Even though Ramon Garcia-Prieto tried to hand his killers a bag of money he had just picked up from the bank, they weren't very interested. "I'm going to kill you," one of them said. Then they shot the 32-year old architect in front of his wife and small child as they stood outside the home of friends in the exclusive Escalon neighborhood of San Salvador. The two killers calmly walked to a waiting car and drove away.
     The 1994 death of Garcia-Prieto, and the official coverup of his killing, lend credence to Benjamin Cuellar's argument that "impunity is the only thing that has been democratized in the country."
     According to Cuellar, director of the Instituto de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Centroamericano (IDHUCA), Garcia-Prieto's killing was ordered by a high military official who sent a hit team of agents from the Policia Nacional Civil (PNC) to get revenge for a dispute over a piece of property that the two families had fought over several years before.
     Garcia-Prieto spent the war years safe in Miami. His family has lots of money and significant political pull. "They're people with power but they came up against people with even more power," says Cuellar. "And a powerful person in this country can buy both the apparatus to kill as well as the apparatus to cover up."
     That's evidently what happened. The PNC and the judge charged with investigating the crime didn't begin an investigation of the murder until 19 days later, and then only under pressure from the Fiscalia General de la Republica. And some of the same police who investigated the case, according to Cuellar, showed up early--dressed as civilians but displaying military credentials--to threaten witnesses not to reveal anything.
     Despite repeated threats, Garcia-Prieto's family has not let the murder be forgotten. Although the police arrested and jailed one of the men believed to be responsible, a sergeant serving in the military High Command, they believe there's more to the killing than what the police have tried to characterize as a botched robbery.
     The government's Procuradora para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, Victoria Marina Velasquez, conducted her own investigation of the case and concluded that Garcia-Prieto's killing was the work of "Irregular Armed Groups, whose behavior is known and tolerated by the government." Velasquez also lambasted the judicial's system's mismanagement of the investigation. She said the killing and events that followed illustrated a crime "whose characteristics, according to the historical pattern in our country, are designed precisely to hide the intellectual authors and create situations of impunity."
     Velasquez has also criticized the PNC's behavior in the January 1996 deathof William Antonio Gaitan, a 16-year old who didn't know the car was stolen when some friends invited him to go for a ride in San Salvador. When the driver refused to stop at a police checkpoint and a PNC patrol car gave chase, Gaitan yelled at the driver to stop. He even tried to pull on the emergency brake. Yet the driver didn't stop, and the police chasing them opened fire. After five minutes of hot pursuit, a tire blew and the car was forced to a stop. The other three occupants ran off, leaving Gaitan, already wounded by police gunfire, slumped in the back seat. When the police arrived, one agent and the patrol car driver approached Gaitan. The driver reloaded his weapon and fired two shots from a short distance, finishing off Gaitan.
     In the aftermath of the killing, the police manufactured a string of lies to justify their behavior, including doctoring lab reports to make it appear Gaitan had fired a gun. Cuellar says the case illustrates a police action that "began as a legitimate act but ended as an arbitrary action, a summary execution."
     The state's handling of the two cases is similar, and not unlike other cases the IDHUCA has investigated. "In all the cases the police call the family liars, crazy, desperate. But it's the authorities who have lied, who have covered up, who have not done their duty."
     Cuellar's criticism of the PNC hasn't won him friends in high places. In October 1995 he was tied up while two men searched IDHUCA files and computers. One of the two was later captured and detained briefly. He's now free on bail, defended by a lawyer who defended members of the Atlacatl Battalion who assassinated six Jesuits in 1989.
     The PNC was created by the 1992 peace accords as a replacement for several security forces that had been used to repress civilians during the civil war. Yet according to Mirna Perla, a children's judge in Santa Tecla, some of today's police-related violence and resembles what happened in the eighties.
     "The same modus operandi is being used today as was used before," says Perla, whose husband Herbert Anaya, a well-known human rights activist, was assassinated in 1987. "We're experiencing the same kind of killings, with the same level of impunity. . . These people were trained to torture and kill, and they're still there, intact. Many of them from the Policia de Hacienda, the Policia Nacional, the GS-2 are now in the PNC. They know how to act in a clandestine manner, and even if they don't have institutional approval, they know how to do what they do."
     According to Cuellar, "They created a monster during the war that wasn't killed with the peace accords and now can't be stopped. The death squads were converted, they lost their financing from Miami and had to look for new sources of money. They grew accustomed to a style of life they don't want to give up. . . With the peace accords, the monster grew a thousand new heads, it diversified. Now these groups kidnap, contracted by people from the past as well as by private companies. The free market functions well for them."