Lawsuit in US targets former Salvadoran colonel in 1982 killings of Dutch journalists
CENTERVILLE, Va. — The brother of a Dutch journalist who covered El Salvador’s civil war, murdered in 1982, has filed a lawsuit against a former Salvadoran military officer who lived in the suburbs of northern Virginia for decades and is accused of orchestrating the killing.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the US court in Alexandria, he is seeking unspecified monetary damages against Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena and a declaration that he is responsible for the murder of Jan Kuiper and three other Dutch journalists.
Reyes Mena, now 85, was a colonel who commanded El Salvador’s Fourth Infantry Brigade. That unit, and Reyes Mena in particular, was found responsible for the journalists’ deaths by a United Nations Truth Commission, which was established in 1992 as part of the peace deal that ended El Salvador’s civil war.
An estimated 75,000 civilians were killed during El Salvador’s civil war, mostly at the hands of US-backed security forces.
“The murder of Dutch journalists, which was identified by the UN Truth Commission as one of the most emblematic crimes committed during the civil war, demonstrated the brutality with which Salvadoran security forces attempted to suppress national and international independent media in El Salvador,” the lawyers said . wrote in their complaint.
Kuiper and three other Dutch television journalists – Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen – were ambushed as they tried to travel to territory controlled by the left-wing guerrilla group fighting Salvadoran security forces. According to the truth commission, the killings took place near the El Paraíso military base commanded by Reyes Mena, who ordered the ambush.
Kuiper’s family and others who have tried to bring the journalists’ killers to justice have been thwarted for decades. Shortly after the truth commission released its report, the Salvadoran government passed an amnesty law that protected Reyes Mena and other military officers from prosecution.
But El Salvador’s Supreme Court ruled the amnesty law unconstitutional in 2016. a judge ordered Reyes Mena’s arrest and others, including former Defense Secretary General José Guillermo García and Colonel Francisco Antonio Morán, former director of the now-defunct Treasury Police, in connection with the killing of the journalists.
According to the lawsuit, Reyes Mena ended his trip to El Salvador when the arrest warrants were issued. According to the lawsuit, there is no indication that Reyes Mena will be extradited, even though a notice requesting his arrest was placed with Interpol.
The Salvadoran embassy referred questions about efforts to extradite Reyes Mena to the country’s legal system, which said a formal public information request needed to be filed. The U.S. State Department did not respond Friday to an email seeking comment on Reyes Mena’s extradition status.
At Reyes Mena’s Centerville townhouse Thursday, a woman who identified herself as his wife declined to comment and said she would pass a reporter’s request for comment on to their attorney, whom she did not identify.
The Center for Justice and Accountability, a nonprofit legal group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Kuiper’s brother, Gert Kuiper, has filed multiple cases over the years against individuals accused of foreign war crimes under U.S. laws such as the Torture Victim Protection Act.
In 2019, an Alexandria courthouse jury found a Northern Virginia man who once served as a colonel in the Somali army during dictator Siad Barre’s regime responsible for torturing a Somali man in the 1980s. The jury awarded damages of $500,000. It also won one A $21 million default judgment against a former Somali defense minister and Prime Minister Mohamed Ali Samantar.
Other efforts to hold foreign officials accountable have failed. Earlier this year, a judge in Alexandria spoke has filed a series of civil lawsuits against a Libyan military commanderKhalifa Hifter, who formerly lived in Virginia and was accused of murdering innocent civilians during that country’s civil war. The Hifter lawsuits were not brought by the Center for Justice and Accountability.