Officials: Salvadoran beloved in Florida tortured rebels

MIAMI – Immigration officials say a Salvadoran man whose arrest had rallied friends and neighbours in northern Florida was a soldier who tortured suspected guerrillas before arriving in the U.S.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement have deported Jose Francisco Grijalva Monroy after he testified he hung rebels by their hands from trees and tied them to the back of an army Jeep to drag them on the road.

ICE said in a Friday release the 49-year-old man was a member of the Salvadoran army. The nation’s civil war raged from 1980 to 1992. Grijalva Monroy has lived in Florida for more than 20 years. The agency has said he was arrested because of an active deportation order from 2011.

His February arrest rallied neighbours in the northern Florida city of Apalachicola where he worked as a manager of a supermarket and raised two U.S.-born children. His family did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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