Case Studies
Neris Gonzalez was a young mother of two. Deeply committed to her local Catholic church, she volunteered as a catechist and health worker. She could not have imagined how much she would be made to suffer for this.
The day after Christmas 1979, when she was eight months pregnant, four National Guardsmen abducted her from a market in the town of San Vincente. The Guardsmen detained her at their post for two weeks, where she was repeatedly beaten, tortured and raped. She was subjected to electric shocks all over her body and still carries scars from multiple cigarette burns. Her son, Daniel Ernesto, was born with serious injuries and died two months later in a hospital. Gonzalez does not remember giving birth to him. Why did this happen? “My crime,” she says, “is that I worked side by side with the church.” She remained in El Salvador for seventeen years, living through a civil war that saw her husband, along with thousands of others, “disappeared,” never to be seen or heard from again. In 1997, she came to the United States with her daughter and was granted asylum.
In 1979, El Salvador’s military dictatorship was mounting a brutal campaign of repression aimed at eliminating its enemies. Among the many civilian victims of this campaign were catechists and others working with the Catholic church, whose leader, Archbishop Oscar Romero, had attracted the government’s ire through his outspoken condemnation of the killings, and who would himself later be assassinated. Neris Gonzalez’s story is just one of many.
General Jose Guillermo Garcia was El Salvador’s Minister of Defense when Neris Gonzalez was abducted. He exercised command authority over all of the country’s military and security forces, including the National Guard. General Vides Casanova was Director-General of the National Guard and was thus directly in control of the Guardsmen who abducted Neris Gonzalez. Together with other military and civilian officials, the two of them allegedly planned and carried out the campaign of terror that shattered the lives of Gonzalez and so many other victims. One can only imagine Gonzalez’s surprise when she learned two years after arriving in America that the two generals were living in Florida, enjoying a leisurely retirement.
Gonzalez decided to take action and joined an ATCA suit against the two Generals. In July of 2002, after a lengthy trial at which numerous witnesses, including former U.S. ambassadors, testified, a District Court in Florida found that the generals bore “command responsibility” for the torture and other atrocities committed by Salvadoran troops against the plaintiffs, and ordered them to pay $54.6 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The Generals have appealed the judgment.
The money may never be collected. But for Gonzalez, this isn’t an issue. “I joined this case to send a message of hope and to motivate people everywhere to continue the struggle for justice. This verdict provides an example of what can be done.” For her, the important thing is knowing that the generals “were made responsible for their actions. And it was a renewal of my spirit and a moral renewal on a global level.”
In 1992, the American corporation Unocal entered into a joint venture with Burma’s military dictatorship (then called the SLORC, or State Law and Order Restoration Council) and a French corporation to construct and operate an oil pipeline running across the interior of the country to Thailand. According to Unocal, the project “brought significant benefits in health care, education and economic opportunity to more than 45,000 people” living in the path of the pipeline.
“John Doe I,” whose village lay directly in the path of Unocal’s pipeline, has a different story to tell (his name has been withheld in court proceedings to protect him from reprisals by the Burma government). John says that in 1992, SLORC soldiers allegedly on Unocal’s payroll ordered the villagers to move because their homes were in the way.
John says that while he couldn’t remain in his village, he refused to go where the soldiers had ordered him. Instead, he and his family moved to another nearby village, where they lived unnoticed for two years. But one day in 1994, while John was out fishing, soldiers ransacked the village, burning and looting. John’s wife, “Jane,” says that the soldiers recognized her and that one officer, enraged to find that the family had disobeyed the order to relocate, kicked Jane and her one-month-old baby into an open fire. She lost consciousness. When the soldiers left, John tells of coming home and finding his wife and daughter badly burned. They obeyed the soldiers and relocated to the new village, but were prevented by the soldiers from finding a doctor and the daughter died days afterwards from her wounds.
The villagers say that the reason the soldiers were so adamant about everyone relocating to the same village was that the pipeline needed a pool of captive labor. Every day, large numbers of villagers were allegedly rounded up and sent out to perform exhausting labor clearing roads, serving as porters, or cleaning the soldiers’ camps. The villagers say that those who refused to work, or who became too weak, were often killed. Others, they say, were beaten and tortured. Many of the women conscripted for work on the pipeline tell stories of being raped at knifepoint by soldiers as their families stood by helplessly and watched.
The villagers had little hope of having their stories heard in a Burma court. But in 1996, John, Jane and thirteen other villagers brought suit against Unocal in California under the Alien Tort Claims Act and California state law. They allege that Unocal aided and abetted SLORC in the commission of these crimes.
Unocal argues that it cannot be held accountable for the excesses of the government in whose country it happened to be working. The villagers, however, allege that Unocal not only knew what was going on, but was actually complicit in it. Burma’s military has an exceptionally bloody reputation, and routinely employs forced labor. Unocal nevertheless allegedly decided to hire the SLORC’s army to provide “security” for its operations, to clear a path for the pipeline, and to build all the necessary roads. While Unocal denies actually contracting for the soldiers’ services, it admits that the government provided battalions both to guard the pipeline project and help with the construction of required infrastructure. The degree to which Unocal directed the actions of those soldiers, and the question of whether they were actually on the corporation’s payroll, will be important issues if the case goes to trial.
The plaintiffs allege that Unocal’s officers had daily meetings with military commanders so that it could give them precise marching orders. Its executives and surveyors were touring the pipeline’s route using a network of helipads and roads allegedly carved out of the wilderness by a population of terrorized slave laborers. Far more damning, Unocal’s own consultant allegedly informed the company quite bluntly that the SLORC soldiers were employing forced labor and forced relocation to advance the pipeline project. The villagers also say they can produce rafts of internal communications between the corporation’s officers urging one another not to admit to the possibility that their pipeline was being built with the help of forced labor. One Unocal representative is alleged to have urged a colleague to argue that while slave labor may have been used “on behalf of” Unocal, it was never employed “by” it. In response to an inquiry by the City Counsel of New York in 1997, Unocal declared that “no human rights abuses have taken place” in the vicinity of the pipeline route.
Arguing that the plaintiffs had produced no evidence that implicates the corporation, Unocal tried to have the case thrown out of court. But a panel of three Ninth Circuit judges allowed the case to go forward, finding that there was significant evidence showing that Unocal may have provided “knowing practical assistance or encouragement that [had] a substantial effect on the perpetration of” the alleged acts of rape, murder, and use of forced labor. The full Ninth Circuit has since agreed to rehear the case. The Bush administration is asking the court to dismiss the case. It is arguing for a radical re-interpretation of the ATCA, saying that it does not grant victims the right to sue for abuses committed abroad.
May 14, 2003
