A jury in El Salvador has convicted three former senior military officers for their roles in the 1982 murders of four Dutch journalists, marking a historic moment in the country’s long struggle for justice over civil war-era atrocities.
On Tuesday, a five-woman jury in the northern city of Chalatenango found former Defence Minister Gen. José Guillermo García (91), former treasury police director Col. Francisco Morán (93), and former infantry brigade commander Col. Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena (85) guilty of murder.
Each received a 15-year prison sentence for their involvement in the ambush and killing of the journalists. The three men, all elderly and absent from the courtroom, were sentenced in absentia. García and Morán are currently under police guard at a private hospital in San Salvador, while Reyes Mena remains in the United States, with El Salvador seeking his extradition.
The victims—Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans ter Laag, and Joop Willemsen—were working for Dutch broadcaster IKON, reporting on El Salvador’s brutal civil war. They had joined leftist guerrillas to document the conflict from behind rebel lines. On March 17, 1982, the group was ambushed and killed by Salvadoran soldiers armed with assault rifles and machine guns.
A United Nations Truth Commission later concluded the murders were the result of a carefully orchestrated military ambush, planned by Reyes Mena with the knowledge of other high-ranking officials.
The case languished for decades, hindered by a post-war amnesty law that was only overturned in 2016. The prosecution was reopened in 2018, following years of pressure from victims’ families, the Dutch government, and the European Union.
The jury also condemned the Salvadoran state for its long delay in delivering justice and ordered President Nayib Bukele, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to issue a public apology to the victims’ families.
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp welcomed the verdict, calling it “an important moment in the fight against impunity and in the pursuit of justice for the four Dutch journalists and their next of kin”.
This is the first time a case from El Salvador’s civil war investigated by the UN has resulted in a conviction. Human rights advocates and relatives of other victims hope this sets a precedent for further prosecutions of wartime atrocities that left an estimated 75,000 civilians dead and thousands missing between 1980 and 1992.
Oscar Pérez, attorney for the victims’ families, stated, “We have clearly demonstrated the extent of the culpability of those charged. The entire organized power structure that influenced the political and military decisions resulting in the journalists’ deaths was involved.”
