Salvadoran court convicts 3 former army officers in the 1982 killing of 4 Dutch journalists

SAN SALVADOR: Three former Salvadoran military officers were convicted by a five-person jury late Tuesday for the 1982 killings of four Dutch journalists during the Central American nation's civil war. They received 15-year prison sentences.

A jury made up of five women convicted the three men of murder in a lightning trial that began Tuesday morning in the northern city of Chalatenango, said Oscar Perez, lawyer for the Foundation Comunicandonos that represented the victims' families. Perez said prosecutors had requested minimum 15-year prison sentences for all three.

Convicted were former Defence Minister Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia, 91, former treasury police director Col. Francisco Moran, 93, and Col. Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85, who was the former army commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade in Chalatenango.

Garcia and Moran are under police guard at a private hospital in San Salvador, while Reyes Mena lives in the United States. In March, El Salvador's Supreme Court ordered that the extradition process be started to bring him back.

Perez said that in addition to the convictions of the former high-ranking officers, the judge condemned the government for the delayed justice and ordered the commander in chief of the armed forces, President Nayib Bukele, to issue a public apology to the victims.

The Dutch TV journalists - Jan Kuiper, Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemson - had linked up with leftist rebels and planned to spend several days behind rebel lines reporting. But Salvadoran soldiers armed with assault rifles and machine guns ambushed them and the guerrillas.

Garcia was deported from the US in 2016, after a US judge declared him responsible for serious human rights violations during the early years of the war between the military and the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas.

The prosecution of the men was reopened in 2018 after the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a general amnesty passed following the 1980-1992 war.

It moved slowly, but in March 2022, relatives of the victims and representatives of the Dutch government and European Union demanded that those responsible for killing Jan Kuiper, Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemson be tried.

The United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, which was set up as part of a U.N.-brokered peace agreement in 1992, concluded there was clear evidence that the killings were the result of an ambush set up by Reyes Mena with the knowledge of other officials, based on an intelligence report that alerted of the journalists' presence.

Other members of the military, including Gen. Rafael Flores Lima and Sgt. Mario Canizales Espinoza were also accused of involvement, but died. Canizales allegedly led the patrol that carried out the massacre of the journalists.

Juan Carlos Sanchez, of the nongovernmental organization Mesa Contra la Impunidad, in comments to journalists, called the trial a "transcendental step that the victims have waited 40 years for."

An estimated 75,000 civilians were killed during El Salvador's civil war, mostly by US-backed government security forces.