Salvadoran Catholic Church Refuses to Turn Over Archives to Officials

After law enforcement authorities in El Salvador announced they had searched the premises of the shuttered Tutela Legal human rights office last week, advocates in the country were assured that the center’s archives had been safeguarded by the government. However, on Sunday the Archdiocese clarified that it had refused to allow police to view the records, and had eventually reached an agreement which permitted Church officials to hold on to them.

On Friday, the Salvadoran Attorney General’s Office announced that it had obtained a court order to search Tutela Legal in order to guarantee the safekeeping of the estimated 50,000 case files kept in the center. Attorney General Luis Martinez told El Faro that the office had been secured in order to guarantee that the records could be used in future trials related to human rights abuses in the country’s civil war. “We are taking action on the issue of massacres, and are defending the victims’ right to protection,” Martinez said. Nevertheless, El Faro noted that the nature of public prosecutors’ control over the archives, as well as their capacity to take stock of the inventory, was uncertain.

This was cleared up by the Archbishop of San Salvador, Jose Luis Escobar Alas, who told reporters yesterday that he had not permitted the Attorney General to assume control over the records.  “The archive belongs to the Church, and we are not going to allow anyone to take away any part of it,” said Monsignor Escobar. La Prensa Grafica reported that, despite Martinez’s announcement, Friday’s search of Tutela Legal had been merely “superficial,” and did not consist of a review of the records. The Archbishop had apparently reached an agreement with Attorney General’s Office to allow the archives to remain under Church supervision. According to the AFP, law enforcement officials only briefly inspected the archives and placed yellow tape on the doors in Friday’s operation.

The fact that the records will remain in the hands of the San Salvador Archdiocese will no doubt some rankle human rights activists in the country, many of whom have expressed concern about the Church’s motives for closing Tutela Legal. Some have suggested that it is an attempt to shield human rights abusers, pointing out that the move came after the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on whether the country’s amnesty law was constitutional. While the Church has said it will reopen a new office to take Tutela Legal’s place, it has provided a timeline for this. To fill the void left by the human rights center, a number of activists have laid plans to create a new organization in its place, to be named after deceased Tutela Legal director Maria Julia Hernandez, IPS reported last week.

News Briefs

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