Confronting the
Past
6
Honduran Plaintiffs Suing Over 1980's Human Rights Abuses
By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 25, 2002; Page B01
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The last time Oscar
Reyes met Col. Juan Evangelista Lopez Grijalba, they were attending a State
Department reception for visiting dignitaries from their homeland, Honduras.
Reyes was representing a Spanish-language newspaper in the District, and
Grijalba was the new military attaché at the Honduran Embassy.
Recovering from
their surprise, they mumbled greetings and hastily parted, preferring not to
revisit the past they had shared. Reyes had just come face to face with a man
he held responsible for the arrest and torture of him and his wife in 1982, the
confiscation of their property and their banishment into exile.
In the decade since
that chance social encounter, Reyes, now 66 and still editor of El Pregonero, a
30,000-circulation newspaper published by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of
Washington, has become a fixture in the community. He and his wife, Gloria,
settled in Vienna with their two children and became U.S. citizens in the
mid-1990s, determined to forget their old life and make a new one.
Now Reyes can't
wait to see Grijalba again -- this time in court.
A lawsuit filed
last week on behalf of the Reyeses and four other plaintiffs blames Grijalba
for torture, disappearances and killings in the early 1980s, when he was
Honduran military intelligence chief and allegedly controlled a notorious
CIA-trained unit, Battalion 316, that functioned as a death squad. An official
Honduran human rights commission in 1993 documented 184 disappearances of
suspected leftists who reportedly had been kidnapped and killed by the
battalion.
Grijalba, 63, moved
permanently to the United States in 1998 and was living in Florida when he was
arrested in April by the Immigration and Naturalization Service under a program
aimed at rooting out alleged human rights violators. He is being held in Miami
awaiting deportation proceedings. His attorney, Griselda Ybarra, did not return
phone calls seeking comment.
The suit, filed in
federal court in Miami, is the latest attempt by torture victims and relatives
of those who disappeared to bring the alleged persecutors to justice in the
United States. In a separate case in Florida, three Salvadorans -- including
Juan Romagoza, director of the Clinica del Pueblo, a free D.C. clinic -- won a
$54.6 million verdict Tuesday against two former Salvadoran generals for brutal
torture 20 years ago.
Although Romagoza
and the two other plaintiffs may never collect any significant damages, Reyes
said he welcomed the verdict.
"At least
there's a recognition of a jury that they were responsible for the torture of
those people," he said. "I hope it will be the same in the case of
Mr. Lopez Grijalba. I think it's important for the world to know exactly what
happened in that black period in our country and hold responsible the people
who were in charge."
"We're trying
to make sure the United States doesn't become a retirement home for
perpetrators of human rights abuses," said Matthew J. Eisenbrandt, an
attorney for the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability,
which helped prepare the lawsuits against Grijalba and the Salvadoran generals.
To some extent,
that already has happened, human rights advocates say. The same immigration
system that has allowed at least 500,000 torture victims from around the world
to seek refuge in the United States also has admitted some people thought to be
responsible for such offenses.
A report issued in
April by Amnesty International says as many as 1,000 suspected torturers may be
living in the United States. Titled "USA: a Safe Haven for
Torturers," the 174-page report notes that nobody has been prosecuted
under a 1994 law that criminalized acts of torture committed outside the
country.
"All too
often, individuals who have committed torture or other human rights abuses in
other countries have been allowed to enter and reside in the United States with
impunity, in some cases even settling in the same communities as their
victims," the report says.
For the victims,
the only legal recourse is usually a civil suit under the 1992 Torture Victims
Protection Act or a 1789 law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, that was originally
intended to punish pirates.
When Reyes saw
Grijalba at the reception, Grijalba had diplomatic immunity and could not be
sued. Besides, Reyes said, "we decided when we came to the States to
forget about everything."
He changed his mind
in 1996 when a former Battalion 316 officer published a book that sought to
justify the group's actions, including the July 8, 1982, raid on Reyes's home
by men in black masks.
Reyes was then a
university professor and a former supporter of the leftist Sandinista
revolutionaries in neighboring Nicaragua. He said he broke with the Sandinistas
when they became openly Marxist after their 1979 takeover. But he was suspected
of trying to foment revolution in Honduras and of "masterminding" a
group of suspected Salvadoran leftists who had moved in next door to him, he
said.
Bound and
blindfolded, Oscar and Gloria Reyes were taken to a secret detention center,
where they say they were tortured for several days. Oscar Reyes said he was
given electric shocks, suspended by his handcuffs and "beaten like a
pinata." His wife, he said, was struck with rifle butts and tortured with
electric shocks that damaged her ovaries, which eventually had to be removed.
When they were
released five months later, they were ordered to leave Honduras immediately.
The suit charges
that Grijalba "planned, ordered, authorized, encouraged or permitted
subordinates in the Honduran military and paramilitary forces to commit acts of
torture, disappearance and extrajudicial killing," then helped cover up
the abuses. The plaintiffs, who are seeking unspecified damages, include four
other Hondurans who are suing on behalf of two men allegedly killed by
Battalion 316.
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