El Salvador: Impunity Prevails in Human Rights Cases

On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was killed by a single bullet to the chest while performing mass at a chapel at the Divine Providence cancer hospital. His murder is perhaps the most dramatic example of the impunity with which the military and death squads in El Salvador carry out their crimes. Although the assassination deprived the Salvadoran people of a venerated leader, and despite repeated government promises that the killers would be discovered and punished, no arrests were ever made and no investigation completed. Even more importantly, evidence of official involvement in the murder and coverup has yet to be probed seriously. Ten years after the assassination, there is little prospect that the killers will ever be prosecuted or punished.

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Despite a decade of promises by government officials to bring to justice those responsible for gross violations of human rights in El Salvador, the impunity of military officers and death squads members remains intact. Although thousands of cases of political killings, torture, and disappearances of civilians at the hands of government forces have been documented, to date, no officer has been convicted of a politically motivated human rights abuse in El Salvador.1 Six officers have been charged in connection with two recent massacres (see below, Massacre at San Francisco and Slayings of Jesuits, Their Cook, and Her Daughter), but have yet to be tried. The following is a status report on nine human rights cases in which prosecutions are still pending. Despite their particular visibility and significance both internationally and within El Salvador, each case is a story of the denial of justice. The way in which each case has unraveled -- investigations never completed or never initiated, trials that never occur, the persecution of witnesses or judicial officials -- sheds light on the impunity of the armed forces and death squads which allows such gross abuses to continue.
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