffs in the case, works to end the impunity of human rights
abusers by, among other means, representing survivors in lawsuits
based under these laws. CJA is joined in the suit by Florida
attorney Robert G. Kerrigan of Kerrigan, Estess, Rankin &
McLeod.
The Center for Justice & Accountability was founded in 1998 with
support from Amnesty International USA and the United Nations
Voluntary Fund for the Victims of Torture to help victims of severe
human rights abuses seek justice against perpetrators living in and
traveling to the United States.
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II. Against Salvadoran Generals Vides
Casanova and Jose Guillermo
Garcia.
Introduction
This case is expected to go to jury Thursday, July 18. The
federal civil suit (by Romagoza et. al.) against General Vides and
Gen. José Guillermo García, who have both lived in the United
States since 1989, is the second they have faced in this court. They
were cleared of similar charges in an October 2000 suit brought by
relatives of four American churchwomen raped and killed by the
Salvadoran military in 1980. Gen. Garcia is a 1962 graduate of the
US Army School of the Americas.
From the Center for Justice & Accountability in San Francisco:
Dear all, Last week's testimony included Terry Karl, Professor of
Political Science and former Director of the Latin American Studies
Program at Stanford University. As an expert on El Salvador, she
advised members of Congress throughout the Salvadoran conflict and
led high level delegations to the country. She interviewed dozens of
individuals from all sectors of Salvadoran society, including
members of the military, for her extensive research on Latin
American military structures. She was also a consultant to the UN
Secretary General’s office for the U. N.-brokered 1992 Peace
Agreement between the Salvadoran government and the FMLN, the
Salvadoran guerrilla organization. Her testimony was quite long, but
is well worth the read.
The remainder of the week's activity included plaintiff Neris
Gonzalez, followed by the defendents' opening statement.
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7/ 8 & 9 Testimony of
Professor Terry Karl
Professor Karl described her personal witnessing of state violence
in El Salvador. For example, at times, she accompanied the staff of
the Legal Aid Office of the Archbishop when they would search for
the bodies of the disappeared. First, they would go to the city
morgue to look for bodies, at times piled up outside the front door.
Then, they searched the streets looking for bodies, mostly in the
poorer neighborhoods. They took photographs of the bodies and put
them in large books along with other identifying information so that
family members could try to identify their missing loved ones. At
times, Karl was present when someone identified a friend or family
member while looking through the book of photographs.
Professor Karl explained to the jury that the human rights
violations committed in El Salvador by the Armed Forces were among
the highest in the world and second highest in Latin America. “I
think you will see from my testimony,” she told the jury, “that
the evidence is overwhelming” of massive repression by the
military forces. As a political scientist, she explained, she
studies power. When General Garcia was Minister of Defense, she
described, he was probably the most powerful person in El Salvador.
Therefore, he had the power to curb the human rights abuses being
committed by the forces subordinate to him. Professor Karl opined
that he did not take even “the most minimum reasonable actions”
to prevent human rights abuses or to punish those officers known to
be committing the abuses. When the two generals were successive
Ministers of Defense, she told the jury, not one single officer was
ever prosecuted for a human rights violation.
Karl then explained the background to the conflict in El Salvador.
Two factors were the most important to consider. First, she
explained the extreme levels of poverty and inequality in El
Salvador, a country where three-quarters of the children were
malnourished, the leading cause of death was diarrhea, and 10
percent of the population controlled 80 percent of the resources.
But inequality alone was not the only cause of the conflict, she
explained. Other countries had similar poverty indices but did not
break into war.
In El Salvador, she explained, all peaceful means to pursue social
changes had been cut off by successive military dictatorships.
Beginning in 1932 with the massacre of between 10 and 30,000
peasants (“La Matanza”), after a few hundred had gathered to
call for land reform, dictatorships reacted violently when the
Salvadoran populations sought to organize themselves into political
parties, trade unions, or religious communities. There was little
opposition until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a political
coalition, which included the Christian Democrats participated in
the 1972 elections. The military refused to allow the winning
candidate, Napolean Duarte, to take office. He was beaten and forced
into exile. Professor Karl also defined the nature of military
dictatorship, where the military has all real power instead of any
civilians who might possess titular power. She also described the
intimate relationship between the economic elite and the ruling
military power, which she described as a “partnership.”
In 1977, internal debate occurred in the military about how to
respond to a growing peaceful opposition to military rule. She
described the two groups as the “hardliners” who wanted to use
violence to curb political opposition, and the “reformers” who
sought a transition to a more democratic state. When Garcia was
appointed Minister of Defense by the new military junta in 1979, he
began to move reform advocates into weaker positions and hardliners
into more powerful ones. A U. S. intelligence cable of the period
showed to the jury described Garcia as “the power behind the
throne.”
Professor Karl then described a “scale of terror” developed by Freedom
House, a bipartisan think tank funded largely by the U. S. Congress.
She focused on three levels in particular: mass state terror, targeted
state terror, and highly targeted state terror. In a period of mass
state terror, torture, murder, and disappearances threaten the entire
population, while targeted state terror targets certain groups and
highly targeted terror targets visible group leaders. Karl then showed
the jury a timeline of 1979-1983, in which the defendants were
successive Ministers of Defense in El Salvador, as a period of the mass
state terror. An estimated thirty thousand unarmed civilians were
killed from 1979-1982 alone by members of the armed forces and the
security forces. Many were killed in large-scale massacres. In 1980 and
1981, an average of 1,000 people were killed each month. During this
same time period, Archbishop Romero was assassinated after having given
a homily in which he urged those who were given orders to kill to put
down their rifles. “I beseech you,” he said, “in the name of God, stop
the repression.”
The patterns of violence also indicated clearly that it was not
random, as similar tactics were used in different incidents
throughout the country, and the massacres could not have been
carried out without logistical support and coordination. The same
types of torture were also noted in different parts of the country.
Furthermore, often bodies would be left with symbols to send a
message to the population, such as dirt stuffed into the mouths of
those who urged for land reform. The massacres were part of a
military strategy, she explained, aimed at “draining the sea,”
or killing any civilian who might be perceived as providing support
for the guerrillas. To explain why the levels of terror dropped
after 1983, Karl provided two possible hypotheses. One was that
“terror works.” According to Karl, people were much more
reluctant after such intense violence to participate in any kind of
associational activity. Two, a series of visits from high-level U.
S. officials, including former Secretary of State Schultz and former
Vice-President George Bush, delivered what Karl described as a
“drumbeat” of messages indicating that if human rights abuses by
the military and security forces in El Salvador continued, U. S. aid
would be terminated. The fact that abuses were reduced at that time,
opined Karl, meant that Salvadoran officials had the capacity to do
so even without U. S. pressure.
Professor Karl reviewed Secretary of Schultz’s talking points for
his trip to El Salvador, prepared by then-Undersecretary of State
for Latin American Affairs, Tony Motley. Among other issues, the
talking points also highlighted the need to arrest those involved in
the Sheraton murders, particularly a Captain Avila, who was known to
be frequently in San Salvador and staying at a safe house that was
adjacent to the National Guard Headquarters. Plaintiff’s lawyer
Peter Stern then directed Professor Karl’s and the jury’s
attention to excerpts of former Ambassador Edwin Corr’s deposition
which confirmed many of Karl’s assessments. Mr. Corr will be
testifying next week for the defense.
One slide prepared by Professor Karl listed the reasons why the
defendants should have known about the abuses committed by the
forces under their command. The list included the bodies found
throughout the country, Salvadoran press reports, and the
information provided to them by U. S. officials, international
organizations, and Salvadoran groups and leaders. The parallel of
what was happening in El Salvador, she told the jury, would be to
see dead bodies in downtown West Pam Beach or at a nearby hotel. It
was also on television, she explained. One night, while Professor
Karl was in a hotel room in San Salvador, the television program she
was watching was interrupted, and a “confession” was televised
on a homemade-looking videotape of a man, who looked, beaten
confessing to being a communist. Two other “confessions”
followed. The next day, all were found dead, badly tortured and
mutilated, and Karl saw the bodies. “These types of human rights
abuses were visible, they were in the newspapers, they were on
television,” she said.
On Tuesday, Professor Karl’s testimony focused on a year-end memo
written by former-Ambassador Corr in 1988, in which he describes his
concern at growing human rights abuses. In the memo, under the title
“Code of Silence,” Corr talks about the fear that members of the
military and security forces have of pulling the “skeletons” out
of the closet, stopping any one from denouncing other military
officers regarding human rights abuses or corruption. Professor Karl
earlier had described the “tanda” system in which a group of
boys entered the military academy together. Those who graduated from
the rigorous program (approximately 20-40 men) became like a
“brotherhood” whose ties to each other were stronger even than
family, as they were promoted as a group up the chain of command.
Corr’s memo also discusses what Karl had described earlier as
“deniability,” a phenomenon in which the military forces denied
involvement in human rights abuses, tried to diminish the gravity of
what was reported if there was evidence that abuses occurred, and
made only false promises to investigate and/or blocked any outside
attempts to investigate. One example of this obstruction was when an
investigating judge requested the names of all the men who were on
duty in the area where a notorious killing had taken place.
Witnesses had identified members of the National Guard and the
military as responsible, one with the name of “Tony.” Vides
Casanova gave the judge a list of 450 names, including 50 whose
first name was Antonio.
Had Vides Casanova, the Minister of Defense at the time the memo was
written, responded to the reported abuses, Karl testified, it would
have made a difference. As it was, the signal sent to officers was
that “they would be protected no matter what they do.” She
defined “impunity” as precisely this situation in El Salvador
– military and security forces acting without fear of punishment.
In fact, Professor Karl explained, human rights abusers were
rewarded and promoted to positions of greater power. She described
in detail the promotions that had been given from 1979-83. The
abuses, she explained, would not have been possible without the
support of the Minister of Defense. She emphasized, as other
witnesses have, that no one was ever prosecuted for a human rights
violation when the defendants had command responsibility over the
military and security forces.
Even mass violence with substantial evidence was denied, she
explained, giving the El Mozote massacre as one example. Karl read
the details of the massacre to the jury from the Truth Commission
report. In that massacre, the Atlactl Army Battalion brutally
exterminated an entire village of hundreds of men, women, and
children and subsequently burned the bodies. The massacre was widely
reported in the U. S. press. After the massacre at El Mozote and
another killing a group of 17 people in El Salvador, then-U. S.
Ambassador Hinton wrote in a cable which Karl read to the jury:
“While [Minister of Defense] Garcia talks a good game, I no longer
trust him or believe him.” Another cable from Ambassador Hinton
quoted Garcia as he called the El Mozote massacre a “novela” and
“pure Marxist propaganda devoid of foundation.” The Truth
Commission report described the evidence of the massacre and
Garcia’s denials that it had ever occurred. “If it were not for
the skeletons of the children,” Professor Karl said, “some
people would still be disputing whether a massacre took place.”
In closing her direct testimony, Professor Karl laid out many of the
ways that the defendants could have prevented the grave human rights
abuses that occurred under their commands. The list included: a
demand for immediate reports of all civilian deaths and detentions
(to reduce the risk of torture); clear written instructions that
officers who committed abuses would be removed so that commanders
would known their careers were on the line; inspection of the sites
of alleged abuses; the investigation of commanders under whom abuses
were reported; the protection of witnesses of grave abuses; and the
prosecution of abusers. After each missed opportunity, Stern would
ask whether Karl believed that the defendants had the practical
ability to take these measures. She always replied, “Yes.” Stern
then asked her the cumulative effect of Garcia’s and Vides
Casanova’s failure to take any of these actions. “In my
opinion,” she stated, looking directly at the defendants, “
because of that thousands and thousands of people died who did not
have to die, and thousands and thousands of people were tortured who
did not have to be tortured.”
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Cross Examination
Kurt Klaus’ cross-examination lasted much of the afternoon. His
initial focus was on the issue of transitions to democracy and
whether El Salvador was in a transition to democracy during the
period from 1979 to the 1990s. Professor Karl made clear that the
Salvadoran transition did not really begin until the 1992 peace
agreements. She stated that a true transition could not occur until
the security forces were disbanded and the military was purged of
human rights abusers, pursuant to the peace accords. She emphasized
that, while elections have occurred throughout Salvadoran history,
they were problematic prior to 1994 since a range of political
parties could not safely participate.
Professor Karl explained that political parties had to reveal their
lists of supporters and that this was unthinkable in the climate of
repression that pervaded El Salvador. Next, When Klaus pressed
Professor Karl on the impact of the Cold War on the region,
Professor Karl illuminated the complexities of the U. S. role in
Nicaragua from 1978 onward.
Klaus then inquired about the significance of the October 15, 1979
coup by junior military officers in response to growing repression
under General Romero. Professor Karl pointed out that both reformers
and hardliners in the military assumed that the military would
remain autonomous from civilian control. Klaus had Professor Karl
read the Proclamation of the junior officers which set forth their
program of agrarian reform, the end to human rights abuses and
corruption. While Klaus and Karl sparred over Karl’s conclusion
that El Salvador had one of the most extreme disparities of wealth
in Latin America, Professor Karl made it clear that the military
remained firmly in control of the new Revolutionary Junta. Despite
the presence of civilians in the government, Karl stressed again
that they “served at the pleasure of the military.” She also
said that the military faction that led the coup, under the
leadership of Colonel Majano and pushed for reforms was eventually
totally marginalized and then removed by defendant Garcia.
Klaus returned to a document in evidence written by Ambassador
Robert White. Professor Karl pointed out a pattern common to all U.
S. ambassadors in this period in which they all arrive in El
Salvador optimistic about the U. S. ability to influence events
there. However, as was evident from cables sent from each of the U.
S. ambassadors, they all leave confronted with a very different
reality. In that context, Karl emphasized that White’s early
assessment was overly optimistic. Further, while Karl agreed that
the main players in El Salvador were mostly as White had described,
she also emphasized that the “right wing extremists” that White
described as key were being directed from inside the Salvadoran
security forces. Klaus tried to press Karl on the amount of U. S.
aid to the country. Karl made clear that military aid did rise after
President Reagan took office in 1981, but also that the Salvadorans
clearly had trucks, communications equipment, and other material
from the U. S. which enabled command and control of troops in the
field.
Karl readily admitted that she had never interviewed Garcia in her
many trips to El Salvador to support her research. She said she
tried hard to get an interview with him; receiving a welcome laugh
from the jury she stated that she “apparently didn’t ask for the
right person.” In referring to her extensive testimony of the
“tanda” system of the Salvadoran military, she stated that one
instance in which the tanda did not act as a protector for its
members was the treatment of Majano and the other reformers who were
all forced out of the military. Majano had to flee El Salvador after
two assassination attempts against him and his family.
Klaus next turned to the role of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson.
Professor Karl was quite familiar with him as she had traveled with
him during his political campaign in El Salvador. He was involved in
death squad activity in the early 1980s, and Professor Karl stated,
is believed to have been the mastermind behind the assassination of
Archbishop Romero. An extensive examination focused on Majano’s
arrest of D’Aubuisson and 23 of his cohorts, all main death squad
and security force members in a farmhouse on the Finca San Luis in
May 1980. The house contained arms, supplies, false license plates,
ski masks, lists of backers and other equipment generally used by
the death squads. Majano was still laboring under the assumption
that if he could catch military officers with damning evidence of
extra-judicial killings and illegal operations that he would have
the support of other military commanders “to could cut off the
head of the apparatus that was operating primarily out of the
security forces and military.” When Col. Majano arrested them, put
them in jail and elicited testimony and confessions from some of
them as to their involvement in human rights abuses, defendant
Garcia released D’Abuisson and the other officers and changed
Majano’s military position to force him out.
Klaus next asked about the role of the guerrillas in El Salvador. He
asked Professor Karl “if the guerrillas acted with impunity.”
Professor Karl noted that the term impunity “refers to state
officials becoming the murderers. In other words, the organizations
“that are supposed to protect you are killing you.” Professor
Karl emphasized that the security forces are supposed to serve and
protect, and impunity exists when “the law breaks the law.” She
did say that guerrillas also acted outside the scope of the law,
especially as they grew and controlled territory. Some guerrilla
groups engaged in kidnappings to finance their operations or
targeted assassinations. She noted that the guerrillas so-called
final offensive in 1981 was neither final nor really an offensive. She then recounted
the evolution of the FMLN as a unified armed command. She even noted
that the FMLN received some of its weapons from corrupt Salvadoran
military who sold arms to them.
In testimony that recalled the U. S.’ unsuccessful strategy in
Vietnam, Professor Karl said that U. S. diplomats encouraged the
Salvadoran military to engage in “winning the hearts and minds”
of the civilian population. They understood that the military had to
halt the high level of state terror. Karl stressed her belief that
it would have been possible to prosecute and purge human rights
abusers from the military. Without this, however, the war for the
“hearts and minds” of the people would ultimately be
unsuccessful. In extraordinarily moving testimony, Professor Karl
described her interviews with young members of the guerrillas during
a trip to El Salvador. As she fluidly moved between Spanish and
English, she told the jury how she asked each young man why they
were with the guerrilla. None spoke of Marxist-Leninist theory, but
each stated: “they killed my mother;” “they killed my
father;” “they killed my grandmother;” “they killed my
brother.”
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Redirect
On redirect, Professor Karl emphasized that a country cannot make
the transition to democracy without the rule of law. The ideals of
the October
1979 were never fulfilled, and the defendants’ actions were
clearly inconsistent with those ideas as they failed to ensure that
“the people with guns are the law abiders.” She stated that the
“single most important thing to do to democratize El Salvador was
to lower the level of repression, and the single greatest violators
were inside the security forces.” Stern solicited testimony
regarding the fact that it would have been relatively easy for the
defendants to find out what their officers were doing. Professor
Karl emphasized that were only 16 field officers in the National
Guard when Vides Casanova was Director General. In conclusion, she
stated that no one was more powerful in the military than the
defendants when they were the respective Ministers of Defense.
Furthermore, U. S. Embassy officials clearly viewed the Minister of
Defense as the person to seek out to discuss persistent human rights
abuses.
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July 10th Testimony of Neris
Gonzalez
The plaintiffs rested their case today with one of the most
emotional testimonies in the case, as the third plaintiff, Neris
Gonzales, took the stand. Ms. Gonzales began by telling the jury
about the Salvadoran community where she was raised, San Nicolas
Lempa, an agricultural community of peasants who worked on cotton
and coffee plantations. Ms. Gonzalez grew up in a small house made
of bamboo with her 12 siblings. To get to school, she walked an hour
and a half each way. She became active in the church as a child and
later became a catechist, preparing the church and sacraments for
the local priest’s weekly visits and assisting with confirmations
and communions. She felt a strong connection to the other
communities in the area with whom her community shared church
activities. As a catechist, she met Archbishop Romero twice. Her
family also owned a small store which would lend products to the
workers until they got paid.
One day she went to the fields and saw that the peasants picking
cotton were only getting paid for half of what they had picked
because they could not read the scale on which the cotton was
weighed. She had studied through the ninth grade and decided to
begin a literacy program through the church. The program was
popular; many workers would come after the work day and learned to
count from one to a hundred. With the assistance of the church, Ms.
Gonzalez also began a program to train health care providers in
order to compensate for the lack of medical services in the
community. To help with the health program, Ms. Gonzalez used the
book “Where There is No Doctor”– a book of diagnoses and
treatments used in communities throughout the world that lack access
to basic medical assistance.
When plaintiffs’ lawyer Jim Green asked Ms. Gonzales what happened
in October 1979, she explained that it was the month of the coup, on
October 15. After the coup, she explained, the repression got worse. The
National Guard was constantly present in her community. They
harassed, threatened, and abducted and killed whole families. Her
house was under constant surveillance; the Guardsmen would come in
and ask her why she had a first aid kit and “Where There is No
Doctor?” As the repression worsened, Ms. Gonzalez called the
Archbishop, the only one to whom denunciations could be made.
Archbishop Romero would denounce the violence in his weekly homilies
which were heard throughout the country. In her community, where
there was no electricity, the people would gather around
battery-operated radios. One time when she called the Archbishop, he
told her “My child, let us have faith in God. God will take care
of these people and lead them to understand.” Ms. Gonzalez would
report the mutilated and disfigured cadavers, found more and more as
time went on, to the Legal Aid Office of the Archbishop. One day, a
close friend of Ms. Gonzales who also worked with the church was
taken from a bus at one of the many National Guard checkpoints. The
next day her decapitated body was found. Another friend was
similarly killed and left with the sign “This is the way
communists die.” Ms. Gonzalez told the jury she was so frightened
that she would sleep with her little brothers and sisters in her
arms, when she could sleep at all.
At noon on December 26, 1979, Ms. Gonzalez went to sell meat at the
market. As she was leaving she was captured by three National
Guardsmen and a civilian who accused her of being a subversive. The
women in the market yelled, “Why are you taking Neris?” She was
well-known and loved at the market, and she was eight months
pregnant at the time. Before she continued with her story, Ms.
Gonzalez paused and said, “I hope I have the strength to tell you,
ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what happened to me in the
National Guard post, after October 1979, when these men took over as
Minister of Defense and Director-General of the National Guard.”
Giving her testimony well into the afternoon, Ms. Gonzalez explained
how she was taken to the National Guard post where she was severely
tortured and repeatedly gang raped by successive groups of National
Guardsmen every night for over two weeks. The first night she was in
a main office with a telephone, which rang frequently. During her
weeks of captivity, Ms. Gonzalez was also forced to watch the
torture and execution of others, including a teenage boy. She was
interrogated about why she had taught peasants to count. After her
brutal and relentless weeks of torture, she was thrown with a group
of cadavers into a garbage dump. After she was found, she was nursed
back to health over a period of 6 months. During that time, her son
was born disfigured from the torture and died two months later. She
explained how much fear and terror existed in El Salvador, too much
to ever denounce what had happened. Archbishop Romero, the only
person to whom they could make denunciations, was assassinated in
March of 1980 after calling on the military to end the repression.
Later, Ms. Gonzales moved to Chicago and received treatment at the
Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture. In
Chicago, she is active in the church and works on issues of urban
ecology.
On cross examination, defense attorney Kurt Klaus asked Ms. Gonzalez
about her living children and her marital status. She explained that
she had been married and divorced before her capture, and that her
second husband, who was also the father of her unborn child at the
time of her capture, had also been disappeared. Klaus then
questioned Ms. Gonzalez about her involvement in the lawsuit and
whether she knew anyone who had ever received compensation for human
rights abuses from any group in El Salvador. She answered that she
knew of no such thing.
When asked on redirect about her purpose in becoming a plaintiff in
the lawsuit, she answered, “To tell the truth, to denounce what
happened to me, to tell of the torture. I have had this with me for
more than 20 years.” She ended her explanation to the jury saying,
“I want to tell you that this is the best offering I can give to
my son.”
In the afternoon, plaintiff’s put on their final witness, Glenn
Caddy, clinical and forensic psychologist and a specialist in
trauma. After explaining his credentials, he described the common
psychological effects suffered by torture survivors. He explained to
the jury that all of the plaintiffs suffered forms of post-traumatic
stress disorder and anxiety, among other long-term effects of their
torture. After his testimony and a brief cross-examination, the
plaintiffs rested their case. The jury was then dismissed.
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July 11th
Defendants' Opening
Statements
In his opening statement, which he had not delivered at the
beginning of the trial, defendants’ attorney Kurt Klaus
characterized his version of Salvadoran history and the events
relevant to the case. He began by telling the jury that the roots
and nature of conflict go back to its colonization by the Spanish.
At that time, the Spanish governor and the large landowners
controlled the country. By the end of the nineteenth century, after
El Salvador had gained independence, the country had become largely
a one-crop economy (coffee), and land had become increasingly
centralized in the hands of fewer families.
In the early twentieth century, Klaus described a revolt against
this inequitable system which ultimately was crushed. The landowners
realized that they could use the Army to accomplish this, and 30,000
people were exterminated, including much of the indigenous
population. Disparity kept growing between the landowners and
landless peasants and throughout mid-century, the labor movement and
peasant associations continued to organize. In contrast to Costa
Rica, Klaus stated, in El Salvador, no consensus was reached between
the “haves and the have-nots.” Klaus conceded that “you can
not have this kind of disparity without doing something about it.”
Elections were held in 1972; Napoleon Duarte won but was then forced
into exile. Another cycle of repression and military dictatorship
began. Eventually, in October, 1979, he told the jury, young
officers toppled military President Romero and threw out over forty
of the “worst” officers in the Army. They set forth their plan
for reform in a proclamation called the “Proclama.” They
appointed a junta of two military officers, Col. Gutierrez and Col.
Majano, and three civilians to run the country. Klaus noted that
defendant Garcia was appointed Minister of Defense and then
characterized Gutierrez as his superior. Klaus stated that “people
on the right” opposed the coup and remained active in the country
and in the Army. He noted further that great divisions existed in
the society as the communist insurgency began. The right-wing wanted
to crush the opposition. Echoing earlier testimony in the
plaintiffs’ case, he recounted their philosophy of “draining the
sea” which was aimed at eliminating any potential popular support
for the guerrillas.
Klaus then noted fundamental changes in the perspectives of the
Catholic Church. In particular, he described, a new church
philosophy that encouraged individuals to pursue their rights to
dignity in this life not merely wait for the afterlife. In one of
the consistent themes of his opening, Klaus again noted that the
oligarchy resented this change as a threat to their way of life and
“that was how problems broke out.”
Klaus noted that the years from 1979 to the 1990’s were a process
of transition from an oligarchy/military dictatorship to democracy.
He contested Professor Karl’s statement that the transition to
democracy had not really begun until after the Peace Agreement.
Klaus characterized Professor Karl to the jury as “a professor
writing a thesis, needing to come up with a thesis on history.”
Instead, he said his expert witness, former U. S. Ambassador Edwin
Corr, was more reliable as he “needed to give accurate accounts to
[the] government.” Klaus conceded that members of the death squads
operated within the military. He blamed Major D’Aubuisson for
planning coups and the assassination of Archbishop Romero. He even
noted that General Garcia’s Vice Minister, Nicolas Carranza, was
on the payroll of the CIA (making $90,000 dollars per year). He
noted that the Truth Commission attributed most of the abuses to
forces on the right, both within and outside the military.
Klaus urged the jury to assess whether the defendants had command
control over the people who perpetuated the acts against the
plaintiffs. He said that they would have to evaluate the weakness of
the command structure, including breaks in the chain of command. He
said “my clients did not have direct control over the people who
perpetuated the acts.” He continued that he would give examples of
what was really occurring in El Salvador – the bribery, the
selling of guns to the guerrillas, the disobeying and ignoring of
written orders, and the pursuit of individual campaigns against the
people, influenced by group ORDEN. He then blamed ORDEN for the
majority of the repression.
In concluding, Klaus noted, in the United States, “we have
certainty in our lives, and people follow laws.” He then referred
to the testimony of Glenn Caddy that one of the worst consequences
of torture is the feeling of “lack of certainty; the lack of plan
for the future because the person doesn’t know what is going to
happen.” Klaus analogized Caddy’s statement to the attitudes of
U. S. government officials during this period -- that the U. S.
wanted a reliable future for El Salvador because of the fears of the
spread of communism, the protection of U. S. corporate investments,
and the stability of the region. According to Klaus, from 1979
forward, El Salvador went through a long, painful process. Peace was
finally negotiated when it was clear that neither the military nor
the guerrillas could win. Today, El Salvador is a democracy, he
concluded, with the tragic horror of pain and suffering that people
went through to accomplish that goal.
Klaus then conducted his direct examination of General Garcia, and
plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jim Green, began his cross-examination.
Garcia’s testimony will be summarized when his testimony is
completed on Tuesday, July 16. The remaining two witnesses for the
defendants are Edwin Corr, a former U. S. Ambassador to El Salvador
and General Vides Casanova. The parties estimate that the case will
go to the jury on Thursday, July 18.
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Chris McKenna,
Outreach Coordinator
Center for Justice &
Accountability
870 Market St., Suite 684
San Francisco, CA 94102
tel: (415)
544-0444, x302
fax: (415) 544-0456
e-mail: cmckenna@cja.org
web site: www.cja. org
