San Blas Massacre case ignores key evidence of widespread wrongdoing - El Faro (July 18, 2016)

The arrest last week of seven police officers involved in the alleged extrajudicial killing of eight people last year -- the so-called San Blas Massacre in which six alleged gang members and two civilians were killed, seemed to be a promising blow against police impunity in El Salvador. (See last Tuesday's post.) A piece from InSight Crime last week, for example, celebrated that the move by attorney general Douglas Meléndez indicate a message on his part that police must act within legal boundaries when carrying out anti-gang operations.

But the actual case presented by the Fiscalía is extremely limited, ignores evidence of more extensive wrongdoing by the police officers -- including evidence tampering. It might be an attempt to appear to be responding to widespread police abuses, without really doing so, according to a piece by El Faro's Oscar Martínez.

In a damning, in-depth piece he reviews the limited nature of the Fiscalía's case, and emphasizes violations it ignores, such as the killing of a 16-year old girlfriend of an alleged gang member, and the fact that the shootout between gang members and the police involved three shots from the gang members and 311 from police firearms.

Martínez's account also notes that the Salvadoran Procuraduría para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (PDDH) reviewed the same evidence and came to the conclusion that Dennis Alexánder Martínez, a 20-year-old working on the ranch, and the 16-year-old girl were victims of extrajudicial executions, and that the other six "might also have lost their lives arbitrarily by extrajudicial execution" rather than the 45 minute gunfight described by police.

Other inconsistencies include why Dennis was killed kneeling and begging for mercy, but also armed with two machetes and a knife, according to the police evidence.

The 37-page PDDH report also points to the possibility of a coverup by police high command, notes Martínez.

El Faro's sources report that evidence was tampered with, and that would constitute procedural fraud, a case that is being built to be lost.

"The San Blas ranch trial has been opened as the United States is about to implement giving 750 million dollars in aid to the Central American Northern Triangle for development and justice strengthening programs. El Salvador aspires to 69 of those millions. It's the Alliance for Prosperity Plan. But the U.S. government has made one of the conditions of payment that the Salvadoran government give signals that it is resolving cases like the San Blas massacre and others in which state security forces are accused of massacring and presenting the facts as shootouts."

El Faro broke the story of the eight killings last year (see post for July 23, 2015).

"Mano dura" crackdowns against gang in El Salvador have resulted in widespread human rights violations say observers. So far this year the police have reportedly killed 346 alleged gang members in violent confrontations -- while reports indicate that, as of April, 16 police officers had been killed by gang members, according to InSight Crime. The situation raises serious questions about what's going on. "Across Latin America, from Mexico to Venezuela and Brazil, the term "confrontation" is used to explain lopsided body counts and cover up human rights abuses by the security forces," notes InSight.

El Salvador's Human Rights Ombudsman David Morales decried such practices, saying they risk intensifying the already extreme violence affecting the country, reported Vice News earlier this year.

Aside: Martínez won an international press freedom award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. 

News Briefs

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• The promise of peace in Colombia will depend not on the final agreement being negotiated in Havana, but with grassroots peace activism, which is largely led by women, according to a Guardian op-ed. Women's groups have experience setting up "peace enclaves, where combatants temporarily laid aside their arms and limited ceasefires held. Women's groups created spaces for public gathering and dialogue, helping to integrate people displaced by war into the communities that received them." Now this expertise must be applied to the concentration zones where FARC fighters will demobilize, argues the piece.

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• Argentine prosecutors are probing possible connections between a top aide to former President Nestor Kirchner and $21 million in Miami luxury housing investments, based on data released in the "Panama Papers" leak, reports the Miami Herald.

• A new study by the International Trade Centre (ITC), the joint agency of the UN and World Trade Organization found that high quinoa prices in Peru improved the welfare of poor rural communities. The finding contributes to an ongoing debate over whether the international fascination with the so-called "super grain" harms communities that can no longer afford the traditional source of nutrition, according to a Guardian op-ed. "The data shows that as prices rose between 2004 and 2013, both producers and consumers in the region benefited financially from the trade. Quinoa farmers, who are among the poorest people in Peru, saw a 46 percent increase in their welfare over this period, measured by the value of all goods and services consumed by the household."

• Ecuadorian historian Pablo Ospina Peralto has an interesting piece in Nueva Sociedad, in which he criticizes the Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa's "progressive" track record. He notes that the left tends to pardon "unacceptable measures," in the name of political expediency. He notes the long-standing tradition of the regions' left to pardon Cuba's sins, comparing it to the "interested and selective blindness" Latin American leftists had for socialist regimes.