On June 3, 2025, a court in rural El Salvador read the text of its historic verdict, for the first time holding high-ranking former military men accountable for the violence against civilians that characterized the country’s long and bloody armed conflict. The case involved the March 1982 killings of Dutch journalists Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen, alongside four others presumed to be Salvadoran guerrillas, though their identities remain unknown. The court found that the men were killed in an ambush planned by Colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena with knowledge of other military leaders, and sentenced retired Minister of Defense Colonel José Guillermo García, retired Colonel Francisco Morán, and retired Colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, to 15 years in prison. Further, the court ordered President Nayib Bukele, in his role as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, to issue a public apology to the victims’ families for the state’s role in delaying justice for decades.
This groundbreaking verdict comes in the midst of new and urgent concerns about violations of human rights in El Salvador, including widespread acts of repression against human rights defenders, including journalists. Several leaders have been arrested in recent months and are currently held as prisoners of conscience in El Salvador’s notorious prison system—the same system to which the United States government expelled hundreds of men, mostly Venezuelan nationals, in March 2025.
The violation of rights in El Salvador—then and now—is also inextricably linked to the role of the United States. During the war, the U.S. government served as a principal source of funding, training, and support for the Salvadoran military, which committed these crimes in the context of its counterinsurgency war against the FMLN guerrillas. Former Minister of Defense Guillermo García, in fact, based his assertion of innocence in the Dutch journalists case largely on the unequivocal support he claims to have received from the United States. However, UWCHR Director Angelina Godoy’s analysis of U.S. documents about the killings, and about García’s communications with U.S. officials throughout the conflict, was actually part of the evidence cited by the court in convicting him under the doctrine of command responsibility. In fact, the historical documents paint a dramatically different picture than what García claims: they show that García was repeatedly reprimanded by U.S. officials for atrocities committed by troops under his command, some of which he admitted; and yet, he took no discernible action to seriously investigate past crimes or prevent their repetition.
For this reason, UWCHR is proud to share the extracts from Dr. Godoy’s testimony, which draws on our Center’s fifteen years of engagement with historical documents pertaining to the conflict in El Salvador.