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<a href="http://www.soaw.org/new/newswire_detail.php?id=1035" eudora="autourl">
http://www.soaw.org/new/newswire_detail.php?id=1035<br>
</a>Victims win torture case <br>
Wednesday, February 1st 2006 <br>
Teresa Borden, Atlanta Jounal Constitution <br><br>
It has been nearly 23 years since a death squad --- 14 unknown, <br>
non-uniformed, heavily armed men --- burst into Carlos Mauricio's
university classroom in <br>
San Salvador, El Salvador, and took him away for 10 days of beatings and
abuse. <br>
An Atlanta appellate court last month handed him a long-awaited victory
over <br>
those responsible for his torture.<br><br>
A panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta reversed
itself, <br>
saying that Mauricio and two other victims are entitled to damages from
Jose <br>
Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, former high officials
in <br>
the Salvadoran military who Mauricio and the other plaintiffs say ordered
their <br>
abductions.<br><br>
The plaintiffs were able to sue their torturers because both parties now
live <br>
in the United States. The legal basis used is the Torture Victims
Protection <br>
Act and the Alien Tort Claims Act.<br><br>
A jury in Florida first granted the trio almost $55 million in July 2002,
but <br>
Garcia and Casanova, former defense ministers in the Salvadoran military,
<br>
appealed, saying that the 10-year statute of limitations of the act ran
out <br>
before the suit was filed.<br><br>
In its Jan. 4 decision, the court concluded that such limits should be
<br>
extended when the victims can reasonably expect violent retribution if
they sue <br>
their torturers within the time limits.<br><br>
"Until the end of civil war in 1992, the military would have used
its <br>
significant power to thwart any efforts to redress the human rights
violations that <br>
it had perpetrated," the judges said. "The plaintiffs
legitimately feared that <br>
their family members and friends remaining in El Salvador would be
subject to <br>
harsh reprisals and the same brutalities that the plaintiffs
suffered."<br><br>
Indeed, the statute of limitations hasn't run out on Mauricio's memory
--- <br>
the past is not forgotten.<br><br>
"I smelled the odor of death, the odor of powerlessness: adrenaline
mixed <br>
with blood and urine," he said. Then came the beatings, the hanging
by the arms, <br>
the hours of forced standing.<br><br>
For Mauricio and the others, that past isn't even past. In April 2004,
photos <br>
of naked, bound and hooded Iraqi war prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and later
<br>
accounts of alleged U.S.-sponsored violations of prisoners' human rights
in <br>
Guantanamo Bay, kept the victims' memories as fresh as
yesterday.<br><br>
"What I saw published about what went on in Iraq were the same
practices that <br>
I suffered, felt and saw," said Neris Gonzalez, a church worker who
was also <br>
a plaintiff in the lawsuit. "I was shocked and surprised that they
were still <br>
using those same torture practices."<br><br>
Mauricio was not surprised. Like many Salvadorans who opposed the regime,
he <br>
believes that the U.S. military-sponsored School of the Americas, now
known as <br>
the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Cooperation and based
at <br>
Fort Benning in Columbus, trained paramilitaries --- the so-called death
squads <br>
--- working covertly for the right-wing government of that time.<br><br>
"The parallels with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are evident," he
said.<br><br>
The U.S. Defense Department had already launched an investigation into
what w<br>
as happening at Abu Ghraib when the photos surfaced, and it said the
abuses <br>
were the independent actions of low-ranking soldiers. It later removed 17
<br>
soldiers and officers from duty, charging seven criminally and convicting
them in <br>
courts-martial.<br><br>
But a 2005 report by the group Physicians for Human Rights said <br>
"psychological torture was systematic and central to the
interrogation process of detainees <br>
in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo."<br><br>
It fits in with what Mauricio remembers.<br><br>
"My torturers intentionally left me standing, bound to a pipe,
forcing me to <br>
listen to the screams of people who were getting electrical shocks, women
who <br>
were being raped, men who were being beaten," he said. "The
worst thing was <br>
that I knew I was on that list."<br><br>
Students targeted<br><br>
Mauricio says Salvadoran authorities tagged him as a problem while a
student <br>
leader at the University of El Salvador, when he complained about
injustices <br>
against the poor in his country.<br><br>
After he graduated and became a science professor, it was only a matter
of <br>
time before the paramilitary death squads, which have been blamed for
thousands <br>
of deaths during the civil war, came for him.<br><br>
Gonzalez and Juan Romagoza Arce, the other plaintiff in the lawsuit, also
say <br>
they were branded troublemakers because of their community-building <br>
activities.<br><br>
Gonzales was a church worker, and Romagoza Arce was a doctor. Both worked
in <br>
the countryside, where Marxist guerrillas were also waging war.<br><br>
Romagoza Arce said he regularly saw mutilated bodies in the street in the
<br>
towns where he worked trying to organize health fairs for peasants.
Gonzales said <br>
she tried to stick to Bible teaching. But both say they became targets
when <br>
the government sought to stamp out sectors of Salvadoran society it
considered <br>
a threat to its policies.<br><br>
"The government used the guerrillas as an excuse for state-sponsored
<br>
terrorism," Mauricio said. To belong to a union or a student group
was a matter of <br>
life and death. This was the negation of all democratic participation.
The <br>
government closed down all democratic protest."<br><br>
Brutality, then freedom<br><br>
When the men took him away on that June afternoon in 1983, they beat
Mauricio <br>
with such ferocity that they broke two of his ribs and left a nasty cut
on <br>
one of his eyes. For nine more days, he said, he was systematically
beaten, <br>
interrogated, bound behind his back and hung by the arms from a ceiling
beam, <br>
forced to stand for hours without sleep, and kept for days without food
or water. <br>
Finally, the Red Cross came looking for him.<br><br>
Mauricio didn't know it, but his family, friends and students had mounted
a <br>
nationwide campaign to free him. He was released to his ex-wife, with a
<br>
warning: Leave the country immediately. He went to live with relatives in
San <br>
Francisco, where he applied for and received political asylum.<br><br>
He now teaches at a San Francisco high school, though he has taken a
<br>
temporary leave to travel on behalf of School of the Americas Watch, a
nongovernmental <br>
group protesting the activities of the school, which has consistently
denied <br>
ever training anyone to violate human rights.<br><br>
Mauricio says he is thankful for the U.S. justice system that validated
his <br>
claims in court.<br><br>
"My case was based on wanting to find justice," he
said.<br><br>
But he says the American people ought to learn from what happened in El
<br>
Salvador.<br><br>
"Salvadorans are accusing the generals," he said. "They're
making sure that <br>
those responsible respond for their crimes. Americans are also
responsible for <br>
making their torturers answer for what they have done." <br>
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