José Guillermo García-Merino, a former El Salvador Defense Minster who had been living in the United States for over 25 years, was extradited to San Salvador to face justice for war crimes last week.

The 83-year-old García-Merino was Defense Minister from 1979 to 1983, a time when his nation was engaged in a civil war that lead to the deaths of approximately 70,000 civilians.

Nestor Yglesias, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announced on Jan. 8 that the former general had been flown to the capital city, the Associated Press reports.

García-Merino was arrested in Florida on Dec. 17, 2015 when an immigration judge upheld a 2014 decision, which declared that he could be deported. As The New York Times reports, Judge Michael C. Horn’s 2014 ruling found that under García-Merino the torture and murder of government opponents was a deliberate military policy.

In 2015, Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, another high-ranking former Salvadoran official who had also been living in Florida, was similarly deported back to El Salvador.

According to Clyde Haberman, a journalist for The New York Times, both José Guillermo García and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, were allowed to settle in Florida because they had once been considered allies to the U.S. “They were allowed to settle there during the presidency of George Bush, who, like his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, considered them allies and bulwarks against a Moscow-backed leftist insurgency," wrote Haberman in The New York Times.

Haberman said that as administrations changed so did the government's attitude towards the exiled officials.

In 2014, El Salvador’s government released a report detailing the crimes against humanity that were committed during its civil war. As reported in Telesur, President Sanchez Ceren called the report’s publication a “symbol of a past we do not want to repeat.”

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