The trial is of great importance for Salvadoran reconciliation. It is also important for the global push to end impunity and bring war crime prosecutions to the doorstep of the highest-ranking officials. For one of the accused in this case is a former Salvadoran Defense Minister, Jose Guillermo García. He is a powerful figure who had been granted asylum and subsequent permanent residence in the United States, only to have it revoked in 2015 because of his command responsibility in relation to the war crimes committed in El Salvador, as the U.S. Immigration Court put it (the first instance decision here, the appeals decision here). He is joined in the box for the accused by the former Chief of Joint Staff of Salvadoran Army, General Rafael Flores Lima; the former Commander of the Airforce, General Juan Rafael Bastillo Toledo; the former Vice-Minister of Defence, Francisco Adolfo Castillo; and a number of others who were, at the time of the crime, mid-ranking officers, but have subsequently risen to the ranks of colonels and generals.
There is not much information as to what is actually happening in the courtroom. The trial is taking place some four-hour drive from the capital, San Salvador, through the serpentine roads of the Salvadoran countryside often infested with gang violence (El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world). Foreign governments and international organizations didn’t precisely race to shower local and international NGOs with funds to monitor this historic process. Public information about the trial is only circumstantial and rarely focused on legal issues. When there is some information, it is mostly in Spanish. This (not so) short entry is supposed to bring this case to some more attention of international criminal lawyers.
The El Mozote Trial is a purely domestic process tried before an ordinary, first instance, territorially moj database competent criminal court in a remote North-Eastern Morazán Department of El Salvador. There are no specialized chambers, internationalized courts or international tribunals there. There is not even a state prosecutor in the lead role. The prosecution is conducted by private prosecutors instead of the Attorney General Office.
This is by no means a unique situation. In fact, these kind of prosecutions for gross human rights violations are fairly common (and successful) in Latin America. There are, however, some peculiarities when it comes to the justice system in El Salvador that make this state of affairs particularly bothersome.
First, there is nothing ordinary in the “ordinary workload” of a Salvadoran judge. El Salvador’s extraordinary murder rate has already been mentioned. Add to this systemic inefficiency of the justice system, and one gets a staggering backlog of unresolved cases. As a result, the conviction rate in El Salvador is extremely low – some estimate it at only 5%. At this point, one can only make a wild-guess as to how many cases, beside the El Mozote Massacre, the trial judge has in his docket. The fact that this is the nation’s (and by extension Judge Urquilla’s) first war crimes trial, makes it logical to assume that he could use some help both by relieving his docket and by providing him with some expert assistance. The former most certainly did not happen. The latter did, but only thanks to private initiatives through two amici curiae submissions – the first by the Due Process of Law Foundation (DPLF) and the other by the American University’s Academy for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (both are available only in Spanish).