After more than three decades, human rights advocates in El Salvador and around the world, as well as the families of five Spanish Jesuit priests who were massacred by the Salvadoran military in November 1989, await the decision of a court in Madrid, Spain, against former Salvadoran Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano Morales, who is accused of planning the killings.
The trial, conducted on video due to COVID-19, began in June and came to an end on July 15.
The 1989 massacre reflected the brutality and hatred that the military held for those who advocated for peace.
Colonel Montano served as vice minister of defense and public safety for the Salvadoran government during that country’s twelve-year civil war. He was one of seventeen people accused in Spain—the home country of five of the six murdered Jesuit priests—of planning the massacre. He was extradited from the United States in 2017.
The trial in Madrid was held under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which permits human rights crimes committed in one country to be investigated and tried in another.
“For us, this is an enormous contribution to universal justice and an enormous contribution to break the cycles of impunity in El Salvador,” Manuel Escalante, the subdirector of the Human Rights Center of the University of Central America (UCA), tells The Progressive. “A grand part of the testimony we at UCA knew, but what is important is that this was known in front of a judge.”
Bodies of Jesuit priests lying on the ground after the 1989 killing.
Early on the morning of November 16, 1989, soldiers from the infamous Atlacatl battalion, a counter-insurgency battalion trained by the United States, invaded the campus of the Jesuit-run university in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital city. The soldiers were given orders to “leave no witnesses.”
By later that morning, Father Ignacio Ellacuría, the University’s rector who had been instrumental in the negotiations for the Peace Accords, and five other Jesuit priests, were dead along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter.
During the massacre, soldiers also set fire to the rooms, burning images and paintings of Monseñor Romero, the Archbishop for San Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 after he had spoken out against the human rights violations carried out by the Salvadoran military. In October 2018, Monseñor Romero was declared a saint by the Catholic Church.
The 1989 massacre reflected the brutality and hatred that the military held for those who advocated for peace.
“It was evident that there was an intention to destroy everything that the ideas that they were developing represented,” Escalante says. “Their idea was for peace.”
Military officials had planned the attack for weeks. It was part of a campaign to derail the process of discussing the peace accords. By targeting Father Ellacuría, one of the key negotiators and advocates for peace, they hoped to paint him and other Jesuits as allies of the leftist guerillas.
“The [declassified U.S.] records reflect that there was detailed planning among the high command of the Salvadoran armed forces to target and kill the Jesuit priests,” Kate Doyle, the senior investigator at the National Security archives who testified in the trial, tells The Progressive.
In total, the United States contributed more than $4.5 billion to El Salvador during the 1980s, with more than 70 percent of those funds going to the military.
“The documents also reflect a campaign waged by the military to smear Ignacio Ellacuría as a communist, to link him with the revolutionary left of the FMLN [Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation],” Doyle adds, and to imply that Ellacuría was a tool of the guerrillas. In that way the high command of the military could psychologically prepare society for the killings.”
According to Doyle, evidence about the military’s assassination plot came larrgely from documents created after the Jesuits were killed. But she points out that the United States officials on the ground knew of the campaign and the high command’s hatred for Father Ellacuría long before they ordered his murder.
Prosecuting war crimes in El Salvador has proven difficult in the years since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992.
El Salvador passed an amnesty bill in 1993, which protected those accused of war crimes from being prosecuted, although the law was overturned in 2016. The prosecution in Spain has led Escalante and others to hope that this will open the door to more trials for crimes against humanity that occurred during the Salvadoran internal armed conflict.
Seventeen high-ranking military officers are currently on trial in El Salvador for their part in the massacre of more than 800 civilians in the village of El Mozote in 1981. The massacre was also carried out by the elite U.S.-trained Atlacatl unit.
The civil war in El Salvador occurred during the period of the United States’ proxy wars of the Cold War. Throughout the twelve-year civil war, the United States directly funded and trained the Salvadoran military’s efforts against the leftists guerrillas of the FMLN. In total, the United States contributed more than $4.5 billion to El Salvador during the 1980s, with more than 70 percent of those funds going to the military.
Doyle points out that the aid, in the eyes of U.S. officials at the time, would help democratize the region and assist the military in embracing human rights. But instead, it had the opposite effect. The money only assisted in the massacre of civilians.
The war left more than 75,000 people dead, and 8,000 disappeared.
Colonel Montano is a graduate of the United States military’s infamous School of the Americas (now called WHINSEC), which trained military officials from across Central and South America in brutal tactics such as counterinsurgency and toture. These tactics, ostensibly intended to be used in dirty wars against leftist guerrillas, were later deployed against civilian populations.
The Salvadoran military’s brutality, which hinged on terrorizing civilians in the name of stopping communism, was known by the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, but they lied to cover up the massacres.
But the massacre of the prominent Jesuits in 1989 led to this narrative falling apart. Congress withheld half of the military aid money to the country in 1991 (although the Bush Administration restored this military aid later that year).
“Reading the cables, you see how all of the truisms that U.S. officials told themselves about our involvement in Central America blow up in their face,” Doyle tells The Progressive. “The U.S. policy in the region during the Cold War was not simply to promote U.S. security and economic interests, but rather an aggressive effort to roll back communism as we saw it, explicitly assisting military dictatorships in Central America to attack the left.”