1989 murders of Jesuits in El Salvador
"Be a patriot, kill a Priest," phrases such as these stemmed from propagandist anti-communist sentiment instilled into the radical leadership during the Salvadoran Civil War.
Despite being fended off by the Salvadoran military, this offensive changed the tide instilling fear that the FMLN was growing too powerful to defeat.
[8] Note: All descriptions of events are taken from the Truth Commission's report[9] and the summary of accusations admitted by the Spanish court against the members of the Salvadoran military who were sentenced for the crime.
Colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda, Vice-Minister for Defence, had publicly accused UCA El Salvador of being the center of operations for FMLN terrorists.
In negotiations for a peaceful solution to the conflict, Jesuit priest and rector of the university Ignacio Ellacuría had played a pivotal role.
On the evening of 15 November, Atlácatl Colonel Guillermo Alfredo Benavides Moreno met with officers under his command at the Military College.
He informed them that the General Staff considered the recent rebel offensive "critical", to be met with full force, and that all "known subversive elements" were to be eliminated.
"[13] When The New York Times described the murdered priests as "leftist intellectuals" in March 1991,[14] Archbishop John R. Quinn of San Francisco objected to the use of that characterization "without qualification or nuance".
The trial's outcome was confirmed by the report presented by the Truth Commission for El Salvador, which detailed how Salvadoran military and political figures concealed vital information in order to shield those responsible for the massacre.
The report identified Rodolfo Parker, a lawyer and politician who later led the Christian Democratic Party and became a member of the Legislative Assembly.
"[20] The Jesuits in El Salvador, led by José María Tojeira, UCA's former rector, continued to work with the UCA's Institute of Human Rights, founded by Segundo Montes, to use the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, to bypass the Salvadoran Amnesty Law of 1993 and expose the role of higher military officers in the murders.
Jose Maria Tojeira, head of UCA's Human Rights Institute, called him a "scapegoat" for those who ordered the murders and who remained unpunished.
[27] During the course of this judicial process, an unidentified witness confessed to his own participation in the massacre and implicated the High Command of the Salvadoran Military and Cristiani.
Judge Velasco's resolution on the demand initially included investigations on the 14 implicated members of the Salvadoran Military, excluding the former Salvadoran president, but including the Military High Command represented by General (Colonel, at that time) René Emilio Ponce (who then was chief of defence of El Salvador).
[30][failed verification] On 30 May 2011, the court ruled against twenty members of the Salvadoran military finding them guilty of murder, terrorism, and crimes against humanity.
According to the substantiation of the ruling, the accused took advantage of an initial war context to perpetrate violations of human rights, with the aggravating character of xenophobia.
The propaganda against them, that prepared the context for the murder, called them leftist neoimperialists from Spain, who were in El Salvador to reinstate colonialism.
The ruling of the Spanish court specifies that the Jesuits were murdered for their efforts to end the Salvadoran civil war peacefully.
[31][32] In August 2011, it was discovered by a human rights organization, The Center for Justice and Accountability that one of the twenty Salvadoran military officers indicted in a Spanish court, "Inocente Orlando Montano Morales", a former government vice minister of public safety, was living in Massachusetts for a decade using his real name.
[33] He was subsequently charged with immigration fraud and perjury, resulting in a plea deal with U.S. authorities, before being extradited to Spain in November 2017 to stand trial for his participation of the assassination of Father Ignacio Ellacuría.
[43] On Sunday, August 6, 2023, Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas announced the opening of the canonization process of the slain Jesuits and their household as well as other victims of the Salvadoran civil war.
