CJA In The News

A new report by Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice, endorsed by CJA, finds credible allegations of post-war international crimes by government forces against Tamils in Sri Lanka’s north, nearly five years after the end of a three-decade civil war

A federal judge in California on Monday revoked the U.S. citizenship of a former Guatemalan special forces officer and sentenced him to a maximum 10-year prison term for deceiving U.S. immigration officials and covering up his role in a 1982 massacre of 250 villagers in Guatemala, one of the worst atrocities in modern times in Latin America.

The U.S. has defended a judge’s decision ordering General Vides-Casanova’s removal from the U.S. for his role in widespread human rights abuses in El Salvador in the 1980s, including the torture of CJA’s clients and the murder of four American churchwomen. Click here for the press release, here to read the full immigration court decision or here to read a summary of the oral arguments of the appeal hearing.

Vides Casanova, who was El Salvador’s defense minister, has been living in Florida since immigrating in 1989. In 2012, an immigration judge ruled that he could be deported for his role in multiple acts of killings and torture committed by the Salvadoran military, including the slayings of three American nuns and a lay churchwoman in 1980.

They say as many as 200,000 men, women and children were executed and buried in mass graves in 1980s Somaliland. They accuse Somalia’s late dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, of atrocities and want to put his alleged henchmen on trial.

A former Salvadoran general accused of overseeing the torture and killing of thousands of civilians during a 12-year civil war appealed a U.S. deportation order Thursday on the grounds that his nation’s anti-communist campaign was backed and funded by the American government.

America’s professional association of psychologists has quietly declined to rebuke one of its members, a retired US army reserve officer, for his role in one of the most brutal interrogations known to have to taken place at Guantánamo Bay, the Guardian has learned.

The Center for Justice and Accountability is outraged by the proposed visit of indicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir to attend the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York next week. Sudanese President al-Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on ten counts of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Darfur and has two outstanding warrants for his arrest.

Activistas de derechos humanos en Estados Unidos reclaman la extradición del ex oficial del Ejército chileno Pedro Pablo Barrientos, acusado como uno de los autores del asesinato del cantante Víctor Jara ocurrido en 1973, mientras abogados del artista ya lo ubicaron en Florida.

Victor Jara’s family have filed a civil lawsuit accusing former Chilean army Lt. Pedro Barrientos Nunez of ordering soldiers to torture Jara. The suit claims that Barrientos fired the fatal shot while playing a game of ‘Russian roulette’ inside a locker room in Santiago’s Estadio Chile, where some 5,000 supporters of socialist President Salvador Allende were being detained.