The U.S. has arrested a Salvadoran retired navy officer for his alleged involvement within the El Mozote bloodbath, one of the crucial broadly identified killings in latest Latin American historical past.
Roberto Antonio Garay Saravia, a retired officer from the Salvadoran Armed Forces, was arrested in New Jersey on Tuesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Removing Operations officers with the help of Homeland Safety Investigations brokers.
He was arrested on prices of helping or in any other case collaborating in extrajudicial killings and willfully misrepresenting this materials reality in his immigration utility, the Division of Homeland Safety stated in a information launch.
“People who’ve dedicated atrocities abroad won’t discover protected haven in the USA,” DHS Deputy Secretary John Ok. Tien acknowledged within the press launch.
The investigation was initiated and developed by Homeland Safety Investigations’ Human Rights Violators and Struggle Crimes Heart.
In late 1981, U.S.-trained Salvadoran military items attacked civilians within the city of El Mozote. No less than 1,000 folks, half of them kids, had been killed.
The Salvadoran military was combating leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí Nationwide Liberation Entrance.
When President Ronald Reagan took workplace earlier that yr, he elevated navy support and despatched Particular Forces instructors to the Central American nation.
In keeping with the press launch, Garay Saravia was a piece commander in a specialised counterinsurgency unit referred to as the Atlácatl Battalion from 1981 to 1985. It goes on to say the unit was straight implicated in quite a few atrocities, together with the El Mozote bloodbath.
Garay Saravia was additionally deployed in three different operations that resulted within the massacres of lots of of noncombatant civilians.