Chalatenango, June 4, 2025 – It is now known as the Santa Rita Massacre. It took place on the 17th of March, 1982, in the small municipality of Santa Rita in northwestern El Salvador near the Honduran border.
Four Dutch journalists, Koos Jacobus Andries Koster, 46; Jan Cornelius Kuiper, 40; Johannes “Joop” Jan Willemsen, 45, and Hans Lodewijk ter Laag, were filming a documentary on the Salvadoran Civil War and had planned to spend a few days reporting behind enemy lines. The crew was embedded with several guerrillas of the insurgent Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) when the group was ambushed by the Atonal Battalion of the Salvadoran Army.
Those responsible for the attack were found guilty on the 3rd of June of this year, more than 40 years later, following a trial in the northern town of Chalatenango that was discreet and closed to the media.
Convicted for the murders were former Defense Minister General José Guillermo García, 91, former treasury police director, Colonel. Francisco Morán, 93, and ex-infantry brigade commander, Colonel. Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85.
A general amnesty after the Peace Accords brokered in Chapultepec, Mexico in 1992, enveloped dozens of military officers of the Salvadoran Armed Forces suspected of war crimes during the bloodshed, which lasted 12 years and claimed the lives of 75,000 civilians. However, in 2018, the Salvadoran Supreme Court declared the move unconstitutional, and a case against the accused for the killing of the four Dutch journalists was quickly reopened at the urging of the United Nations, the Dutch government, and the families of the slain.
In 1993, a U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission – mandated as part of the Accords to investigate acts of “grave wrongdoings” that occurred during the war – revealed that the four Dutch journalists were in fact ambushed in a plan orchestrated by Reyes Mena, according to intelligence and testimony provided in the Commission’s report.
The Commission also concluded that 85% of killings of civilians during the civil war were carried out by Salvadoran military and state security forces, and paramilitary units. Other elite military units like the deathly Atlacatl Battalion were trained, funded, and backed by the U.S. government in an effort to stem the tide of spreading communism in Central America during the 1980s.
The U.N. Truth Commission also found that the Salvadoran Armed Forces were responsible for the targeted intimidation of foreign journalists during the civil war, whom state security forces viewed as “threats”.
Following a speedy trial, the three men were each sentenced to 15 years in prison; a trifle considering the ghastly details of how the innocent met their ends, but for the defendants, a life sentence.
