Torture victims find justice in U.S. court

The acrid smell of disinfectant, sweat and fear filled Carlos Mauricio’s nostrils. Blindfolded, he heard the moaning of other political prisoners inside the headquarters of El Salvador’s national police.

There were screams and shouted questions, the hollow thump of blows, and the sizzling zap of an electrical prod, followed by guttural protests and involuntary thrashing.

“I realized I was in a chamber of torture,” he said. “At that moment, I accepted my death.”

It was 1983, and El Salvador was in the midst of a 12-year civil war that claimed 75,000 lives. Mauricio, an agronomy professor at the University of El Salvador, had been kidnapped from his classroom by men with guns.

As he stood in the dark, handcuffed to a pipe, his extremities tingled with mounting panic.

“I knew I was next,” he said.

Mauricio survived 15 days of captivity and torture, but he left behind his dignity, his ability to trust and his belief in justice.

He got some of that back in a lengthy U.S. legal process that ended last summer.

Mauricio and two other former Salvadoran political prisoners sued the military commanders who once ran the Central American country. Along with lay church worker Neris Gonzalez and Juan Romagoza Arce, a doctor who volunteered his time helping the poor, Mauricio won a $54.6-million jury award that was upheld on appeal.

The three plaintiffs have recovered $300,000 so far, and they donated most of that to human rights causes. But the money made it one of the first cases in which torture survivors were able to make those responsible pay for their actions.

Mauricio, who lives in San Francisco, thinks the case sends an important message.

“They’d never accepted any responsibility,” he said of the generals. “We exposed them as criminals.”

*

Once among El Salvador’s most powerful men, Generals Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova stood in a West Palm Beach, Fla., courtroom, their stature diminished with their influence.

They were now just two grandfathers living out their retirement in the United States, the country that backed their regime against leftist opposition.

But they still thought they were above the law, Mauricio said. “They were arrogant. They were looking at us like, what can three Salvadorans do to us?”

About 400,000 torture survivors live in the U.S., and about 1,000 alleged torturers live among them, according to an Amnesty International report. They come from Haiti, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan.

More than a dozen cases like Mauricio’s have been tried in U.S. courts, many of them handled by the Center for Justice and Accountability, the legal advocacy group that filed the case in Florida federal court on behalf of Mauricio, Gonzalez and Arce.

Not all those who were tortured can face a trial, said Moira Feeney, an attorney with the San Francisco group.

“Some people need to close that door, never think about it again,” she said. “But for some ... seeking justice is part of an individual’s recovery process.”

Mauricio’s case hinged on two statutes.

The Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, originally adopted to protect traders from pirates, allows foreign nationals to sue in U.S. courts for acts that violate international law.

The Torture Victims Protection Act, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, allows suits against foreign officials who commit torture or are responsible for murders.

Attorney Kurt Klaus, who represented the two generals, calls the case “revisionist history” and the doctrine of command responsibility, under which his clients were held liable, a “legal fiction.”

“They made it sound like everything was under control [in El Salvador during the war] and that this was an orchestrated plan of terror,” Klaus said. “My guys were trying to stay alive themselves and implement the United States’ plans for the region, which succeeded. El Salvador is a functioning democracy.”

*

The day Mauricio thought would be his last started like any other.

It was June 13, 1983. The university, suspected of being a leftist stronghold, had been shuttered by the government. So the professor drove to an off-campus building for classes.

He was ambushed by a man who had asked him to move his car. Like many Salvadorans at the time, Mauricio had heard about the “disappeared,” those taken and never seen again.

He was forced into a van and driven to a place where he was questioned about guerrilla groups, training and activities he says he knew nothing about.

“I was told I wasn’t confessing because I’d been trained not to confess, not because I was innocent,” he said. “There was no escape. You’re guilty because you were accused.”

Day after day, he was interrogated and beaten while hanging from the ceiling by his wrists.

“It was excruciating pain,” Mauricio told jurors. “I thought I was going to lose my arms.”

He was released after a campaign led by his then father-in-law, a retired Army captain, and university colleagues. They asked the Red Cross to visit the National Police headquarters and took out ads in newspapers and on the radio protesting his kidnapping.

As with Romagoza and Gonzalez, no official charges were ever filed against him.

He was released with broken ribs, contusions covering his body, and the vision in one eye permanently impaired. Doctors were afraid to treat him.

Three weeks later, he fled to Mexico.

*

One of four children born to a single mother who died when he was 11, Mauricio had built a life that made him proud.

When he fled El Salvador, he lost his family, his university teaching post and his colleagues’ respect.

“I was completely destroyed,” he said.

He spend the next few decades trying to rebuild that life.

From Mexico he made his way to Miami, where he took a bus to San Francisco to join his sister.

He worked in construction and as a dishwasher, learned English, and signed up for university classes. He earned a master’s degree in education and got a job as a science teacher at a high school.

By 1999, he was starting to feel like himself again when a friend told him that some San Francisco attorneys had filed a lawsuit against the men responsible for his imprisonment. He was initially reluctant to join the case because he had family in El Salvador, including two grown children, and feared for their safety.

Revisiting the experience was still painful. He’d spent years dealing with recurring nightmares, anxiety and severe depression -- symptoms shared by many torture survivors.

Survivors of torture almost never feel comfortable talking about it -- especially not in court where they can be attacked under cross-examination, said Sarita Kohli, director of mental health programs at Asian Americans for Community Involvement’s Center for Survivors of Torture in San Jose.

Mauricio eventually joined the suit out of a sense of responsibility toward those who died in El Salvador, or who still can’t speak of the atrocities they suffered, and to seal his recovery.

“How many will have a chance to confront the generals? Not many,” he said. “I am the one who can say I was there, I saw it. I realized I needed to tell my story in front of a jury, to have my day in court.”

*

Confronting Garcia and Vides Casanova had a powerful effect on Mauricio.

“These were men who thought they would be president. But they were not particularly intelligent,” Mauricio said. “What they had was the willingness to kill, rape and torture to keep power.”

No Salvadoran officials showed up to support them. Only one U.S. official, Edwin G. Corr, U.S. ambassador to El Salvador from 1985 to 1988, spoke on their behalf. He called Vides Casanova the man “most responsible for helping improve the human rights situation in El Salvador.”

In his opening statement, Klaus painted a picture of El Salvador in the 1980s as a place so chaotic that the military chain of command had broken down.

The generals were part of an effort within the military that was trying to ensure stability and bring democracy to a country bordering on anarchy, Klaus said in a recent phone interview.

“They were part of a democratically elected government that was supported by the United States,” he said. “They were charged with trying to maintain some kind of order in the country.”

The generals’ efforts led to threats against their families and themselves, which they escaped by moving to the United States. “They were targets of violence,” Klaus said of his clients.

What Mauricio endured was horrible, but he wasn’t a victim of the state -- he was just “at the wrong place at the wrong time” in a violent country, and suffered the consequences, Klaus said.

But another former U.S. ambassador who testified for the plaintiffs read damning State Department documents, including a cable of an interview he had with Garcia in 1980 -- three years before Mauricio’s capture.

“Garcia admitted that the excesses were grave and that he had a good idea who was responsible,” former Ambassador Robert E. White told the jury.

The generals never took responsibility in court for what happened in El Salvador under their command.

“Do you acknowledge that people were tortured in detention facilities of the armed forces of El Salvador while you were minister of defense?” asked Klaus.

“No, I have never had proof of that,” Garcia replied.

Their denial is what lost them the case, said Mauricio, who cried when he heard the verdict.

“They lied,” he said. “The jurors could see it. They lied.”

*

Garcia and Vides Casanova were found liable for what the professor, the church worker and the doctor had endured. The case was appealed, and the plaintiffs waited another three years to recover any money and return to rebuilding their lives.

Mauricio now teaches part-time at public schools to allow time for human rights work.

Romagoza, a surgeon, was hung by wires wrapped around his fingers until they dug into his flesh as his tormentors told him he’d never be able to perform surgery again. He now runs a clinic in Washington, D.C.

Gonzalez, who was dumped in the countryside, her pregnant body slashed by machetes and razor blades and left for dead, now teaches children in Illinois about nutrition and ecology.

The Center for Justice and Accountability is handling 13 more torture cases.

“We’re talking about some atrocities that are so beyond the pale that they require accountability,” Feeney said.