Lawsuit in US targets former Salvadoran colonel in 1982 killings of Dutch journalists

CENTREVILLE, Va. -- The brother of a Dutch journalist slain in 1982 covering El Salvador's civil war has filed a lawsuit against a former Salvadoran military officer who has lived for decades in the northern Virginia suburbs and is accused of orchestrating the killing.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks unspecified monetary damages against Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena and a declaration that he is responsible for the killings of Jan Kuiper and three other Dutch journalists.

Reyes Mena, now 85, was a colonel who commanded El Salvador’s Fourth Infantry Brigade. That unit, and Reyes Mena in particular, were declared responsible for the journalists' deaths by a United Nations Truth Commission that was established in 1992 as part of the peace agreement that ended El Salvador's civil war.

An estimated 75,000 civilians were killed during El Salvador’s civil war, mostly by U.S.-backed government security forces.

“The killing of the Dutch Journalists, which the U.N. Truth Commission highlighted as among the most emblematic crimes committed during the civil war, demonstrated the brutality with which the Salvadoran Security Forces sought to stifle national and international independent media in El Salvador,” the lawyers wrote in their complaint.

Kuiper and three other Dutch television journalists — Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen — were ambushed as they tried to travel to territory controlled by the leftist guerilla group that was fighting the Salvadoran Security Forces. According to the truth commission, the killings occurred near the El Paraíso military base that was under the command of Reyes Mena, who ordered the ambush.

Kuiper's family and others who have sought to bring the journalists' killers to justice have been thwarted for decades. Shortly after the truth commission released its report, the Salvadoran government passed an amnesty law that shielded Reyes Mena and other military officers from prosecution.

But El Salvador's Supreme Court struck down the amnesty law as unconstitutional in 2016. In 2022, a judge ordered the arrest of Reyes Mena and others, including former defense minister Gen. José Guillermo García and Col. Francisco Antonio Morán, former director of the now-defunct treasury police, in connection with the journalists' killing.

According to the lawsuit, Reyes Mena ended his travel to El Salvador when the arrest warrants were issued. The lawsuit said there's no indication that Reyes Mena will be extradited, even though a notice seeking his arrest has been posted with Interpol.

The Salvadoran Embassy referred questions about efforts to extradite Reyes Mena to the country's court system, which said a formal public information request must be submitted. The U.S. State Department did not respond to an email Friday seeking comment on Reyes Mena's extradition status.

At Reyes Mena’s Centreville townhouse, a woman who identified herself as his wife declined to comment Thursday and said she would relay a reporter’s request for comment to their lawyer, whom she did not identify.

The Center for Justice and Accountability, a nonprofit legal group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Kuiper's brother, Gert Kuiper, has brought multiple cases over the years against individuals accused of overseas war crimes under U.S. laws like the Torture Victim Protection Act.

In 2019, a jury at the Alexandria courthouse found a northern Virginia man who once served as a colonel in the Somali Army during the regime of dictator Siad Barre responsible for torturing a Somali man in the 1980s. The jury awarded $500,000 in damages. It also won a $21 million default judgement against a former Somali defense minister and prime minister, Mohamed Ali Samantar.

Other efforts to hold foreign officials accountable have failed. Earlier this year, a judge in Alexandria tossed out a series of civil lawsuits against a Libyan military commander, Khalifa Hifter, who used to live in Virginia and was accused of killing innocent civilians in that country’s civil war. The Hifter lawsuits were not brought by the Center for Justice and Accountability.