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Alfredo Cristiani
Alfredo Cristiani, the former president of El Salvador, has been charged by prosecutors for his role in the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests at the height of the country’s internal armed conflict. He is accused along with twelve others, primarily high-ranking members of the military.
“[The case] has been a symbol of impunity in El Salvador and in the public prosecutor’s office for more than twenty years, which has always been on the side of the perpetrators, never on the side of justice,” Leonor Arteaga, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Due Process of Law Foundation, tells The Progressive. But there are questions about the accusations against the former president.
“It is a right of the victims to have a judicial process, where the truth comes out, against the intellectual authors.”
“In this case the arrests seem to come a little out of nowhere,” Arteaga says. “Behind these orders for arrest there is no solid investigation, there is no evidence from an investigation by the prosecutor’s office.”
She adds, “There is not enough evidence to consider him as a defendant in the case. The Truth Commission mentioned Cristiani in its report, but to prosecute him criminally, other types of evidence are needed that apparently do not exist.”
Arteaga suggests that this could be yet another action by El Salvador’s current President Nayib Bukele to attack his political rivals, specifically among the political and economic elite. The lack of evidence, she feels, will likely lead to the case failing in the courts.
Cristiani, a member of the far-right ARENA party and part of the political elite, oversaw the signing of peace accords with leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 1991. The peace accords brought the country’s twelve-year brutal civil war to an end.
The former president, who served between 1989 and 1994, has denied any knowledge or involvement in the plans to carry out the massacre of the Jesuit priests.
According to Arteaga, this is the first time that a former president is being accused of crimes against humanity during the country’s internal armed conflict. While there are questions about the case, its advancement in El Salvador is welcomed by the victims’ lawyers.
“It is a victory and something just,” Arnau Baulenas, a lawyer who represents the families of the victims of the massacre, tells The Progressive. “It is a right of the victims to have a judicial process, where the truth comes out, against the intellectual authors.”
On November 16, 1989, soldiers from the infamous Atlacatl battalion invaded the campus of the Jesuit-run University of Central America in San Salvador. The soldiers were given orders to leave no witnesses.
The Atlacatl battalion was an elite unit trained by U.S. advisors in El Salvador for rapid response and counterinsurgency in the early 1980s. The United Nations-sponsored truth commission found that the unit was responsible for a number of high profile massacres, including the killing of the Jesuit priests, during the country’s twelve-year civil war, which left more than 75,000 people dead, and 8,000 disappeared.
Father Ignacio Ellacuría, the university’s rector, along with five other Jesuit priests, a housekeeper, and her teenage daughter were brutally murdered by the soldiers. Father Ellacuría had been an instrumental part of the negotiations for peace between the Guerrillas and the Salvadoran government.
At the time, there were attempts by the ultra right and segments of the Salvadoran military to smear Father Ellacuría as a communist sympathizer and “a tool” of the guerrillas. Kate Doyle, the senior investigator at the National Security Archive, told The Progressive in 2020 that this campaign was undertaken to prepare the society for the massacre.
The crime had remained unprosecuted for decades, in part due to a post-war amnesty law that protected those accused of carrying out crimes during the civil war. This amnesty was later ruled to be unconstitutional by the country’s Supreme Court in 2016.
The current charges against Cristiani, the former president, continue previous efforts to prosecute the massacre’s perpetrators. A Spanish court in 2020 sentenced former Salvadoran Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano, who had been vice minister of defense and public safety for the Salvadoran government at the time of the murders, to 133 years for his part in the massacre of the priests.
He was one of eight people accused in Spain, the home country of five of the murdered Jesuit priests.
El Salvador marked the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the peace accords on January 16. But the country failed to hold a public ceremony to commemorate this anniversary, in part due to the position of President Bukele.
“President Bukele has no real interest in justice,” Arteaga explains. “Until now, all his actions have shown that he is a president who believes more in the power of imposition and control, who does not comply with the laws.”
President Bukele has referred to the peace accords as a “farce.”
“There is quite a bit of inconsistency in the position of the president,” Baulenas says. “Because a country moving from war to peace can never be a fraud. That is to say, whenever there is peace in the country it is a victory.”
Many elements of the 1992 peace agreements have been reversed in the past thirty years. Buekele, elected in 2019, has largely sought to erase these accords and diminish what occurred during the internal armed conflict in the 1980s and early 1990s, while at the same time growing closer to the country’s military forces.
“Many things from the peace agreements have not been implemented and we have to continue working on this,” Baulenas says. “But President Bukele himself contradicts the peace agreements.”
This is a common problem in Central America. The attacks on the peace accords have permitted a culture of impunity to fester in these post war societies. While Guatemala has taken steps to prosecute former soldiers for war crimes, there also exists a far-right plan to take control of the judicial sector or for the congress to declare amnesty for war criminals.
But Bukele has taken significant steps back from the accords, including increasing the presence of the Salvadoran military in the country’s public security structure. This has included deploying soldiers against the country’s congress in 2020.
The military has also blocked investigators from access to the archives of the El Mozote massacre, which is also currently in the courts. There are seventeen former high-ranking military officers who are facing charges for massacring 800 civilians in the village of El Mozote in 1981. This massacre was also carried out by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl battalion.
“We want these cases to advance in El Salvador,” Arteaga says. “The impunity of the past continues to send a negative message.”