U.S. Deports Salvadoran General Accused in ’80s Killings

[Judi Lynn]

Source: New York Times

U.S. Deports Salvadoran General Accused in ’80s Killings
By JULIA PRESTON
APRIL 8, 2015

After a 16-year legal battle, a former defense minister of El Salvador once embraced by Washington as a close ally during the civil war there in the 1980s, was deported on Wednesday after immigration courts found that he had participated in torture and killings by troops under his command.

The officer, Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, is the highest-ranking foreign official to be deported under laws enacted in 2004 to prevent human rights violators from seeking haven in this country. The expulsion culminates persistent efforts by rights advocates to hold General Vides accountable for his role in the 1980 murders of four American churchwomen, one of the most notorious crimes by the Salvadoran armed forces in that era.

General Vides landed at the international airport in Comalapa, El Salvador just after 12:30 p.m., one of dozens of Salvadoran deportees aboard an Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter flight, according to Mauricio Silva, a spokesman for the Salvadoran immigration agency. The general had been detained by immigration authorities in the United States since March 25.


[font size=1]
General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova outside the federal courthouse in Palm
Beach, Fla., in October 2000.

Credit Marta Lavandier/Associated Press
[/font]
The deportation “sends an enormously important message to El Salvador and the rest of the world that we are not going to harbor people who committed these violations even when at the time they appeared to be supporting U.S. policy,” said R. Scott Greathead, a lawyer who represented William Ford, the brother of Sister Ita Ford, one of the murdered churchwomen. Mr. Ford died in 2008.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/us-deports-salvadoran-general-accused-in-80s-killings.html

[Comrade Grumpy]

1. That murdering thug should have gone a la pared years ago.

[Demeter]

2. How on earth did we ever get such legislation passed?

I am shocked beyond belief...esp. during W.

[cosmicone]

3. We use foreign despots like kleenex tissues

Good that the general will face the music.

How about the people who enabled the general? Ollie North, David Regan, Caspar Weinberger et al?

What is amusing is that despite the history of Americans using and discarding despots, the line of despots wanting to be used is always miles long.

[Zorra]

4. Ronald Reagan's beloved henchman Casanova is a School of the Americas (SOA) graduate.

Two Salvadoran ex-generals and School of the Americas graduates, José Guillermo García Merino and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, have been ordered deported by Immigration Judges in the last year. This excellent article from Trevor Bach in the Miami New Times details the history of the different types of judicial proceedings instituted against them in the U.S. and elsewhere, the crimes they have been found responsible for, their continued lack of remorse, and the unwavering fight for justice by the Salvadoran people and international allies. The ex-Defense Minister and ex-Director of the National Guard continue to evade responsibility for their heinous crimes and are appealing their deportation orders.

http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/soawhinsec-grads/grads-in-the-news

[Midnight Writer]

6. Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers"

[Zorra]

5. ^