This month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained a retired Salvadoran military officer for participating in one of that country’s worst massacres.
According to the U.S. Department for Homeland Security, retired military officer Roberto Antonio Garay Saravia was arrested on April 4 in New Jersey “for aiding or participating in extrajudicial killings and for deliberately misrepresenting this information on his immigration application.”
Garay Saravia stands accused of participating in the El Mozote massacre, where the Salvadoran military killed nearly 1,000 civilians, about half of them minors, in 1981. He is set for deportation back to El Salvador.
For those involved in seeking justice for the victims, Garay Saravia’s arrest is an important step towards accountability.
“The United States has found proof of Garay Saravia's participation in a massacre of civilians, including the Mozote massacre,” David Morales, a lawyer with Cristosal, the Salvadoran organization that is representing the victims of the Mozote case, tells The Progressive.
“This shows that objective investigations can lead to the prosecution of these Salvadoran war criminals,” Morales explains.
According to Morales, Garay Saravia belonged to a unit that had participated in the massacre. The entire chain of command is implicated in the case, including Brigadier General
José Guillermo García who was serving as the Salvadoran minister of defense at the time.
In December 1981 soldiers with the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite military unit trained by the United States, arrived in the northeastern department of Morozán. Between 1,000 and 2,000 soldiers were deployed as part of the counter-insurgency effort called “Operation Rescue” or “Anvil and Hammer”—searching for alleged insurgent training camps in the area. But by the end of the operation nearly 1,000 civilians in the village of El Mozote were massacred and their homes burned.
The United Nations-backed Truth Commission issued its findings of these war crimes in March 1993. But the crimes remained unprosecuted for many years due to legislation passed by Salvadoran lawmakers weeks later that granted blanket amnesty for war crimes.
The amnesty law was overturned in 2016. Now, fourteen military officials face trial for human rights violations in a case reopened by the Salvadoran government. But prosecutors are racing against the clock since those who are facing charges are dying of old age.
“Three of [the accused] have died while the trial has progressed since it was reopened,” Morales says. “And many of the surviving victims have also died without seeing justice.”
“This shows that objective investigations can lead to the prosecution of these Salvadoran war criminals.”
“They have not been detained for the Mozote massacre,” he adds. “All the defendants have [been allowed] alternative measures, such as signing in each month in a court stating that they are still subjected or willing to go through the process, they cannot leave the country, they cannot approach the victims.”
Others accused of participating in the war crimes still remain free, as the courts in El Salvador have not yet ordered their arrests.
The Salvadoran case has also faced setbacks following the election of President Nayib Bukele in 2019. In 2020, with support from Bukele, the Salvadoran military blocked access to archive materials by the prosecuting judge. The following year, the judge overseeing the case was removed following a legal reform by the country’s legislative assembly. This resulted in further delays to the case.
But for those seeking justice, there is enough evidence to prosecute the men who were involved in the massacre. Morales explains, “We believe that there is enough evidence to go to the final judicial stage in this case.”
Garay Saravia’s arrest highlights the problem of accused war criminals fleeing to the United States. But since 2003, ex-military officials have increasingly faced deportation due a precedent-setting U.S. case.
Following the end of the internal armed conflicts in Central America many former high-ranking military officials accused of war crimes migrated to the United States. For Salvadoran officials, the 1993 amnesty meant that many former high-ranking officials were able to live peacefully in their adopted country.
Both former Defense Minister Guillermo García and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, the former head of the Salvadoran National Guard, had left El Salvador in the 1980s for Florida. But human rights advocates grew concerned that they were not facing charges for their crimes against humanity.
In 2002, the Center for Justice and Accountability brought a groundbreaking case against both Guillermo García and Vides Casanova on behalf of victims of torture. They also faced prosecution for their part in the murder of four women—three nuns and one layworker in the Catholic church—by death squads in December 1980.
While both men were convicted and eventually deported after years of appeals, the cases against Guillermo García and Vides Casanova set in motion the legal change that would block war criminals from settling in the United States.
“They’ve taken advantage of the migration side because they probably never should have been allowed to become permanent residents in the first place.”
“We were fortunate that they had never chosen to become U.S. citizens,” Carolyn Patty Blum, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of California Berkeley Human Rights Center who worked with the Center for Justice and Accountability, tells The Progressive. “They’ve taken advantage of the migration side because they probably never should have been allowed to become permanent residents in the first place.”
In 2004, Blum and the Center for Justice and Accountability were a part of efforts behind a provision in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 that blocked those accused of acts of torture or extrajudicial killings from legally entering or seeking asylum in the country. It was a bipartisan issue and was approved in December of that year.
Such efforts were further supported under the Obama Administration, Blum points out.
The Department of Homeland Security Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center was established in 2008 to investigate those accused of war crimes residing in the United States. According to ICE, there are at least 160 open investigations into suspected war criminals residing in the United States and more than 350 alleged war criminals and human rights violators have been blocked from entry.
Since the case against Guillermo García and Vides Casanova, many other former military personnel accused of human rights violations have been arrested and deported from the United States.
These cases include at least two former elite members of the Guatemalan Kaibiles, Gilberto Jordán and José Mardoqueo Ortiz Morales, who were deported to face trial for their part in the Dos Erres massacre in the 1980s. The trial against Jordán and Mardoqueo, as well as another ex-Kaibil Alfonso Vicente, who was deported from Belize, began in April 2023.
In November 2017, ex-colonel Inocente Orlando Montano Morales of El Salvador was extradited from the United States to Spain to face charges for his part in the massacre of five Spanish Jesuit priests in 1989. In 2020, Montano was sentenced to 133 years in prison for his part in these murders.
Guillermo García is also accused in the Mozote case, but the former defense minister continues to be protected by the Salvadoran state, David Morales points out.
“We have requested that the arrest of García be ordered for the Mozote massacres,” he says. “But up until today the courts that handle these cases have not given us an answer.”