A former defense minister and two colonels went on trial in El Salvador Tuesday for the killings of four Dutch journalists 43 years ago, giving relatives hopes of finally seeing justice.
Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen were killed in 1982 while filming a television documentary during El Salvador’s civil war.
They worked for IKON TV, a Dutch channel founded by several churches.
The accused are General Jose Guillermo Garcia, 91, former police colonel Francisco Antonio Moran, 93, and ex-infantry brigade commander Mario Reyes Mena, 85.
None of them were in court for the hearing.
In 1993, a UN-sponsored Truth Commission found the journalists had walked into an ambush planned by Reyes, who lives in the United States, and with the knowledge of other officers.
The Salvadoran Supreme Court approved an extradition request for Reyes in March, but there has been no progress so far.
Garcia and Moran are under police surveillance in a private hospital in San Salvador.
The hearing in the northern city of Chalatenango, which was closed to media, was expected to conclude by Wednesday with a verdict from a five-member jury.
If convicted, the defendants face prison sentences of up to 30 years.
The NGOs Fundacion Comunicandonos and the Salvadoran Association for Human Rights hailed the trial as a “decisive step” in the search for truth and justice.
“We trust that this trial sets a historic precedent in the fight against impunity,” they said in a joint statement.
The Netherlands’ Costa Rica-based ambassador to Central America, Arjen van den Berg, was in court.
“Justice is at work,” he told AFP.
The case remained unresolved for decades after the presiding judge received threats in 1988, prompting her to seek refuge in Canada.
It was reopened in 2018 after the Supreme Court declared an amnesty law for civil war crimes unconstitutional, but relatives of the victims still had to wait years for the main hearing.
Evidence such as a statement from a former US military attache and a military expert’s report “directly points” to the defendants’ responsibility, said lawyer Pedro Cruz, who represents the victims’ families.
More than 75,000 people were killed in El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war pitting the military against leftist guerrillas.
Garcia led the Armed Forces from 1979 to 1983, when the worst massacres perpetrated by the military took place.
