Say Anything Blog

Today, we have Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova and Jose Guillermo Garcia and Nicolas Carranza (also see here).

The first two:

Reopening a bloody wound from two decades ago, a U.S. federal court in Florida on Tuesday found two retired Salvadoran generals responsible for torture, rape and other atrocities committed during El Salvador’s civil war.

The jury in West Palm Beach ordered Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova and Jose Guillermo Garcia to pay $54.6 million to three torture victims.

The generals each held top posts, including minister of defense, in the rightist Salvadoran government’s brutal war against Marxist guerrillas. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed by army-linked death squads and counterinsurgency sweeps. The Reagan administration saw the war as a crusade against communism and sent more than $1 billion in aid to the Salvadoran government despite loud criticism from many members of Congress.

Both generals were trained at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, and both received U.S. Legion of Merit awards from the State Department. They retired to the Miami area in 1989.

and the latter:

The federal court jury found Memphis resident Colonel Nicolas Carranza, the former Vice-Minister of Defense of El Salvador, responsible for overseeing torture and killings in that country.

The trial was marked by several important revelations.  Former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White testified that Colonel Carranza was a paid informant for the CIA while he was Vice-Minister of Defense and a member of the High Command in 1980.  At that time White asked the CIA station chief in El Salvador to remove Carranza from the CIA payroll because of his deplorable human rights record but no action was ever taken.  Carranza admitted on the witness stand that he had been receiving money from the U.S. government since 1965.

Some nice torture precedents. Uh oh. Someone tell Addington to hide his a$$ets.