By ANDREW SELSKY Associated Press
It was 1982, the height of the civil war in El Salvador. Four Dutch TV journalists had linked up with leftist rebels near the town of El Paraiso, which has an army base on its outskirts.
Planning to spend several days behind rebel lines, the newsmen hoisted rucksacks onto their backs and, carrying their recording gear, walked single-file down a narrow dirt trail.
They had only minutes to live. Lying in wait, Salvadoran soldiers armed with assault rifles and machine guns were ready to spring an ambush.
"They were sitting ducks. The military waited for them and basically executed them," said Thomas Buergenthal, an American who was part of the three-member United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, set up as part of a U.N.-brokered peace agreement in 1992.
In 1993, the commission's report on wartime human rights violations concluded that the ambush was set up to kill the journalists, and was ordered by Col. Mario Reyes Mena, a brigade commander.
Calls are now mounting in the Netherlands for Reyes Mena and others responsible for the killings to be brought to justice after a documentary shown on Dutch TV cast a spotlight on the never-prosecuted slayings. The investigative piece, aptly titled "In Cold Blood," revealed that Reyes Mena had been living for years in relative obscurity in the United States.
"It is very much in the interest of the Dutch government to bring those responsible for the deaths of the four journalists to justice," the Dutch foreign and justice ministers told lawmakers six weeks after the documentary aired. "Not only because it concerns four Dutch citizens who were shot dead, but also because it concerns journalists, who have an indispensable task in a democratic constitutional state."
"The government will make every effort to achieve this result," the ministers said.
Reyes Mena, now 79, lives in a Washington suburb. A legal resident of the United States since at least 1987, he is no longer shielded by a 1993 amnesty law that protected the military, paramilitary groups and guerrilla fighters from prosecution for human right abuses during the 12-year war. The Salvadoran Supreme Court declared the amnesty unconstitutional in 2016, though the country's legislature is now considering granting another one.
Even before the Dutch documentary aired in September, the attorney general's office in El Salvador had begun investigating possible criminal charges against Reyes Mena and Francisco Antonio Moran, the former head of the Salvadoran secret police who was also named in the U.N. report. The prosecutors were acting on a criminal complaint filed in March 2018 by lawyers for Gert Kuiper, a brother of one of the slain journalists, said Oscar Perez, a spokesman for Kuiper's legal team.
"I need to find justice," said Kuiper, whose older brother, Jan, was killed two days before his 40th birthday.
The Salvadoran attorney general's office won't comment on its confidential investigation, which the Dutch government says began last June.
The developments come amid a growing push for justice on behalf of victims of El Salvador's civil war, during which an estimated 75,000 civilians were killed, mostly by U.S.-backed government security forces.
In November 2017, former Salvadoran army Col. Inocente Orlando Montano, accused in the 1989 massacre by soldiers of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in San Salvador, was extradited from the United States to stand trial in Spain. Several of the victims were Spaniards. He remains jailed and the trial is expected to begin later this year.
In January 2016, former Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia Merin was deported from the United States to El Salvador. He is among those being prosecuted for the December 1981 massacre by a U.S.-trained Salvadoran army battalion of almost 1,000 people in the village of El Mozote, the largest massacre in modern Latin American history.