The Rise of the Isaac Accords: How Israel is Redrawing South America’s Political Landscape
This is not neutral cooperation. It is political conditionality.
By Freddie Ponton | 21st Century Wire | December 15, 2025
Foreign influence in the Global South rarely arrives in uniform. It comes disguised as ethics, stability, and shared values, only revealing its true cost once the rules are set. In Latin America, such a transformation is now underway. A new architecture of alignment is being quietly assembled, presented as moral course correction but functioning as a geopolitical filter. At its core lie the Isaac Accords, a project deliberately modelled on the Abraham Accords. Where the latter normalised Israel’s position in the Middle East through elite deals brokered by Washington, the Isaac Accords aim to reorder Latin American politics by locking governments, economies, and security institutions into Israeli and U.S. strategic orbit.
The Accords are not simply about Israel’s image or diplomatic isolation. They operate as a filter of legitimacy: governments that align are embraced, financed, and promoted; those that resist are marginalised, sanctioned, or framed as moral outliers. Venezuela, long aligned with Palestine and the broader Axis of Non-Alignment, sits squarely in the crosshairs.
This article examines how the Isaac Accords function in practice, why figures such as Javier Milei and María Corina Machado have become central to their rollout, and what this strategy reveals about Israel’s ambitions in South America, not as a neutral partner, but as an active geopolitical actor working in tandem with U.S. power.
The Isaac Accords: A Latin American Reboot of the Abraham Model
The Isaac Accords did not emerge in a vacuum. They are consciously modelled on the Abraham Accords, which rebranded Israel’s regional integration in the Middle East as “peace” while bypassing Palestinian self-determination entirely. The lesson Israeli and U.S. policymakers appear to have drawn is simple: normalisation works best when imposed from above, through elite alignment, financial incentives, and security integration.
The Accords are administered through a U.S.-based nonprofit, American Friends of the Isaac Accords, and financially seeded through institutions closely linked to Israeli state and diaspora networks. Their stated aim is to counter antisemitism and hostility toward Israel. Their operational requirements, however, reveal a far broader ambition.
Countries seeking entry are expected to:
- Relocate embassies to Jerusalem, recognising Israeli sovereignty over a contested city
- Redesignate Hamas and Hezbollah in line with Israeli security doctrine
- Reverse voting patterns at the UN and the OAS, where Latin America has historically voted in favour of Palestinian rights
- Enter intelligence-sharing agreements targeting Chinese, Iranian, Cuban, Bolivian, and Venezuelan influence
- Open strategic sectors: water, agriculture, digital governance, security, to Israeli firms
Israel’s own diplomats have described the Isaac Accords as a way to pull “undecided” Latin American states into Israel’s orbit at a moment when European public opinion has become less reliable. In other words, the Global South is being repositioned as Israel’s strategic rear guard.
The role of Javier Milei in Argentina illustrates how this model operates. Milei has not merely improved relations with Israel; he has embraced it as an ideological reference point. He has pledged to move Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem, framed Israel as a civilisational ally, and positioned himself as the Isaac Accords’ flagship political figure.
Co-Founder and Chairman of The Genesis Prize Foundation Stan Polovets presents prize to 2025 Laureate Javier Milei on June 12 in Jerusalem. (Source: American Friends of Isaac Accords)
That role was formalised in 2025 when Milei became the Genesis Prize Laureate, an award frequently described as the “Jewish Nobel Prize.” The Genesis Prize is not politically neutral. It is explicitly awarded to figures who strengthen Israel’s global standing and its ties with the diaspora. Milei’s decision to donate the prize money directly back into the Isaac Accords ecosystem symbolised how moral recognition, political allegiance, and financing now operate as a single circuit.
This is alignment rewarded, visibly, materially, and publicly.
As reported by AP in August, the Isaac Accords are set to extend to Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and potentially El Salvador by 2026, as stated by the organizers, the American Friends of the Isaac Accords.
Recent New York Times reporting situates Brad Parscale’s involvement in the Honduran election within Numen, a Buenos Aires–based political consultancy he co-founded with Argentine strategist Fernando Cerimedo, highlighting how transnational firms operate beyond traditional regulatory scrutiny. Critics warn that Numen’s methods reflect a broader global political influence ecosystem that often draws on data-driven targeting, psychological profiling, and digital amplification techniques associated with Israeli-linked political technology and messaging firms that have operated in elections worldwide.
When combined with U.S. political endorsements, strategic pardons, and offshore consulting structures, this model raises serious concerns about how advanced data analytics and covert messaging infrastructures are used to shape voter behavior in vulnerable democracies, eroding electoral sovereignty while remaining largely insulated from accountability.
Venezuela, Palestine, and the Manufacturing of Illegitimacy
If the Isaac Accords require a moral antagonist, Venezuela fulfils that role perfectly.
Since Hugo Chávez severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009, in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza, Venezuela has positioned itself as one of Palestine’s most consistent supporters in the Western Hemisphere. Chávez, and later Nicolás Maduro, framed Palestinian resistance not as terrorism but as an anti-colonial struggle, aligning Venezuela with much of the Global South rather than the Atlantic bloc.
Under the Isaac Accords’ logic, this position is intolerable.
Opposition to Israel is no longer treated as a political stance but as evidence of extremism or antisemitism. Zionism and Judaism are deliberately conflated, allowing criticism of Israeli state policy to be reframed as hatred. This narrative provides the moral justification for isolation, sanctions, and, potentially, regime change.
Maria Corina Machado in Venezuela, Thursday, July 25, 2024. (Source: AP – Matias Delacroix)
Into this context steps María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition figure most warmly received by Israeli and U.S. political networks. Machado’s alignment with Israel is not rhetorical or recent. In 2020, her party, Vente Venezuela, signed a formal inter-party cooperation agreement with Israel’s ruling Likud Party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. The agreement committed both parties to shared political values, strategic cooperation, and ideological alignment.
This is a remarkable document. It ties a Venezuelan opposition movement directly to a foreign ruling party, well before any democratic transition, and signals how a post-Maduro Venezuela is expected to orient itself internationally.
DOCUMENT: Vente Venezuela signs cooperation agreement with Israel’s Likud party – Agreement signed by María Corina Machado and Eli Vered Hazan, representing Likud’s Foreign Relations Division (Source: Vente Venezuela)
Machado has since gone further, pledging to:
- Restore full diplomatic relations with Israel
- Move Venezuela’s embassy to Jerusalem
- Open Venezuela’s economy to privatisation and foreign investment
- Align Venezuela with Israel and the United States against Iran and regional leftist governments
Her narrative rests on a crucial claim: that Venezuela itself is not anti-Israel, only its government is. According to this framing, Venezuelans are inherently pro-Israel and pro-West, their “true” preferences suppressed by an illegitimate regime.
In a November interview with Israel Hayom, Machado asserted that “The Venezuelan people deeply admire Israel.”
This argument is politically useful and historically thin. Venezuelan solidarity with Palestine predates Maduro and reflects a wider Latin American tradition of identifying with colonised peoples. To erase that history is to deny Venezuelans their own political agency.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has repeatedly accused the Venezuelan government of fomenting “anti-Israel” and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Yet, a closer look tells a different story. Caracas’ statements are largely expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination, combined with pointed criticism of Israeli state policies. By framing these positions as attacks on Jews or Israel itself, the ADL distorts the narrative, turning principled political stances into a perceived moral failing. This tactic underscores a broader pattern in which international organizations can paint Global South governments as rogue actors whenever they resist the gravitational pull of Israeli and U.S. influence, subtly laying the groundwork for diplomatic pressure or intervention.
DOCUMENT: Mini report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, accuses Venezuela of fuelling an incendiary anti-Israel and anti-Semitic environment.(Source (ADL)
Security, Economics, and the Cost of Obedience
Beneath the moral language of the Isaac Accords lies a familiar architecture of control: security integration, economic restructuring, and ideological discipline.
Israel is a leading exporter of surveillance technologies, border systems, cyber-intelligence platforms, and urban security tools, many developed under conditions of occupation and internal repression. In South America, these systems are marketed as solutions to crime and narcotrafficking, but their real function is often political: expanding state surveillance capacity during periods of transition.
Security cooperation creates dependency. Once intelligence-sharing, training, and doctrine are integrated, political autonomy narrows. Policy divergence, particularly toward China, BRICS, or non-aligned partners, becomes risky.
The economic dimension is equally strategic. Israeli firms are deeply involved in water rights, desalination, agrotechnology, digital governance, and infrastructure, sectors that determine long-term sovereignty. These investments are typically tied to privatisation, deregulation, and long-term concessions, transferring control of strategic resources away from the public sphere.
Venezuela is the ultimate prize. A post-sanctions transition would open one of the world’s most resource-rich economies to restructuring. Machado’s commitment to rapid privatisation aligns seamlessly with this vision, raising an unavoidable question: who benefits from “democracy” when it arrives pre-packaged with foreign economic priorities?
This strategy is inseparable from U.S. power. The Trump administration’s framing of global politics as a permanent war on terror and narcotrafficking, a framing echoed by figures like Marco Rubio, has provided cover for sanctions, covert operations, and extrajudicial violence across the Caribbean and Pacific. Israel’s partnership reinforces this logic, supplying both technology and moral framing.
Conclusion: The Global South and the Right to Choose
The Isaac Accords are not simply about Israel’s diplomatic standing. They are about reordering South America’s political horizon at a moment when the Global South is rediscovering multipolarity.
Israel’s role in this process is active, strategic, and consequential. Through political patronage, economic leverage, security integration, and narrative control, it is shaping which governments are deemed legitimate and which are disposable.
For South America, and the wider Global South, the warning is familiar. When alignment is framed as morality, dissent becomes deviance. When sovereignty is conditional, development serves external interests. When history is rewritten, intervention soon follows.
Non-alignment was never about isolation. It was about the right to choose. That very right, today, is being quietly renegotiated, and the cost of refusing may soon become very clear.
Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador dictatorship: Made in Israel
By Alan MACLOED | MintPress News | May 14, 2025
Nayib Bukele may be Palestinian, but the dictatorship he has built in El Salvador is very much made in Israel. From arming his security forces to supplying him with weapons and high-tech surveillance tools, MintPress explores the Israeli influence helping to prop up the man who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
Arming a Dictatorship
Since Bukele’s ascension to the presidency in 2019, Israeli exports to El Salvador have been rapidly advancing, growing at an annual rate of more than 21%. This increase consists primarily of weapons. Salvadoran forces are well supplied with Israeli hardware. The military and police use the Israeli-made Galil and ARAD 5 rifles, the Uzi submachine gun, numerous Israeli pistols, and ride in AIL Storm and Plasan Yagu armored vehicles.
Some equipment Salvadoran forces use comes free, courtesy of Israeli sources. In 2019, an Israeli NGO, the Jerusalem Foundation (a group that builds illegal settlements on Palestinian land), announced that it would donate $3 million worth of supplies to the Salvadoran police and military.
For others, however, the Bukele administration is paying top dollar, meaning that this relationship is extremely profitable for the high-tech Israeli defense sector.
In 2020, the Salvadoran police paid around $3.4 million for one year’s use of three Israeli spyware products. These tools include GEOLOC, a program that intercepts calls and texts from targeted phones, and Web Tangles, which uses individuals’ social media accounts to build up files on people, including using their photos for facial recognition. A third, Wave Guard Tracer (marketed in some regions as Guardian), tracks users’ movements through the GPS on their phone.
Perhaps the most notorious piece of spyware used, however, is Pegasus, developed by the NSO Group, an outgrowth of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200. The app hit the headlines in 2022, when it was revealed that repressive governments the world over had used it to surveil thousands of public figures, including kings, presidents, politicians, activists, and reporters. El Salvador was one of the most heavily penetrated nations. A report from Citizen Lab found that the Bukele administration was using it to secretly monitor dozens of public figures critical of the president, including 22 journalists from the independent outlet El Faro.
Incarceration Nation
Bukele has used these Israeli tools and weapons to crack down on dissent and opposition to his rule. Since 2022, when he declared a State of Exception, suspending rights and civil liberties, he has imprisoned at least 85,000 people, a staggering figure for such a small country. Today, around 2% of the adult population — along with over 3,000 children — languish behind bars in dangerously overcrowded jails.
The most well-known of these is the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT), which is by far and away the largest prison in world history. Built to incarcerate over 40,000 people, it is to this center that the Trump administration has been sending migrants rounded up by ICE. In a meeting with Bukele in the Oval Office, President Trump stated that U.S. nationals would be sent there next.
El Salvador holds vastly more people in prisons per capita than any other country, and conditions are among the worst in the world. Food is sparse, lights are kept on 24 hours a day, and cells are frequently packed with more than 100 occupants. Those incarcerated at CECOT are allowed no contact with the outside world, not even with their families or lawyers.
Often, the first thing a Salvadoran family hears about their disappeared relative is news that he died while incarcerated. Torture is commonplace. Osiris Luna, the director of El Salvador’s prison system, has even been sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in “gross human rights abuses.”
Bukele has justified the mass imprisonment of his countrymen as a necessary step to break the power of organized gangs and drug cartels. Yet a significant portion of those held are his political opponents. Among those detained are union leaders, politicians, and human rights defenders.
Facing the threat of imprisonment or other punishment, El Faro has moved its operations to neighboring Costa Rica.
A Palestinian Who Loves Israel
Amid the chaos, Bukele has fired tens of thousands of public service workers and reduced taxes on the business community. He has also reoriented El Salvador’s foreign policy from a progressive, anti-imperialist stance to allying itself with right-wing governments around the world, including Israel.
Despite coming from a prominent Palestinian family that emigrated from Jerusalem in the early 20th century, throughout his political career, he has made a point of vocally supporting Israel, its culture, and its foreign policy. As far back as 2015, when he was Mayor of San Salvador, the Israeli Embassy had identified him as a “partner for cooperation.”
Three years later, in February 2018, he visited Israel on a trip organized by Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tzipi Hotovely, and American Jewish Congress President, Jack Rosen. There, he participated in a security conference attended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, and made a public appearance at the Western Wall.
El Salvador is home to a large Palestinian population; some 100,000 live in the small country. And yet, the Central American nation is far from a stronghold of support for anti-colonial struggles. Palestinians in El Salvador have generally done very well and entered society’s upper echelons. Bukele is actually the third Palestinian to become president.
Historically, the Latin American business community has sided with conservative or reactionary forces, and the Palestinian diaspora has shied away from supporting resistance movements in the Middle East.
“Bukele’s culture is not so much Palestinian as it is neo-fascist. That’s his culture. So he is going to identify with repressive governments around the world,” Roberto Lovato, a Salvadoran-American writer and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told MintPress News.
The country is also home to a large and active evangelical Christian community, for whom Israel’s rise is a key issue. Despite being the son of the country’s most notable imam — one who claimed his son is a practicing Muslim — Bukele has positioned himself as a Christian conservative, and his evangelical supporters say he was chosen by God to rid the nation of gang violence. “I believe in God, in Jesus Christ. I believe in His word, I believe in His word revealed in the Holy Bible,” he said.
Dirty Wars and Dirty Politics
The connections between Israel and El Salvador, however, predate Bukele by decades. During the 1970s and 1980s, the country was a hotspot in the Cold War, and U.S.-backed death squads battled the leftist FMLN rebels. The military regime killed around 75,000 civilians in a dirty war that scars the region to this day. The violence was so extreme and so well-publicized that even the United States sought to distance itself from it. Into that void stepped Israel, providing 83% of El Salvador’s military needs from 1975 to 1979, including napalm. In return, El Salvador moved its embassy to Jerusalem, legitimizing Israel’s claim to the city.
Lovato, a former member of the FMLN, told MintPress that the country was turned into a “laboratory for repression.”
During the Civil War, the U.S. government aligned a whole panoply of different practitioners of torture and mass murder. You had trainers from Taiwan, Israel, and other countries going to El Salvador to train the Salvadoran government to do what they had learned how to do.”
One of the most notable individuals who received Israeli training was Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, leader of a far-right death squad. D’Aubuisson is known to have ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Nicknamed “Blowtorch Bob” for his penchant for using the tool on his opponents’ genitals, his death squad is thought to have killed some 30,000 people, many of whom were tortured to death. Thus, it is no stretch to say that El Salvador’s repressive state apparatus has long been sustained by Israeli money, tech, and know-how.
But this is far from an isolated example. Indeed, Israel has supplied weapons and training to repressive governments around the world, honing the skills acquired suppressing the Palestinian population and taking them global.
In Guatemala, Israel sold planes, armored personnel carriers and rifles to the military, and even built them a domestic ammunition factory. General Efraín Ríos Montt thanked Israel for its participation in a coup that brought him to power in 1982, stating that it went so smoothly “because many of our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” Around 300 Israeli advisors worked to train Ríos Montt’s forces into genocidal death squads who systematically killed over 200,000 Mayans. A sign of the deep connections between the two groups is that Ríos Montt’s men began referring to the indigenous Mayans as “Palestinians” during their attacks.
It is a similar story in Colombia, where the country’s most notorious death squads were trained by Israeli operatives, such as General Rafael Eitan. To this day, Colombian police and military make extensive use of Israeli weaponry. So normalized has the Israeli influence become in Colombian society that, in 2011, sitting President Juan Manuel Santos appeared in an advertisement for Israeli mercenary firm Global CST. “They are people with a lot of experience. They have been helping us to work better,” he stated.
Israel also armed and supported the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, even as the latter explicitly targeted over 1,000 Jews in the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
In Nicaragua, Israel supplied the Somoza dictatorship, helping it carry out a dirty war. In Rwanda, it sold weapons to the Hutu government as it was carrying out a genocide against the Tutsi population. Israeli weapons were used by Serbia during the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990s. And successive administrations in Tel Aviv also helped sustain the Apartheid government of South Africa, sending it weapons and sharing intelligence with it.
Therefore, it should come as little surprise that Bukele’s administration has sought and established such close ties to the Israeli government. These weapons and techniques, honed on the Palestinian population, are going global, helping a government thousands of miles away crack down on civil liberties. While Bukele — a Palestinian — is very much in charge of El Salvador, it is clear that his dictatorship has a distinct Israeli flavor.
Arrests made in Dutch journalists case
El Salvador Perspectives | October 18, 2022
Forty years have past since their crimes were committed. But in the past week, former military figures from El Salvador’s civil war have been arrested for their roles in the cold-blooded killing of four Dutch journalists covering that war.
In early 1982, El Salvador was a dangerous place for journalists covering the civil war between FMLN guerrillas and the country’s armed forces. Despite the danger, Dutch journalists, Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Joop Willemse and Hans ter Laag, ventured out to the Department of Chalatenango to get an interview with guerrilla fighters. The Salvadoran army ambushed their group and killed all the journalists.
The ambush was one of the war crimes documented in the 1993 UN Truth Commission Report following the conclusion of El Salvador’s civil war:
On the afternoon of 17 March 1982, four Dutch journalists accompanied by five or six members of FMLN, some of them armed, were ambushed by a patrol of the Atonal Battalion of the Salvadorian armed forces while on their way to territory under FMLN control. The incident occurred not far from the San Salvador-Chalatenango road, near the turn off to Santa Rita. The four journalists were killed in the ambush and only one member of FMLN survived. Having analysed the evidence available, the Commission on the Truth has reached the conclusion that the ambush was set up deliberately to surprise and kill the journalists and their escort; that the decision to ambush them was taken by Colonel Mario A. Reyes Mena, Commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade, with the knowledge of other officers; that no major skirmish preceded or coincided with the shoot-out in which the journalists were killed; and, lastly, that the officer named above and other soldiers concealed the truth and obstructed the judicial investigation…
1. The Commission on the Truth considers that there is full evidence that Dutch journalists Koos Jacobus Andries Koster, Jan Cornelius Kuiper Joop, Hans Lodewijk ter Laag and Johannes Jan Willemsen were killed on 17 March 1982 in an ambush which was planned in advance by the Commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade, Colonel Mario A. Reyes Mena, with the knowledge of other officers at the El Paraíso barracks, on the basis of intelligence data alerting them to the journalists’ presence, and was carried out by a patrol of soldiers from the Atonal BIRI, under the command of Sergeant Mario Canizales Espinoza.
2. These same officers, the sergeant and others subsequently covered up the truth and obstructed the investigations carried out by the judiciary and other competent authorities.
During the war a judicial investigation of the events came to an end in 1988 when the judge on the case sought asylum outside of El Salvador after receiving death threats, and the 1993 amnesty law prevented any prosecution thereafter.
After the amnesty law was nullified, the Fundación Comunicándonos and the Asociación Salvadoreña para los Derechos Humanos (ASDEHU) filed a complaint on March 13, 2018 asking for El Salvador’s attorney general (FGR) to reopen the case and prosecute the military officers in command of the ambush. The ambassador to El Salvador from the Netherlands joined the human rights attorneys as they presented the demand, and expressed his hope that the FGR would investigate and bring the guilty to justice.
The case was reopened, and now arrest warrants have been issued by the judge.
El Faro English describes the week’s developments:
General Guillermo García, the minister of defense and strongman of the Salvadoran Army in the early 1980s, has been detained for his alleged responsibility in the murder of four Dutch journalists in 1982, members of the judicial branch involved in the case and two relatives of the victims confirmed to El Faro. Also arrested was Colonel Francisco Antonio Morán, the former director of the defunct Treasury Police, a fearsome security force tied to massacres, enforced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial activities attributed to death squads.
The arrests were ordered on October 13 by Judge María Mercedes Argüello of the trial court in Dulce Nombre de María, Chalatenango, after finding sufficient grounds for the accused officers to face trial for the murder of Jacobus Andries Koster, Jan Cornelius Kuiper, Hans Ter Laag, and Johannes Jan Willemsen, Dutch journalists ambushed and executed by the Salvadoran Army on Mar. 17, 1982, in rural Chalatenango.
General García and Colonel Morán were detained in the early hours of Friday, October 14, in their homes in San Salvador. Their first hearing was set for Monday, October 17.
The court also ordered the arrests of Colonel Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, former commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade of El Paraíso; Colonel Rafael Flores Lima, ex-chief of the Joint General Staff; and Sergeant Mario Canizales Espinoza, of the Atonal Battalion.
The 89 year old Garcia was deported from the US in 2016 after a federal court found him guilty of serious violations of human rights prior to his entry to the US. He has also been linked to other civil war atrocities such as the massacre at El Mozote and the killing of four US churchwomen.
Judge María Mercedes Arguello also ordered that authorities begin an extradition process against Col. Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, former commander of El Salvador’s 4th Infantry Brigade, who currently resides in the United States. Reyes Mena is alleged to have given the orders in 1982 to kill the four Dutch journalists. The massacre occurred in Santa Rita close to the base of the 4th Infantry Brigade in El Paraíso, Chalatenango.
Dutch journalists from ZEMBLA tracked Reyes Mena down through social media activity to a house in the United States. He has reportedly been living in the US since 1984, two years after the massacre. From NL Times :
Zembla tracked down the colonel who ordered the murder of the four Dutch. The now 79-year-old Mario Reyes Mena has been living in the United States for four years. Zembla found him through his three adult children, who are active on social media.
In 1993 a United Nations truth commission concluded that Reyes Mena was responsible for the ambush and the murder of the Dutch journalists – Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Joop Willemsen and Hans ter Laag. That same year an amnesty law was passed in El Salvador, which meant that he could not be prosecuted in that country.
The ZEMBLA team tweeted the video of meeting Reyes Mena at his front door where they asked to speak to him about the allegations in the Truth Commission report.
Reyes Mena is seen answering the door in an ARENA T-shirt and angrily telling the reporters that he was never charged with anything. The video begins in English and later their conversation switches to Spanish.
The families of the victims and the Dutch government have been seeking justice in this case throughout the past 40 years. As prospects for reopening the case brightened, they published a multimedia website in English and Spanish which presents the story of the massacre, the historical context and the quest for justice.
Dutch news outlets reported reactions to news of the arrests:
For Gert Kuiper, the brother of the murdered Jan Kuiper, the news about the arrests came as a big surprise. “It’s really good news, I’m hopeful that they will be brought to justice. These arrests give me hope that impunity will be nullified,” he told NOS. Kuiper is also happy that El Salvador is asking for the extradition of Colonel Reyes Mena, the leader of the unit that shot the Dutch. He left for the United States two years after the murders and still lives there. “The Americans can hardly let him live his life in Virginia unmolested,” says Kuiper.
Gert Kuiper and other relatives received the news about the arrests from their lawyers. Zembla reports that representatives of the Dutch Public Prosecution Service are going to El Salvador to speak with the suspects.
Advocates for the families held a press conference on Monday, October 17, to praise the actions of the court:
It is a very important case, considered as a crime against humanity, for which truth and justice have been demanded for 40 years. It is one of the crimes described in the report of the [UN] Truth Commission for El Salvador; thus we must recognize the courage of the judge,” said Oscar Pérez, president-director of Fundación Comunicarnos, an organization that, together with the Salvadoran Association for Human Rights (ASDEHU), is advancing the case in El Salvador.
The massacre of children and others at El Mozote
Garden next to church in El Mozote where hundreds of child victims lie buried.
Thirty-six years ago, from December 10-12, 1981, the armed forces of El Salvador massacred hundreds of children in the town of El Mozote and surrounding communities. Last week El Salvador’s government divulged the results of the first official register of the victims who died in that massacre. Of 978 victims executed, 553 or 57% were under 18 years of age and 477 were 12 and under. Twelve infants died in their mothers wombs. Henceforth, at El Salvador Perspectives, we will refer to this atrocity as the “Massacre of Children and Others at El Mozote.”
As it covers the trial, the online periodical El Faro has offered us another view into the lives of the victims. A photogallery at the site shows ordinary objects of life in the village. The objects were recovered during the course of exhumations locating the bodies of the army’s massacre. Like the artifacts from Pompeii or Joye de Ceren, these items from everyday life give us a glimpse into the pre-disaster lives of the victims.
On this 36th anniversary, president Salvador Sanchez Ceren traveled to El Mozote for the first time during his presidency. In his speech, the president spoke of a debt to the victims, of the government’s efforts to invest in the zone as a form of reparations through public works, a health clinic, and cultural activities. The president indicated there were plans to construct a center devoted to historic memory so the events at El Mozote would not be forgotten. Despite his reference to historic memory, however, the president made no indication that the military would be required to open its archives from the time. He also made no mention of the current trial proceedings where former military commanders are charged with responsibility for the massacre of children and others at El Mozote.
Criminal law in El Salvador talks about those who are the material authors of a crime, the ones who pulled the trigger, and the intellectual authors of a crime, the ones who gave the orders for the crime. There have been previous trials in El Salvador for the material authors of such crimes as the murder of the Jesuits, a housekeeper and her daughter in 1989, or the murders of the four US churchwomen in 1980. But the current trial in the courtroom in San Francisco Gotera is the first full trial of the intellectual authors of atrocities committed during the civil war. For that reason, as well as the magnitude of the crime of a massacre of hundreds of children and others, the trial is historic.
The El Mozote criminal prosecution has developed a momentum and a seriousness not seen in any other case involving war crimes from the time of El Salvador’s civil war. It is a momentum pushed by the zealous efforts of the human rights lawyers for the victims who have called witness after witness to the stand to describe the loss of their families at the time. I have seen the coverage of the suit and the commentary about it in social media increasing as each new witness takes the stand. In small steps, the country is starting to confront what justice means for a military command which ordered its soldiers to massacre children.
Marco Rubio Threatens El Salvador, Haiti, and DR to Vote for Venezuela OAS Suspension
By Lucas Koerner | Venezuelanalysis | March 28, 2017
Caracas – Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio publicly warned the governments of El Salvador, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic Monday that the US would cut off aid if they failed to vote to suspend Venezuela from the Organization of American States.
“This is not a threat, but it is the reality,” said Rubio, speaking ahead of an extraordinary OAS session scheduled for Tuesday, in which the body’s 35 member-states may be called to vote on whether to invoke the Inter-American Democratic Charter against Venezuela.
“We have a very difficult situation in Washington, where massive cuts in foreign aid are under consideration and it will be very difficult for us to justify assistance to those countries if they, at the end of the day, are countries that do not cooperate in the defense of democracy in the region,” the senator added.
El Salvador’s left-wing FMLN government, for its part, slammed Rubio’s instrumentalizing of US aid as a means of “political pressure”.
“Marco Rubio’s disregard for international treaties that mediate and lay down the rules for cooperation astonishes us,” expressed Eugenio Chicas, spokesman for President Salvador Sanchez Ceren.
Chicas added that Washington is welcome to cut off future aid, noting however that slashing current assistance would be a violation of previous agreements.
The Dominican Republic likewise responded to Rubio by reaffirming its commitment to non-intervention and support for dialogue in Venezuela.
“The Dominican Republic supports dialogue as the solution to the situation in Venezuela,” declared Dominican Foreign Minister Miguel Vargas Maldonado.
Santo Domingo has been a key player in Vatican-sponsored talks between the Maduro government and right-wing opposition over the past year, with former Dominican President Leonel Fernandez serving on the UNASUR mediation team alongside the former presidents of Spain and Panama, Jose Rodriguez Zapatero and Martin Torrijos.
“We appeal to the international principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of [other] countries, respecting their sovereignty,” Vargas Maldonado continued.
Haiti, for its part, has yet to issue public statement concerning Rubio’s remarks.
Under the Chavez and Maduro governments, Caracas has forged strong political and economic ties with the three neighboring countries, which are all members of Venezuela’s regional energy integration initiative known as PetroCaribe.
Rubio’s comments come as OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro scrambles to amass a two-thirds majority of member-states to support Venezuela’s suspension, which has faced opposition from not only leftist governments, but also close US allies.
Most recently, the right-wing Kuczynski government in Peru, one of Venezuela’s most vocal critics in the region, has cast doubt on the success of the bid, calling it “extreme” and admitting that “there is not a majority”.
Likewise, Costa Rica has announced that it would not endorse the application of the Democratic Charter, insisting that the only solution to the country’s current crisis is “electoral”.
Amnesty No More
The Memory and Truth Monument commemorating the victims of El Salvador’s violence civil war (Wikimedia Commons)
By Robin Maria DeLugan | NACLA | July 20, 2016
The Salvadoran Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the country’s controversial Amnesty Law opens the door to unravel impunity for war crimes during El Salvador’s violent civil war.
On July 11, 2016, in a historic decision, El Salvador’s highest court abolished the amnesty law that has been in effect since 1993. The controversial law was put in place immediately following the signing of the peace accords that ended El Salvador’s brutal 12-year civil war (1980-1992), thus sheltering from prosecution the perpetrators of grave human rights violations committed during the conflict in El Salvador. In a much-anticipated decision, the Constitutional Supreme Court declared that amnesty law unconstitutional because it impeded the state’s obligation to investigate crimes against humanity.
An estimated 75,000 civilians lost their lives during El Salvador’s civil war. Some 8,000 were forcibly disappeared, while tens of thousands more were internally displaced or obligated to flee protracted violence. News of brutal atrocities spread across the world. From the high-profile assassination of Archbishop Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero to the merciless slaughter of the entire village of El Mozote, more than 22,000 acts of violence by armed actors of the civil war were recorded by the United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador.
While the state and the oppositional forces of the Farabundo Marti Liberación Nacional (FMLN) both committed abuses during the conflict, the UN-backed Truth Commission attributed 80% of human rights violations to the government of El Salvador. The Truth Commission, while helpful towards recouping the memories of the brutal acts of the war, had no power to enforce, especially against the amnesty law that followed. The amnesty law prevented prosecution and supported continued impunity thus thwarting national efforts for justice and reconciliation.
Over the past 20 years of post-civil war nation-building, government representations of national culture, history, and identity have maintained silence about the atrocities of the civil war. Some officials argued that to do otherwise would threaten the nation’s fragile peace. Others argued that the nation needed to look forward to the future, rather than dwell on the violence of the past. Such arguments justified the amnesty law. Challenging the government’s muteness and combatting public forgetting, civil society actors created two new museums and one major monument in the nation’s capital of San Salvador. Such commemorative sites have played a pivotal role as memory keepers while also helping to sustain the calls for unfulfilled justice.
In the late 1990’s the Museum of the Word and the Image (Museo de la Palabra y el Imagen, MUPI) was established “against forgetting” (contra la desmemoria) with exhibitions and educational activities dedicated to “weaving memory” (tejiendo la memoria). The museum collects and exhibits photographs, manuscripts, audio recordings, and films. Among the collections in the museum archives are photographs of the El Mozote massacre, posters demonstrating the international solidarity for the people of El Salvador and their revolutionary struggle; propaganda used by the Salvadoran government’s armed forces to reduce popular support of the guerrillas; photos about women combatants and the popular schools that were activated in the conflict zones during the war; and information about refugees and their return at to the country after the Civil War. The museum houses the most comprehensive existing archive of materials on the Salvadoran Civil War, maintaining documentation and memory of wartime abuses that the amnesty law sought to shield.
Carlos Henriquez Consalvi, MUPI’s co-founder and director, participated in the civil society collective that erected the Monument to Memory and Truth (Monumento a la Memoria y la Verdad) in San Salvador’s central Parque Cuzcatlán in December 2003. The commemoration site consists of an 85-meter black granite wall etched with the names of more than 24,000 civilian victims. Another portion of the monument contains colorful stucco reliefs, depicting symbols of past social struggles and violence, such as the assassination of Archbishop Romero. Since its construction, the monument has been recognized as a space for hope—and a place for continuing to envision and a more just, humane, and equitable society. In the absence of state recognition of past atrocities, civil society has had to rely on its own resources to recapture the memories and to publicly recognize the war’s many civilian victims.
Meanwhile, the Museum of Art (Museo del Arte, MARTE), which opened in 2003, has relied on private funding to promote and support contemporary art in El Salvador with an expansive collection that showcases the nation’s history. Its permanent exhibition, “Pieces of Identity,” (“Trozos de la Identidad”) includes paintings that represent the history of social movements in the country, as well as the violence associated with the civil war. Among them is “El Sumpul” (1984) by Carlos Cañas. The painting refers to a 1980 military operation in which at least 300 civilians, including many women and children, were assassinated in the River Sumpul in the department of Chalatenango. By displaying “El Sumpul,” MARTE does more than display the historical and contemporary artistic talent of El Salvador; it also tells the history of the nation’s darkest hours and serves as an important guardian of memory.
The abolition of the amnesty law is an important step in the government’s slow process of addressing an important chapter in the nation’s difficult recent past. In 2010, President Mauricio Funes, the first FMLN candidate to achieve the presidency, gained international attention when he issued a state apology for the assassination of Monseñor Romero, as well as an apology for historical and ongoing violence against indigenous populations in the country. In 2012, at an event marking the 20th anniversary of the El Salvador’s 1992 peace accords, Funes also apologized for the atrocities committed at El Mozote. Later that year the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a judgment condemning the Amnesty Law for impeding the government of El Salvador’s responsibility to investigate various cases of human rights violations including the case of El Mozote.
In 2013, an international forum at the Universidad de El Salvador’s entitled “Memories of the War: Changes and Continuities in Local Societies at the beginning of the 21st Century” continued the process of recuperating the history and memory of the Salvadoran conflict. In addition to highlighting the growing body of international scholarship on the civil war, the forum announced the creation of the Unit for Investigations about the Salvadoran Civil War within the national university and the decision to dedicate new resources to research about the conflict. These actions of official apology, international involvement, and state-sponsored academic programming made important steps to breaking long-standing official silence and together with other other civil society initiatives, like museums and monuments, promoted new knowledge about the causes and consequences of the civil war.
One of these consequences, of course, is that the civil war brutality has been replaced with other kinds of violence. As has been widely publicized, El Salvador replaced Honduras as the most violence peacetime country in the world in 2015, with homicide rates nearing one homicide per minute in January 2016. Many, including Benjamín Cuéllar, the ex-director of the Instituto de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Centroamericana, (Institute for Human Rights at the Central American University, IDHUCA,) see a connection between ignoring prosecution of the human rights abuses of the civil war and high levels of postwar violence. As he noted in a recent article in El Diario de Hoy, the impunity that resulted from the amnesty laws has permitted other wars, namely “the war between gangs, the government’s war against gangs, and the war of gangs against the Salvadoran population.” There is hope that addressing past human rights violations will play a role in creating a more just and peaceful society.
The revocation of the amnesty law now makes it possible to pursue justice for civil war wrongs including criminalizing those responsible for the human rights abuses caused by death squads, paramilitary, and security forces. The 73-page court decision lists 32 crimes that occurred between 1989 and1992 that can now be investigated. The list includes the names of members of the military or of the FMLN indicated as having responsibility. In terms of next steps, Romeo Benjamín Barahona Meléndez, ex-Attorney General under former President Mauricio Funes, explained that victims can now formally denounce these past crimes, and the Attorney General’s office will begin investigating the cases.
The court decision, while heralded by many, is causing a commotion within the leadership of the FMLN, the political party that holds executive power in the government. Structurally, whereas the military actors on the list are no longer in the government, investigations could instead lead to trials that involve FMLN leaders, for example the President of the Republic, Vice President, Ministers and Deputies. Some elected officials and government functionaries are openly critical about what will happen next, stating they fear “witch hunts” and the reopening of old wounds. Despite reservations from some in government, the Attorney General’s office appears to have the will to undertake investigations. However, the government lacks resources for the processes, including funds to support the indemnization of the victims who are determined to have suffered “moral damage” (daño moral).
However, should leaders or government actors ignore the ruling, there will undoubtedly be international criticism and a demand for accountability. Sites and practices of public memory in El Salvador have maintained the nation’s focus on civil war human rights abuses and the need for justice for decades. National and international attention created through these efforts contributed to the historic decision to finally revoke El Salvador’s Amnesty Law. These audiences will be carefully monitoring the fresh developments to follow. It is difficult to predict the outcomes of this important court decision. What happens next in El Salvador will be a chapter in an important historical process of nation-building, memory and justice that will provide lessons for other societies pursuing similar struggles against state violence, forgetting and impunity.
Robin Maria DeLugan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of Reimagining National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context (University of Arizona Press, 2012).
Ex-Salvadoran President Released From Prison
teleSUR December 22, 2015
Salvadoran ex-President Francisco Flores was transferred from prison to a state of house arrest Monday while awaiting trial for allegedly embezzling US$15 million from a Taiwanese aid fund to his personal and political bank accounts.
The former head of state, who governed from 1999 to 2004, was relocated from a high-security prison to a luxury residential area, after an appeals court judge dropped charges of money laundering against him.
In response, the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) party issued a press release expressing “indignation” over the ruling.
Several local NGO’s including the Social Initiative for Democracy and the Foundation for Legal Studies criticized the court decision, saying the resolution contained “incongruities and irregularities that should be the subject of an investigation”.
Flores was accused earlier this year by the attorney general’s office of allocating a US$15 million Taiwanese donation, intended for earthquake relief and social programs, to fund his Arena electoral campaign.
Flores’s trial on charges of illicit enrichment and embezzlement will begin on Jan. 18, 2016. He denies the charges.
In recent years, the ruling FMLN party has taken several steps to curb political corruption through the establishment of the Anti-corruption and Complex Crimes Unit, which handles cases involving corruption by public officials and administrators. The Constitution has also established a Court of Accounts charged with investigating public officials and bodies.
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From the Archives
The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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