13 39. The reaction to grave and systematic violations of human rights and international humanitarian law are today a legitimate concern of the international community as a whole. This reaction is even more necessary when the victims are vulnerable and defenseless (as in this Case of Plan de Sánchez Massacre), and the structure of public power is deformed and put at the service of repression rather than in the search of the common good. I consider that the international criminal responsibility of the individual does not excuse that of the State; the two co-exist, and recognition of this is of crucial importance for the eradication of impunity. The norms of contemporary international law are addressed directly at both the State and its agents; the conduct of both is established and regulated by those norms, and both the State and its agents must respond for the consequences of their acts and omissions. VIII. Epilogue 40. I could not conclude this separate opinion without referring, very briefly, to an aspect of the Case of Plan de Sánchez Massacre that, in my opinion, cannot be ignored. Even though the facts occurred 22 years ago, they are certainly still alive in the memory of the survivors. The years of silence and humiliation, faced with the difficulties of locating the clandestine cemeteries and exhuming the corpses of those murdered in the massacre, and the prolonged denial of justice, could not erase what happened in Plan de Sánchez on July 18, 1982, from the memory of the survivors. As a Latin America writer has indicated, “forgetting is full of memories”;47 in other words, there is no forgetting. 41. Memory is enduring, it resists the erosion of time, it surges up from the depths and darkness of human suffering; since the routes of the past were traced and duly trod, they are already known, and remain unforgettable. In this respect, a great thinker of the twentieth century said that we should never ignore “respect for the eternal human rights, appreciation for what is old, and the continuity of the culture and history of the spirit.”48 42. Two decades after the Plan de Sánchez massacre, the defendant State has acknowledged its international responsibility for the grave human rights violations49 in the cas d'espèce, and the victims of Plan de Sánchez have had the merits of their case heard and decided by an international human rights court. The survivors of the Plan de Sánchez massacre can now fully reconstruct or reconstitute their relations with their dead, vindicated by this judgment of the Inter-American Court. 43. In summary, the human conscience is the material source of all law. The collective conscience of the members of the Mayan people has given eloquent testimony of its spiritual, individual and collective existence, which identifies, connects and distinguishes them. The fate of each one of them is inescapably linked to that of the other members of their communities. As C.G. Jung so lucidly reflected in his autobiography, the human soul has an objective nature and behavior.50 The 47 M. Benedetti, El Olvido Está Lleno de Memoria, Bogotá, Edit. Planeta, 2001, pp. 13-19. 48 C.G. Jung, op. cit. infra n. (48), p. 278. 49 Embodied in Articles 1(1), 5(1) and (2), 8(1), 11, 12(2) and (3), 13(2)(a) and (5), 16(1), 21(1) and (2), 24 and 25 of the American Convention; cf. para. 46 of this judgment. 50 C.G. Jung, Recuerdos, Sueños, Pensamientos, Barcelona, Ed. Seix Barral, 2002, pp. 126 and 135.