Jury in El Salvador Convicts 3 Ex-Officers in 1982 Killings of Dutch Journalists

New York Times

3 days ago

A jury in El Salvador convicted three former senior military officers of murder in the 1982 killings of four Dutch journalists on Tuesday, according to the Comunicándonos Foundation, a nonprofit group that has long pursued justice in the case.
The three officers — Gen. José Guillermo García, 91, a former defense minister; Col. Francisco Morán, 93, a former police director; and Col. Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85 — each received 15-year prison sentences after a trial that took about 10 hours.
The jury also condemned the government of El Salvador for delaying a resolution of the case for more than four decades. General García and Colonel Morán are in detention in El Salvador after being arrested in 2022, and Colonel Reyes Mena is in Virginia awaiting extradition, according to the Dutch government.
The four young Dutch journalists — Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Joop Willemsen and Hans ter Laag — were working for a now-defunct Dutch broadcaster, covering a brutal civil war that killed tens of thousands of people.
In Chalatenango, El Salvador, on March 17, 1982, they were traveling behind rebel lines with three guerrilla fighters. Soldiers from the Salvadoran army were waiting to ambush them and shot and killed the men, according to the Dutch government.
At the time, the Salvadoran army told the news media that the four journalists had died when guerrillas accompanying them opened fire on an army patrol. But a 1993 report by the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador concluded that the army had set up the ambush. The report also found that the killings were ordered by Colonel Reyes Mena, who had since moved to the United States.
'Reporters who went to the scene in Chalatenango Province north of the capital found bloody clothing and 30 spent M16 shells near the spot where associates of the four men said they had been dropped off at 5 p.m.,' The New York Times reported in 1982, adding that residents of nearby villages had said they heard 20 minutes of gunfire.
The Dutch journalists had been shot repeatedly at short range, the Times report said.
The killings were a major story in the Netherlands, fueling widespread outrage. In the decades since, the Dutch government and organizations in El Salvador have continued to push for justice in the case.
In a blog post before the trial on a Dutch government website, Arjen van den Berg, the country's ambassador to Costa Rica and El Salvador, said he remembered the atmosphere in the Netherlands at the time. People were angry, he said, 'partly because these men were just doing their jobs, but partly also because it was unimaginable for Dutch people that a government would kill journalists in cold blood.'
Dutch officials expressed relief and gratitude for the sentence. 'This is an important moment in the fight against impunity and in the pursuit of justice for the four Dutch journalists and their next of kin,' Caspar Veldkamp, the outgoing Dutch minister of foreign affairs, wrote on social media.