US Arrests One of the Army Officers Accused of the El Mozote Massacre

Friday, April 7, 2023
José Luis Sanz and Nelson Rauda Zablah

The US government issued a press release on Thursday informing that, on April 4, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Roberto Antonio Garay Saravia, a retired Colonel of El Salvador’s Army, for "assisting or participating in extrajudicial killings and for willfully misrepresenting this material fact in his immigration application." According to ICE, Garay Saravia —a US legal resident since 2014— hid his role in the El Mozote massacre, where nearly 1000 Salvadoran civilians were assassinated in December 1981. The investigation also links him with three other massacres perpetrated between 1981 and 1984, at the start of the 12-year civil war in El Salvador.

Garay Saravia was at the moment a second lieutenant —one of the lowest-ranked officials indicted in 2016 for the El Mozote crimes before a Salvadoran court. ICE’s statement said that Garay Saravia was a "section commander in the Atlacatl Battalion, a specialized counterinsurgency unit responsible for several major war crimes from El Mozote to the Jesuit priests' massacre in 1989. ICE didn’t mention the fact that the Atlacatl elite unit was trained and financed by the United States government, as part of its counterinsurgency policy in Central America.

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If convicted, a New Jersey judge could impose a jail sentence on Garay Saravia, but the most likely outcome is that he’s issued a deportation order, as happened with other Salvadoran military officers accused of war crimes. "This is not a trial about his role in El Mozote, but his indictment in an open case in El Salvador carries weight for the judge’s decision," said a source close to the investigation.

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El Salvador's Freedom

Once deported, Garay would recover his freedom: Salvadoran authorities have never issued a warrant against any of the officers accused of El Mozote. For nine years after the massacre authorities denied it ever happened, but Salvadoran justice opened a case in 1990 that led to the digging of the sites and the exhumation of hundreds of victims, mostly children until the process was halted by the Amnesty Law of 1993. Two decades later, with Amnesty deemed unconstitutional, the court of San Francisco Gotera reopened the case in 2016 but Jorge Guzmán, the judge who oversaw the procedure, never ordered any arrests.

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The El Mozote trial has been littered with legal and political obstacles for 42 years. Immediately after the massacre, the journalists who revealed faced brutal discrediting campaigns. Expert Terry Karl referred to it as a "sophisticated cover-up" by El Salvador’s government and the Reagan administration, who also hid that an American military advisor, Allen Bruce Hazelwood, knew about the operation as it happened, and was even in Morazán.

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202304/el_salvador/26798/US-Arrests-One-of-the-Army-Officers-Accused-of-the-El-Mozote-Massacre.htm