Investigating Clandestine Criminal Groups: The Experience of El Salvador

Clandestine groups, often operating with a mix of criminal and political motives, are a major issue in many countries in Latin America. They engage in criminal activity, including drug trafficking, and often infiltrate state structures—the police, the judiciary, and other security agencies—both to protect themselves from arrest and prosecution, and to further their criminal and political ends. Investigating and exposing these groups is an important but challenging task.

In this panel, reporters who investigated death squads in El Salvador, and who explored their financing and their links to criminal enterprises and state politics in the 1980s and today, will discuss their findings and the challenges of this type of investigation. Rep. James P. McGovern, who as a Congressional staffer was himself involved in investigating the murders of six Jesuit priests and two women in El Salvador, will introduce the panel.

Panelists:

• Introduction by Rep. James P. McGovern (D-MA), co-chair, Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission.
• Craig Pyes, human rights investigator and a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter; he and a colleague were the first reporters to reveal the hemispheric links and inner workings of Salvadoran death squads while they were still active in the early 1980s.
• Douglas Farah, national security consultant and analyst; a former investigative reporter, he won the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for Foreign Correspondence for a Washington Post series on right-wing death squads in El Salvador in 1988.
• Carlos Dada, reporter and director of the Salvadoran online newspaper El Faro; he recently published the results of a two year investigation into the 1980 killing of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero and those involved.

A light lunch will be provided.

Location

Methodist Building
100 Maryland Avenue NE
Washington, DC