Virginia Judge Rejects Deportation of Salvadoran Colonel Tied to El Mozote Massacre
Fred Ramos
Friday, September 29, 2023
Roman Gressier
This Monday, September 25, a Virginia immigration judge ruled to not deport retired Salvadoran Colonel Roberto Antonio Garay Saravia, arrested in April for his alleged involvement in the El Mozote massacre, in which Salvadoran commandos from the Atlacatl Battalion executed nearly 1,000 civilians amid a scorched-earth campaign in December 1981 in the department of Morazán.
Garay Saravia has legally resided in the United States since 2014 and is the first and only member of the Salvadoran military to be arrested explicitly for his ties to the massacre. According to army records, he served as commander of one of four sections of the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite squadron financed and trained by the United States. He was arrested following a joint two-year investigation by the human rights and war crimes units of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). U.S. investigators also tie the colonel to other massacres of civilians committed by the Salvadoran Army between 1981 and 1984 during the civil war, like La Quesera and El Calabozo, but the removal proceedings against Garay Saravia focused on the crimes at El Mozote.
Judge Brian T. Palmer conceded that Atlacatl participated in “scorched earth” campaigns. “The Court finds ample evidence in the record that noncombatant civilians were deliberately killed by Atlacati Battalion soldiers,” he wrote in his decision. He also acknowledged that Atlacatl participated in El Mozote, that Garay Saravia participated in “Operation Rescate,” the military operation in which the massacre occurred, and that the officer “was assigned as a Section Leader, in some capacity, within the Battalion.”
But at the same time he dismissed the key portion of the testimony of expert witness Terry Karl, a Stanford University investigator and specialist on the Salvadoran civil war. Karl asserted during the hearings that Garay Saravia “incited, assisted, or otherwise participated” in the massacres mentioned in the deportation proceedings.
. . .
Karl also testified in April 2021, during the ongoing trial for the El Mozote massacre in a court in Morazán, on the Army hierarchy involved in the massacre and the presence of a U.S. military advisor, Allen Bruce Hazelwood, in Morazán during the murders. The academic argues that a pact of silence among military officers has obstructed any courtroom testimony from within the Salvadoran Armed Forces.
More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202309/el_salvador/27075/virginia-judge-rejects-deportation-of-salvadoran-colonel-tied-to-el-mozote-massacre
~ ~ ~
Colonel Roberto Antonio Garay Saravia
The article indicates this American official was present during the massacre of the citizens.
- click for images of Allen Bruce Hazelwood US Army advisor -
https://tinyurl.com/y99hknpj
https://tinyurl.com/3js28bkr
https://tinyurl.com/bd5y77d8
= new reply since forum marked as read
29 April 2021 by El Faro
- click for image of The Atlacatl Battalion during its 1992 disbandment. Photo: Giuseppe Dezza -
https://tinyurl.com/2pn9axdv
A United States military advisor, Sergeant Major Allen Bruce Hazelwood, was on location, and on duty, in December of 1981 as Salvadoran soldiers carried out the El Mozote massacre, slaughtering almost a thousand civilians.
This groundbreaking revelation was the big takeaway from the expert testimony of Stanford University political scientist Terry Karl during pretrial hearings in El Salvador on Monday, April 26. The news of Hazelwood’s presence — along with Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, commander of the Atlacatl Battalion — at the scene of the massacre offers new insight into the extent of the U.S. role, as well as what Karl calls a “sophisticated cover-up” on the part of the Reagan administration and Salvadoran civil-military junta.
It also rekindles the debate about the United States responsibility in the Salvadoran armed conflict, as well as the need for both governments to fully declassify internal documents on the massacre and other war crimes, which they have withheld for four decades.
“Had [Hazelwood’s presence at El Mozote] come to light at the time, it would have meant cutting off United States aid,” said Karl. She added: “The participation of an advisor in wartime activities is against our laws, and it was illegal at the time.”
The El Mozote massacre was the deadliest war crime of the Salvadoran civil war. Between December 11 and 13 of 1981, the Salvadoran Army deployed almost an entire elite battalion to El Mozote and six nearby villages in the Morazán department, killing 978 unarmed civilians. Most of them, 533, were children. 477 of these were under 12 years old, and 248 under six.
For years the governments of El Salvador and the United States denied that the massacre had occurred. Later, they questioned the identities of the victims in suggesting they were guerrillas. The two journalists who simultaneously revealed the massacre, in the New York Times and Washington Post, were Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto, who then faced swift backlash for their work. By 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights pronounced the Salvadoran state guilty of the crime.
More:
https://www.cadtm.org/El-Salvador-Groundbreaking-Insights-into-U-S-Cover-Up-of-El-Mozote-Massacre
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
El Mozote: 40 years after the worst military massacre in the Americas, victims still calling for justice
Despite decades of institutional silence, a judge continues to fight to bring to trial those responsible for killing nearly 1,000 peasants in El Salvador in December 1981
- click for image -
https://tinyurl.com/336rb88n
CARLOS S. MALDONADO
Mexico - DEC 16, 2021 - 11:24 EST
The day they arrived, the troops promised to deliver food supplies to this desperately poor region of El Salvador. Instead, they gathered the villagers onto an area of a wasteland and massacred them. Between December 10 and 12, 1981, the screams mixed with the howls of dogs near El Mozote.
Amadeo Martínez Sánchez, 49, lost 25 family members. His mother and three siblings aged one, five and seven, were among those who had their lives cut short at the hands of soldiers from the Atlácatl battalion of the Salvadoran army, many of whom had trained at the notorious School of the Americas (some of whose graduates were also involved in another high-profile killing in El Salvador, the assassination of six Jesuit priests in 1989). “When we were able to get close we saw that the pigs were eating the corpses, the chickens were pecking at them, so we put the remains in hammocks and blankets and buried them all in a pit,” recalls Martínez.
Of all the horrors that El Salvador has suffered, the El Mozote massacre is perhaps the most terrible of all: at least 986 people were killed (552 children and 434 adults, including 12 pregnant women) in three days of bloodletting. Forty years have passed and neither Martínez nor the rest of the survivors have received justice or reparations. “We are very disappointed,” he says, resurfacing memories of his nine-year-old self witnessing the worst massacre ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.
Masacre El Mozote
- click for image -
https://tinyurl.com/3f2tkjky
Coffins with the remains of two of the victims of El Mozote, at a burial service in December 2016.
JOSE CABEZAS
Amadeo Martínez was preparing to attend a mass organized as a tribute to the victims, along with his neighbors. The mass is held yearly in La Joya, a hamlet set across the gentle mountains of the eastern part of El Salvador, where there is a humble shrine made from sticks and corrugated iron sheets. “Nobody wanted to help us,” he remembers. In order to erect the monument for the victims, he had to donate the land himself.
On December 9, 1981, his father José Santos Sánchez arrived at home looking upset. He said he had heard rumors that the military would soon deploy to the area, and urged his wife María Inés Martínez to leave the house. El Salvador was bleeding out from a civil war between the Army and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas that would ultimately leave at least 75,000 victims. The military had orders to wipe out alleged “communists” trying to seize power in the country, and peasants were among the main targets. Many were accused of providing protection to the insurgency, which had a strong presence in the area.
Amadeo Martínez’s family left their home in La Joya and went to another nearby hamlet. A neighbor, Jacinto Sánchez, gave them shelter, but on the condition that only Amadeo’s parents and younger siblings would sleep in his house. He and his older brother had to stay outside. In the early hours of December 10 they tried to move on again, but his mother objected: she wanted to return home, claiming that they had nothing to hide. She stayed behind with her younger children, while the older siblings and the father went into hiding.
More:
https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-12-16/el-mozote-40-years-after-the-worst-military-massacre-in-the-americas-victims-still-calling-for-justice.html
. . .
Massacre
In his 1994 book, The Massacre at El Mozote, American journalist Mark Danner compiled various reports in order to reconstruct an account of the massacre:
December 10
On the afternoon of December 10, 1981, units of the Salvadoran Army's Atlácatl Battalion, which was created in 1980 at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas,[6] arrived at the remote village of El Mozote after a clash with guerrillas in the vicinity.[7] The Atlácatl was a "rapid deployment infantry battalion" specially trained for counter-insurgency warfare. It was the first unit of its kind in the Salvadoran armed forces and was trained by United States military advisors.[8] Its mission, Operación Rescate ("Operation Rescue" ), was to eliminate the rebel presence in a small region of northern Morazán where the FMLN had two camps and a training centre.
El Mozote consisted of about 20 houses on open ground around a square. Facing onto the square was a church and, behind it, was a small building which was known as "the convent", the priest used it to change into his vestments when he came to the village to celebrate Mass. Near the village was a small schoolhouse.
Upon their arrival in the village, the soldiers discovered that, in addition to being filled with its residents, the village was also filled with campesinos who had fled from the surrounding area and sought refuge in it. The soldiers ordered everyone to leave their houses and go into the square. They made people lie face down and searched them and questioned them about the guerrillas. They then ordered the villagers to lock themselves in their houses until the next day and warned them that anyone who came out would be shot.[7] The soldiers remained in the village during the night.
December 11 and 12
Early the next morning, the soldiers reassembled the entire village in the square. They separated the men from the women and children, divided them into separate groups and locked them in the church, the convent, and various houses.[9]
During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture, and execute the men in several locations.[10] Around noon, they began taking the women and older girls in groups, separating them from their children and murdering them with machine guns after raping them.[11] Girls as young as 10 were raped, and soldiers were reportedly heard bragging about how they especially liked the 12-year-old girls.[12] Finally, they killed the children, at first by slitting their throats, and later by hanging them from trees; one child killed in this manner was reportedly two years old.[13] After killing the entire population, the soldiers set fire to the buildings.
The soldiers remained in El Mozote that night but, the next day, went to the village of Los Toriles and carried out a further massacre. Men, women, and children were taken from their homes, lined up, robbed, and shot, and their homes then set ablaze.[14]
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre
- click for more images -
https://tinyurl.com/rwftxtk9
Pictures can speak more loudly than words.