Salvadoran torture survivor finds justice in U.S. court after more than 20 years

[struggle4progress]

The Associated Press
Published: February 3, 2007

... <Carlos> Mauricio and two other former Salvadoran political prisoners sued the military commanders who once ran the tiny Central American country in the U.S. courts. Along with lay church worker Neris Gonzalez and Juan Romagoza Arce, a doctor who volunteered his time helping the poor, Mauricio won a $54.6 million jury award in 2002 that was upheld on appeal last year ...

The three plaintiffs have recovered just $300,000 so far, and they donated most of that to human rights causes. But the money made it one of the first cases in which torture survivors were able to make those responsible pay for their actions ...

About 400,000 torture survivors live in the United States, and about 1,000 alleged torturers live among them, according to an Amnesty International report. They come from places like Haiti, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and often their violent pasts are unknown to U.S. authorities.

Over a dozen cases like Mauricio's have been tried in the U.S. courts, many of them handled by the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, the legal advocacy group that filed the case in Florida federal court on behalf of Mauricio, Gonzalez and Romagoza ...

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/04/america/NA-FEA-GEN-US-Torture-Tort.php