THE MURDER 19 years ago of six Jesuit priests by a US-trained army unit was the turning point in El Salvador's long civil war, an atrocity so grave that it helped force an end to the fighting.
But the soldiers and officers convicted or implicated in the killings are free under an amnesty law that is receiving new attention thanks to election politics and a potentially landmark court case in Spain. Relatives of the priests, who were killed along with their housekeeper and her daughter, joined two human rights organisations in filing a suit in Madrid yesterday against the generals, colonels and soldiers blamed for the killings.
The plaintiffs are invoking the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which Spanish courts have championed, that allows a case of an egregious human rights violation to be heard in a country even if the acts did not take place there and the defendants do not reside there.
Human rights activists in the Americas and Europe said they hope the Jesuit complaint can be used to fight impunity and bring justice to the victims' relatives by joining a procession of cases passing through Spanish courts that have forced Latin America to confront its violent past. These include suits against Guatemalan military officers accused in the massacre of indigenous citizens and figures in Argentina's "dirty war" against left-wing dissidents.
The war in El Salvador between the right-wing US-backed government and left-wing guerrillas formally ended in 1992. A national truth commission, as well as several international investigations, established that top army officers had ordered and then covered up the killings of the priests, who the military accused of supporting the guerrillas.
Five soldiers and four officers were tried and convicted for their roles in the case - none higher in rank than a colonel - but all were released in 1993 under the amnesty law. None of the top military was prosecuted.
The suit names as defendants Gen René Emilio Ponce, the now retired former defence minister, and other senior officers. It also names Alfredo Cristiani, the wartime president of El Salvador, who is accused of complicity in the cover-up, said attorney Almudena Bernabeu of the San Francisco-based Centre for Justice and Accountability, one of the two organisations representing the priests' relatives.
The other organisation is the Spanish Human Rights Association. Once the complaint is filed, a Spanish judge will decide whether the case will proceed.
Carlos Martin-Baro, brother of slain priest Ignacio Martin-Baro, said he hoped the pursuit of justice could help El Salvador to emerge from its current "tragic and violent reality", which many people believe is a legacy of the war and its unresolved divisions. "Amnesty laws in a given moment might be used to normalise civilian life, but they don't allow the wounds to close," Martin-Baro, a 67-year-old English teacher, said by telephone from Madrid.
In El Salvador, the amnesty law has become a burning topic in the campaign running up to presidential elections in March. Ponce, the retired general, led thousands of army veterans on a march through San Salvador two months ago to demand that the amnesty law remain in force. Repealing it smacked of "vengeance", Ponce said, and "far from contributing to reconciliation, [it] will only deepen the political polarisation we are living in our country".
The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, the one-time guerrilla movement that is now a political party, has suggested in its electoral platform that the amnesty might be ended.
But the party's candidate, Mauricio Funes, recently told an interviewer that he would not touch the law because to do so would "open wounds" and "create a climate of ungovernability". Funes is leading in opinion polls, besting the candidate from Arena, the right-wing party that has ruled since the last years of the war. - ( LA Times-Washington Postservice)