Salvadoran activists Carlos Santos (left) and Fabricio Santín alongside a papier-mâché sculpture of a torture victim with a plastic bag – “la capucha” - on his head. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Mar 21 2013 (IPS)

A report containing the testimonies of victims of torture during El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war will be published 27 years after it was written, to help Salvadorans today learn more about that chapter in the country’s history.

The 197-page book “La tortura en El Salvador” (Torture in El Salvador), to be launched in April, contains the accounts of 270 victims interviewed in 1986, in the heat of the civil war, by the non-governmental Human Rights Commission of El Salvador (CDHES). IPS was given exclusive access to the report prior to publication.

Most of the interviews were carried out in the La Esperanza prison on the outskirts of San Salvador by members of the CDHES who had also been arrested, tortured and later imprisoned in that facility, where many of the country’s political prisoners were held in the 1980s.

“In the 1980s it was impossible to publish the document, because of the repression. But finally it will see the light of day,” CDHES director Miguel Montenegro told IPS.

El Salvador’s 12-year civil war left 75,000 – mainly civilians – dead and 8,000 disappeared.

When a peace agreement put an end to the conflict, a lack of funds stood in the way of publication of the report, Montenegro said.

The activist was seized in 1986 by the notorious Treasury Police, and learned first-hand about the torture techniques practiced by the security forces.

Because of their involvement in serious human rights abuses, the National Police, the Treasury Police and the National Guard were dismantled and replaced by the National Civilian Police under the United Nations-sponsored peace accord reached in January 1992 by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas and the government of Alfredo Cristiani of the far-right National Republican Alliance (ARENA).

More than 40 torture techniques are described in detail and depicted in drawings in the report.

One of the most commonly used techniques was the “avioncito” (airplane), in which the victim’s hands were tied behind his or her back and the victim was suspended in the air from the wrists, often causing dislocation of the shoulders.

In the “capucha” (hood), a plastic bag was placed over the prisoner’s head, to partially suffocate them, while the “submarino” (submarine) involved simulated drowning.

Other methods were electric shock, cutting off the tongue, or destroying the eyes with chemicals.

“They would take me to a room in the Treasury Police headquarters in San Salvador where the walls and the floor were covered with dried blood,” Montenegro said.

The book also provides profiles of torture victims who were forcibly disappeared.

The abuses formed part of a state policy put into effect by the army high command, and Salvadoran society has a right to know what happened, Montenegro said.

The amnesty law approved by Congress in 1993 protected the perpetrators of war crimes and other human rights abuses committed during the conflict from prosecution.

But retired generals Eugenio Vides Casanova and José Guillermo García, both of whom served as defence minister in the 1980s, were found guilty in 2002 by a U.S. court for the torture of three civilians by units under their command. The court ordered the two retired officers to pay 54.6 million dollars in damages to the civilians.

The CDHES document is coming out shortly after an investigative report by the BBC and The Guardian, published as a documentary on Mar. 5, revealed that retired U.S. Colonel James Steele, a Special Forces veteran of Vietnam who was posted in El Salvador in the 1980s, was later sent to Iraq.

The British media report said Steele, who trained and directed counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador, was sent to Iraq to implement the so-called “Salvadoran option” to fight the insurgency after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 10 years ago.

Steele was reportedly sent to train special Iraqi police brigades in torture techniques employed in this Central American country in the 1980s.

“It is sad that what was used here in El Salvador is being revived in Iraq; this country served as the school,” Montenegro said.

Another investigation into torture committed during the civil war is being conducted by the Salvadoran Association of Torture Survivors (ASST), founded three years ago.

The ASST has two aims: to find out what happened and to bring complaints before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). “We are documenting the cases, to file formal complaints,” Carlos Santos, the president of the ASST, told IPS.

Santos was studying theatre when he was arrested in 1983 along with another student, Fabricio Santín, in the eastern city of San Miguel, where they were tortured before they were transferred to La Esperanza prison.

“Because no one was ever held accountable or punished for the abuses, there is a risk that they could be committed again in the future,” said Santín. “And that is what we don’t want.”

In 2012, the IACHR accepted a complaint brought by the Human Rights Institute of the Central American University in representation of Santos and Rolando González, another member of the ASST.

The complaint also covers four other cases, including the death of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, who was killed in 1975 by fellow members of one of the left-wing groups that made up the FMLN, after he was found guilty of insubordination and spying for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in a “revolutionary trial”.

The case brought before the IACHR accuses the current government of centre-left President Mauricio Funes of the FMLN of negligence with respect to investigating crimes like torture.

The Funes administration has refused to sign the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, which provides for in situ monitoring such as unannounced visits to local prisons.

Nor has it ratified the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court set up to try war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity that national courts cannot or will not handle.

“These are the things that worry us, because they hinder progress in the search for truth, justice and reparations,” the president of the Committee of Relatives of Victims of Human Rights Violations (CODEFAM), Guadalupe Mejía, told IPS.

David Morales, director general of the government’s Human Rights Unit, declined to comment to IPS on government policy.

Since September 2012, Santos and Santín have been touring the country with the exhibit “Nunca más en El Salvador” (Never Again in El Salvador), which uses papier-mâché sculptures of people to show torture techniques used during the years of state violence.

“Some of the images are shocking, but we want to show them so that this won’t happen again,” Santín said.

Representatives of the Argentine state and of non- governmental organisations will be visiting prisons without prior warning, beginning next year, to prevent inmates from being tortured and abused – a problem that persists three decades after the end of the dictatorship, often with fatal results.

Under a new law that created the National Mechanism for Prevention of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, a team will be set up to make regular surprise visits to prisons as well as police stations, psychiatric hospitals and juvenile institutions.

Members of the team can demand information about inmates, meet their families, interview prison officials and keep a record of habeas corpus writs filed in order to ensure the safety of prisoners and adequate prison conditions.

The law, approved in late November, brings the country in line with the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT), an international treaty ratified by Argentina in 2004.

OPCAT, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2002 as an addition to the 1984 U.N. Convention against Torture, and came into force in 2006, established an international inspection system for prisons. This includes an international subcommittee to monitor that the states parties establish national mechanisms for visits to prisons.

The treaty set a deadline for states to comply with the provision, which in the case of Argentina was 2007. But the law creating the mechanism was delayed for five years because of disagreements over the composition of the oversight body.

In an interview with IPS, lawyer Eva Asprella, coordinator of the Working Group on Persons Deprived of Liberty at the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a prominent local human rights group, explained that the difficulties were due to the fact that the provinces in this federal country enjoy considerable autonomy.

The debate was solved by designing a 13-member National Committee and a Federal Council made up of the local (regional or provincial) mechanisms. The two bodies will operate in a coordinated manner, and there will also be representatives of the local mechanisms on the National Committee.

The Committee will be made up of the national prison ombudsman, a delegate from the central government’s Human Rights Secretariat, six representatives chosen by Congress, who cannot be legislators, two representatives of the local mechanisms and three civil society experts.

“This was a necessary, but not sufficient, step towards ensuring prevention,” Asprella said. “It’s a way of setting foot inside the prisons, getting past the walls, establishing dialogue, seeing what goes on inside, making recommendations and resorting to the justice system with writs of habeas corpus.”

The legislation will also give protection to many small organisations that are working under great difficulties in the provinces, she said. “CELS is well known and has had no problems, but some groups have been denied permission to enter the prisons, quite arbitrarily,” she said.

This was the case with the Human Rights Network in the northeastern province of Corrientes, which has been banned from entering the prisons, and the Zainuco Association in the southern province of Neuquén, she said.

Angie Acosta, one of the Zainuco Association’s lawyers, told IPS that in the view of her organisation, “the creation of the mechanism is essential for monitoring prisons.

“As soon as we started denouncing torture cases, they banned us from entering” Unit Number 11 in Neuquén, the capital of the province, said Acosta. “They said it was for security reasons, but they let the churches in,” she added.

Acosta pointed out that in 2004 there was a riot in that prison that was put down with brutal force, lasting four days and resulting in the trial of 27 police agents for torture. But only six were convicted, for lesser crimes.

The crisis broke out because of the officers’ abusive treatment of the mother of Cristian Ibazeta, a 34-year-old blind inmate with multiple sclerosis.

Ibazeta, who had filed numerous complaints about torture, was stabbed to death inside the prison in May, when he was only a month away from being eligible for furlough.

An investigation published by CELS in the book “Derechos Humanos en Argentina: Informe 2012” (2012 Report on Human Rights in Argentina) details tortures, beatings, arbitrary transfers, excessive punishment and lack of hygiene, which it says are common currency in many of the country’s prisons.

In the eastern province of Buenos Aires, the country’s most populous, which accounts for 50 percent of all prisoners, there is also severe overcrowding, with inmates sleeping on the floor without access to toilets and subjected to freezing showers and beatings, while their family members have to submit to humiliating gropings when they visit.

Asprella described how in January, 26-year-old Patricio Barros Cisneros, an inmate in a Buenos Aires prison, was beaten to death by prison guards after asking for a private place to meet with his wife, who was eight months pregnant.

“If a 26-year-old man was beaten to death by a gang in the street, it would be a media scandal for days. But when it happens in a prison, society ignores it, so it goes on happening,” she said.