A jury in El Salvador sentenced three retired high-ranking military officers to 15 years in prison for the murder of four Dutch journalists in 1982, one of the highest profile cases of the Central American nation’s civil war.
The three were charged on Tuesday for the killings of journalists Koos Joster, Jan Kuiper Joop, Johannes Jan Wilemsen and Hans ter Laag, who were reporting for IKON Television during a 1982 military ambush on a group of former Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas – some of whom were armed.
A UN truth commission 11 years later found the ambush was “deliberately planned to surprise and kill the journalists.”
The trial was closed and details about the defendants’ pleas and arguments were not made public.
El Salvador’s civil war stretched from 1980 to 1992, pitting leftist guerrillas against the US-backed Salvadoran army and leaving 75,000 people dead and 8,000 more missing.
Former Defense Minister General Jose Guillermo Garcia was sentenced by a jury in the northern town of Chalatenango, alongside two colonels: former Treasury Police chief Francisco Moran and former infantry brigade commander Mario Reyes.
All three – respectively aged 91, 93 and 85 – were sentenced in absentia. Garcia and Moran are in hospital under custody and Reyes currently lives in the United States though El Salvador is in the process of seeking his return.
“Truth and justice have prevailed, we have won,” Oscar Perez, a representative of the Comunicandonos Foundation that represents some of the relatives, told reporters. “The victims are the focus now; not the perpetrators.”
Prosecutors had requested the 15-year sentence, taking into account the military officers’ age and health conditions.
The jury also issued a civil condemnation to the Salvadoran state over the delay in delivering justice, a symbolic measure that obliges the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, President Nayib Bukele, to publicly ask for forgiveness from the victims’ families.