A retired Salvadoran soldier was arrested in the United States for his alleged participation in different operations of the civil war of the 1980s, including the El Mozote massacre, one of the most emblematic of the conflict, authorities reported on Thursday.
According to the report, officers arrested Roberto Garay Tuesday in New Jersey on charges of aiding or otherwise participating in extrajudicial killings and misrepresenting the facts.
“Roberto Antonio Garay Saravia is a retired soldier from the Armed Forces of El Salvador, who during his active duty participated in multiple operations, including the El Mozote Massacre“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement.
According to a 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report, in December 1981 soldiers tortured residents of the El Mozote hamlet and other nearby places in the department of Morazán, 180 kilometers northeast of the capital San Salvador, in search of guerrillas. .
In the operation, framed in the civil war that between 1980 and 1992 pitted the former leftist guerrilla Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the Army, almost 1,000 civilians were executed, more than half of whom were children.
According to the accusations, Garay was a section commander from 1981 to 1985 in a specialized counterinsurgency unit known as the Atlacatl Battalion, which has been directly implicated in numerous “atrocities,” including three other massacres of non-combatant civilians.
In September 2016, the El Mozote judicial process was reopened and is being heard in a court in the municipality of San Francisco Gotera, in the northeast of the country.
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