Court Acquits Police Officers Accused of Extrajudicial Killings in El Salvador.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
Haunted still by decades of inaction on human rights abuses committed during its brutal civil war (1980-1992), El Salvador is also proving itself unable--or unwilling--to tackle new cases of lawlessness by state agents, this time in the context of a government-ordered crackdown on criminal street gangs.
Never has that been more apparent than on Sept. 22, when a judge in the city of Santa Tecla acquitted eight members of a special operations police unit--the Grupo de Reaccion Policial (GRP) --in connection with the shooting death of a young employee of a coffee-farm. The victim, 20-yearold Dennis Hernandez Martinez, was one of eight people killed in a March 2015 raid on a property called San Blas, near San Jose Villanueva in the department of La Libertad. Six suspected gang members and a teenage girl (the girlfriend of one of the gang members) also died.
Police described the events at San Blas as an enfrentamiento, a catch-all term meaning "engagement" or "shootout" that security forces use to describe any kind of violent encounter with gangs, known locally as maras or pandillas. But in an expose published three months later by the independent, award-winning news site El Faro, journalists Roberto Valencia, Oscar Martinez, and Daniel Valencia Caravantes told a very different story. Using forensics evidence, witness testimony, photos, and other materials, El Faro painted the picture of a commando-style ambush involving summary executions and evidence planting (NotiCen, Aug. 13, 2015).
The office of El Salvador's human rights ombudsman, the Procuradurfa para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (PDDH), looked into the matter as well, and in April 2016, backed El Faro's account. Among the more compelling pieces of evidence was the fact that only three of the 314 bullet casings found at the scene came from guns found near the victims' bodies. This was a police massacre, not a back-and-forth shootout, David Morales, then head of the PDDH, concluded.
Only then did the Fiscaha General de la Republica (FGR), the Salvadoran attorney general's office, finally decide to pursue the case. But rather than treat it as a massacre, prosecutors focused their case only on the death of Hernandez Martinez. That meant ignoring the other seven victims, including Sonia Guerrero, 16, who begged for her life before being shot in the mouth, according to Hernandez Martinez's mother, Consuelo, who wasn't in the room with the girl but was close enough to hear the events as...
Para continuar leyendo
Solicita tu pruebaCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
