U.S. deports former Salvadoran general accused of killings, torture

WASHINGTON, April 9 (UPI) -- The United States deported former Salvadoran general Eugenio Vides Casanova after a court ruled him responsible for torture and killings during El Salvador's civil war.

Vides Casanova, formerly El Salvador's defense minister and head of the National Guard, was deported and arrived with more than 100 other deportees to El Salvador on Wednesday. He was detained in late March under laws enacted in 2004 to prevent human rights violators from seeking refuge in the United States.

Due to an amnesty law, Vides Casanova, who lived in Florida since 1989, will not face charges in El Salvador. He was linked to the murder of four American churchwomen in 1980.

The deportation "sends an enormously important message to El Salvador and the rest of the world that we are not going to harbor people who committed these violations even when at the time they appeared to be supporting U.S. policy," R. Scott Greathead, a lawyer who represented the brother of one of the murdered churchwomen, said.

Vides Casanova's lawyer, Diego Handel, said the deportation was "a shameful day for the United States."

"Our [U.S.] government felt threatened by the insurgency in El Salvador to the extent we committed massive resources to dealing with it," Handel said of the time during the civil war. "We have betrayed one of the principal allies in that effort."

El Salvador's civil war was fought between the right-wing military government and left-wing rebels from 1980 to 1992. More than 700,000 people died.