On April 11, the New York Times reported on immigration proceedings against General José Guillermo García, former Minister of Defense of El Salvador, who in February was ordered to be deported for his involvement in human rights violations including the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero and the massacre of El Mozote:
In an unusually expansive and scalding 66-page decision, Judge Horn wrote that “these atrocities formed part of General García’s deliberate military policy as minister of defense.” He added that the general “fostered, and allowed to thrive, an institutional atmosphere in which the Salvadoran armed forces preyed upon defenseless civilians under the guise of fighting a war against communist subversives.”
In 2002, General García and General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, another former Defense Minister also living in Florida, were ordered by a jury to pay $56 million to three Salvadoran survivors of torture. The verdict was the result of an innovative civil suit brought by the Center for Justice and Accountability in 1999. Visit the CJA website for their reactions and analysis of the decision.
General Vides Casanova was also ordered to be deported in April 2013 for his involvement in human rights violations. Garcia and Vides Casanova are appealing the deportation rulings. They are the highest ranking officials to be brought to trial under a 2004 law that allows Department of Homeland Security lawyers to pursue human rights abusers for immigration violations.
“This is the first court that has ever found General García linked so directly to these massacres and these killings,” said Carolyn Patty Blum, senior legal adviser at the [Center for Justice and Accountability]. “It breaks new ground in terms of the depth the judge goes to articulate a set of criteria to apply to the things he did to participate in killing and torture and the protection of known human rights abusers.”