CJA In The News

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.

Tonight Hemispheres commemorates the 40th anniversary of the US-backed coup in Chile that brought to power a ruthless dictator, Agusto Pinochet, whose regime killed and disappeared thousands of Chileans during his dictatorship. We wll hear from Almudena Bernabeu, International Attorney & Transitional Justice Program Director at the Center for Justice and Accountability.

It is not the only quest for justice in Chile that dates back to the dark days, weeks and years following General Augusto Pinochet’s ousting of socialist president Salvador Allende. Thousands were executed or made to disappear, and thousands more tortured after the CIA-backed military takeover. But Jara – folk-singer, theatre director and cultural ambassador of the Allende government – remains arguably the best-known victim and a potent symbol of a nation still struggling to find peace with itself more than two decades since the return of democracy.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of what’s known as the other 9/11: September 11, 1973, when a U.S.-backed military coup ousted Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende and ushered in a 17-year repressive dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. We’re joined by Joan Jara, the widow of Chilean singer Víctor Jara, who has just filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. court against the former military officer who allegedly killed Jara 40 years ago. Jara’s accused killer, Pedro Barrientos, has lived in the United States for roughly two decades and is now a U.S. citizen. Jara’s family is suing him under federal laws that allow U.S. courts to hear about human rights abuses committed abroad. Last year, Chilean prosecutors charged Barrientos and another officer with Jara’s murder, naming six others as accomplices.

Four decades after Jara’s death, a civil lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Jacksonville, claiming that Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nuñez — a man now living in Florida — is responsible for those events as well as the torture of Jara in the days after the democratically elected Marxist President Salvador Allende was toppled and a military dictatorship installed.

CJA Legal Director Kathy Roberts discusses the Yousuf v. Samantar case.