7 27. State crime exists and to continue denying this – as in the case of some international legal doctrine – is to close ones eyes, partially accept impunity, and do a disservice to the development of international public law. As I have already mentioned in this separate opinion (para. 13, supra), the defendant State took a positive step in the contentious proceeding before the Court by acknowledging its international responsibility for the grave human rights violations in the instant case; it has also demonstrated a constructive attitude during the contentious proceeding. This, added to the Court’s judgments on merits and reparations in this Case of the Plan de Sánchez Massacre, signifies a general acknowledgement of the necessary primacy of law over brute force. 28. This is extremely significant, given the times in which we live, when there is a regrettable increase in the use of force in so many contemporary national and international armed conflicts. Demonstrating a truly irresponsible attitude, the apologists of the use of force seem to forget the suffering of previous generations and the lessons of the not so very distant past. For them the ends justify the means. 29. It should be recalled that the ancient Greeks had already realized the devastating effects of the use of brute force and war on both the vanquished and the victors, revealing the immorality of substituting the ends for the means; from the time of Homer’s Iliad to the present, all “belligerents” have become “means”, things, in a senseless power struggle, incapable of “subjecting their actions to their thoughts.” As Simone Weil observed with such insight, the terms “oppressors and oppressed” almost lose their significance in the face of the impotence of all men before the machine of repression and war, converted in a machine for the destruction of the spirit and the fabrication of insensitivity. 8 30. As in Homer’s Iliad, there are no victors or vanquished, all are taken by force, possessed by the war, degraded by the devastation caused by the brutality and the massacres. 9 The brutality and the massacres that took place in past decades and those taking place in different part of the world in these ominous times in which we live in 2004, have a profoundly de-civilizing effect. The dangerous escalation of violation at this start of the twenty-first century suggests that human beings appear to have learned little or nothing from the sufferings of past generations, which can only be limited by faithful adherence to law and its basic principles. Law is more important than force, just as conscience is more important than will 10 (the ultimate material source of all law). This judgment of the Inter-American Court provides eloquent testimony of the necessary primacy of law over brute force. 8 . S. Weil, Reflexiones sobre las Causas de la Libertad y de la Opresión Social, Barcelona, Ed. Paidós/ Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 1995, pp. 81-82, 84 and 130-131. 9 . S. Weil, "L'Iliade ou le Poème de la Guerre (1940-1941)" in Oeuvres, Paris, Quarto Gallimard, 1999, pp. 527-552. 10 . A.A. Cançado Trindade, "El Primado del Derecho sobre la Fuerza como Imperativo del Jus Cogens", in Doctrina Latinamericana del Derecho Internacional, vol. II (eds. A.A. Cançado Trindade and F. Vidal Ramírez), San José, Costa Rica, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2003, pp. 62-63.