During the Salvadoran Civil War, on 16 November 1989, Salvadoran Army soldiers killed six Jesuits and two women, the caretaker's wife and daughter, at their residence on the campus of Central American University (known as UCA El Salvador) in San Salvador, El Salvador. Polaroid photos of the Jesuits' bullet-riddled bodies were on display in the hallway outside the chapel, and a memorial rose garden was planted beside the chapel to commemorate the murders.
The Jesuits were advocates of a negotiated settlement between the government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the guerilla organization that had fought the government for a decade. The murders attracted international attention to the Jesuits' efforts and increased international pressure for a cease-fire, representing one of the key turning points that led toward a negotiated settlement to the war.
Prior to the Salvadoran Civil War tensions between democratic reformists and the long-standing military dictatorship were rising. Salvador's economy was in a deficit due to the 1973 Oil Crisis and a string of bad agricultural harvests. [1] The old government continued to use its military to repress the population even in the face of mass opposition. In 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by gunfire most likely fired by someone in or linked to the Salvadoran Army. [2]
In October of 1980, The FMLN was founded to combat El Salvador's oligarchic military oppression against the people of El Salvador. These leftist guerrillas faced heavy persecution. El Salvador's military viewed opposition to their power as direct communism and a threat to the dictatorship. [3] Priests took a stand for the bloodshed in the streets by calling for social justice. This only put a clear target on their backs. "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. [4] The FMLN's initial goal in fighting was to overthrow the radical military oligarchy which changed over the course of the 1980s. They made demands for the demilitarization of the Salvadoran government. [5]
In June of 1989, the election of President Alfredo Cristiani enabled the early moves towards reform in El Salvador. The U.S. dropped the claim that the Salvadoran Civil War was an event pertaining to the Cold War rather than an isolated internal struggle. [6] Cristiani was forced to negotiate with the FMLN when they attacked the capital in San Salvador. Despite being fended off by the Salvadoran military, this offensive changed the tide instilling fear that the FMLN was growing too powerful to defeat. [7] The murders of the six Jesuits expedited military aid from the U.S. in support of the FMLN and those they fought for. [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. [10]
The Salvadoran army considered the Pastoral Centre of UCA El Salvador to be a "refuge of subversives". Colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda, Vice-Minister for Defence, had publicly accused UCA El Salvador of being the center of operations for FMLN terrorists. Colonel Inocente Montano, Vice-Minister for Public Security, said that the Jesuits were "fully identified with subversive movements." In negotiations for a peaceful solution to the conflict, Jesuit priest and rector of the university Ignacio Ellacuría had played a pivotal role. Many of the armed forces identified the Jesuit priests with the rebels, because of their special concern for those Salvadorians who were poorest and thus most affected by the war.
Members of the Atlácatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran Army implicated in some of the most infamous incidents of the Salvadoran Civil War, were a rapid-response, counterinsurgency battalion created in 1980 at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, which was then located in Panama. 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. He had been ordered to eliminate Ellacuría, leaving no witnesses. The officers decided to disguise the operation as a rebel attack, using an AK-47 rifle that had been captured from the FMLN.
The soldiers first tried to force their way into the Jesuits' residence, until the priests opened the doors to them. After ordering the priests to lie face-down in the back garden, the soldiers searched the residence. Lieutenant Guerra then gave the order to kill the priests. Fathers Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Baró, and Segundo Montes were shot and killed by Private Grimaldi. Fathers Amando López and Moreno were killed by Deputy Sergeant Antonio Ramiro Avalos Vargas. The soldiers later discovered Father Joaquín López y López in the residence and killed him as well. Deputy Sergeant Tomás Zarpate Castillo shot housekeeper Julia Elba Ramos and her 16-year-old daughter, Celina Mariceth Ramos; both women were shot again by Private José Alberto Sierra Ascencio, confirming their deaths.
The soldiers removed a small suitcase containing photographs, documents, and $5,000. They then directed machine gun fire at the façade of the residence, as well as rockets and grenades. They left a false flag cardboard sign that read "FMLN executed those who informed on it. Victory or death, FMLN".
Those murdered in the attack were:
All but Celina Ramos were employees of UCA El Salvador. [11] [12] Another Jesuit resident, Jon Sobrino, was delivering a lecture on liberation theology in Bangkok. He said he had grown accustomed to living with death threats and commented: "We wanted to support dialogue and peace. We were against the war. But we have been considered Communists, Marxists, supporters of the rebels, all that type of thing." [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". He offered the paper the words of Archbishop Hélder Câmara: "When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why they have no food, they call me a Communist." [15]
The murders attracted international attention and increased international pressure for a cease-fire. It is recognized as a turning point that led toward a negotiated settlement to the war. [16]
The U.S. government, which had long provided military aid to the government, called on President Cristiani to initiate "the fullest inquiry and certainly a rapid one". It condemned the murders "in the strongest possible terms". [17] Senator Claiborne Pell, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said: "I am devastated by these cold-blooded murders, which appear intended to silence human rights activity in El Salvador. I appeal most urgently for an end to the fighting and for a cease-fire ... and ask that those responsible for these murders be brought to justice as swiftly as possible." [17] An editorial in The New York Times catalogued a series of similar crimes that had gone unpunished and warned that "What's different this time is America's horrified impatience". It warned that the U.S. Senate would end U.S. aid if the government of El Salvador "cannot halt and will not punish death squads". [18]
House Speaker Tom Foley appointed Representative Joe Moakley to investigate the murders in what came to be known as the Moakley Commission. Moakley's findings revealed that the murders had been ordered at the highest levels of the Salvadoran military and led to a reduction in military aid by the United States to El Salvador and the creation of a United Nations commission.
Nine members of the Salvadoran military were put on trial. Only Colonel Guillermo Benavides and Lieutenant Yusshy René Mendoza were convicted. The others were either absolved or found guilty on lesser charges. Benavides and Mendoza were sentenced to thirty years in prison. [19] Both were released from prison on 1 April 1993 following passage of the Salvadoran Amnesty Law by a legislature dominated by anti-guerilla and pro-military politicians. It was enacted to promote social and political reconciliation in the aftermath of the civil war, but its support came from the political factions most closely allied with the right-wing armed groups identified by the report as responsible for most wartime violations of human rights. 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. It said he "altered statements in order to conceal the responsibility of senior officers for the murder." [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. [21] [22]
In July 2016, the Supreme Court of El Salvador found the Amnesty Law unconstitutional, citing international human rights law. [23] Benavides returned to prison a few weeks later to serve his sentence. [24]
In May 2017, the Jesuit community in El Salvador asked the Ministry of Justice and Public Security to commute the sentence of Benavides, who had served four years of his thirty-year sentence. They said that he had admitted and regretted his actions and that he posed no danger. Jose Maria Tojeira, head of UCA's Human Rights Institute, called him a "scapegoat" for those who ordered the murders and who remained unpunished. [25]
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In 2008, two human rights organizations, the Center for Justice and Accountability and the Spanish Association for Human Rights, filed a lawsuit in a Spanish court, against the former Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani and 14 members of the Salvadoran military, alleging their direct responsibility for the 1989 massacre. Judge Eloy Velasco admitted this lawsuit in 2009, on the basis of the principle of universal justice. [26] Neither the Jesuits not the UCA were parties to this lawsuit. [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). However, this new testimony opened up the investigation into former president Cristiani as well. [28] Evidence made available for journalists included handwritten notes taken during a meeting of the Salvadoran Military High Command at which the massacre was allegedly planned, and both the military's High Command and the country's Executive were probably aware of, if not directly involved in, these planning meetings. [29] Declassified CIA documents later indicated that for many years the CIA knew of the Salvadoran government's plans to murder the Jesuits. [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. It ordered their immediate arrest. President Cristiaini was not included in the ruling. 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. Five of the murdered scholars were Spanish citizens. 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. Those found guilty face sentences that total 2700 years in prison.
The ruling of the Spanish court specifies that the Jesuits were murdered for their efforts to end the Salvadoran civil war peacefully. The planning of the murder started when peace negotiations between the Salvadoran government and the FMLN had broken down in 1988. The leadership of the Salvadoran military were convinced that they could win the war against the FMLN militarily. They interpreted Ignacio Ellacuría's efforts for peace negotiations as an inconvenience that had to be eliminated.
The operation against the Jesuits involved cooperation between several military institutions. It consisted of a psychological campaign to delegitimize the Jesuits in the media, accusing them of conspiracy and cooperation with FMLN; military raids against the university, and the Jesuits' home, in order to map and plan the operation; and finally the massacre, perpetrated by the Atlácatl Battalion. [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. [34] On May 9, 2019, the Office of the Prosecutor of the National Court in Madrid recommended a prison term of 150 years to be served upon Inocente Montano. [35] The trial of Montano Morales began on June 8, 2020. [36] In September 2020, Morales was convicted of the priests' murders and sentenced to 133 years in prison. [37]
On the 20th anniversary of the massacre, President Mauricio Funes awarded the Order of José Matías Delgado, Grand Cross with Gold Star, El Salvador's highest civilian award, to the six murdered priests. Funes knew them personally, considered some of them friends, and credited their role in his professional and personal development. [38] [39]
Several academic chairs and research centers are named for them:
Most of these scholars are also credited for lasting contributions to the fields of philosophy, theology and liberation theology (Ellacuría), psychology (Martin-Baró), and social anthropology/migration studies (Montes). Some of their scholarship has been published by UCA Editores and others, but much of their material still remains uncategorized or unpublished.
The murders have inspired activism in the United States against U.S. imperialism from intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. [43]
On Sunday August 6, 2023, the canonization of Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas was announced for the UCA martyrs who upheld their faith even in the face of death. Those made martyrs by the murder of Jesuits in 1989 and beyond in the Salvadorian civil war are canonized as saints to the Catholic Church. [44]
The Armed Forces of El Salvador are the official governmental military forces of El Salvador. The Forces have three branches: the Salvadoran Army, the Salvadoran Air Force and the Navy of El Salvador.
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front is a Salvadoran political party and former guerrilla rebel group.
The president of the Republic of El Salvador is the head of state and head of government of El Salvador. The president is also the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of El Salvador.
Ignacio Ellacuría was a Spanish-Salvadoran Jesuit, philosopher, and theologian who worked as a professor and rector at the Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas" (UCA), a Jesuit university in El Salvador founded in 1965. He and several other Jesuits and two others were assassinated by Salvadoran soldiers in the closing years of the Salvadoran Civil War.
Alfredo Félix Cristiani Burkard is a Salvadoran politician who was President of El Salvador from 1989 to 1994.
José Napoleón Duarte Fuentes was a Salvadoran politician who served as President of El Salvador from 1 June 1984 to 1 June 1989. He was mayor of San Salvador before running for president in 1972. He lost, but the election is widely viewed as fraudulent. Following a coup d'état in 1979, Duarte led the subsequent civil-military Junta from 1980 to 1982. He was then elected president in 1984, defeating ARENA party leader Roberto D'Aubuisson.
Ignacio Martín-Baró was a scholar, social psychologist, philosopher and Jesuit priest who was born in Valladolid, Castilla y Leon, Spain and died in San Salvador, El Salvador. He was one of the victims of the 1989 murders of Jesuits in El Salvador.
Segundo Montes was a scholar, philosopher, educator, sociologist and Jesuit priest who was born in Valladolid, Spain and died in San Salvador, El Salvador. He was one of the victims of the 1989 murders of Jesuits in El Salvador.
José Simeón Cañas Central American University, also known as UCA El Salvador, is a private Catholic university with nonprofit purposes in Antiguo Cuscatlán, El Salvador. It is operated by the Society of Jesus.
The Salvadoran Civil War was a twelve-year civil war in El Salvador that was fought between the government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of left-wing guerilla groups backed by the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro as well as the Soviet Union. A coup on 15 October 1979 followed by government killings of anti-coup protesters is widely seen as the start of civil war. The war did not formally end until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when, on 16 January 1992 the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in Mexico City.
Jon Sobrino is a Spanish Jesuit Catholic priest and theologian, known mostly for his contributions to Latin American liberation theology. He received worldwide attention in 2007 when the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a notification for what they termed doctrines that are "erroneous or dangerous and may cause harm to the faithful."
Arturo Rivera y Damas was the ninth Bishop and fifth Archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador. Msgr. Rivera's term as archbishop (1983–1994) coincided with the Salvadoran Civil War. He was the immediate successor of Archbishop Óscar Romero. During Romero's archbishopric (1977–1980), Rivera was Romero's key ally. He had been the auxiliary of Romero's long-reigning predecessor, Luis Chávez y González (1938–1977). He was also a friend of Mother Teresa, who stayed at his family home on her visit to El Salvador
The Atlácatl Battalion was a rapid-response, counter-insurgency battalion of the Salvadoran Army created in 1981. It was implicated in some of the most infamous massacres of the Salvadoran Civil War.
Eloy Velasco is a Spanish High Court Judge, known for being responsible to determine whether or not six former Bush officials should face criminal charges in Spain. He is also known for having accepted the judicial demand against the former Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani and other 14 Salvadoran members of the military, for the 1989 murders of Jesuits in El Salvador.
Juan Rafael Bustillo is a former general and chief of the Air Force of El Salvador who is accused of planning the murder of six Jesuit priests, a housekeeper and her daughter at the Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas" (UCA) in El Salvador on November 16, 1989.
Return to El Salvador is a 2010 documentary film directed by Philadelphia filmmaker Jamie Moffett and narrated by Martin Sheen. It chronicles the rebuilding of El Salvador in the years after the Salvadoran Civil War, and explores the impact a lasting legacy of violence and unrest has had on those who survived, fled, and are now seeking to return.
The Truth Commission for El Salvador was a restorative justice truth commission approved by the United Nations to investigate the grave wrongdoings that occurred throughout the country's twelve year civil war. It is estimated that 1.4 percent of the Salvadoran population was killed during the war. The commission operated from July 1992 until March 1993, when its findings were published in the final report, From Madness to Hope. The eight-month period heard from over 2,000 witness testimonies and compiled information from an additional 20,000 witness statements.
The final offensive of 1989, also known as the ofensiva hasta el tope, was the major engagement of the Salvadoran Civil War. The battle, fought between the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front Marxist guerrilla and the Salvadoran government, lasted from 11 November to early December 1989. Sometimes referred to as "Ofensiva fuera los fascistas. Febe Elizabeth vive", in honor of an assassinated union leader, it was the most brutal confrontation in the entire conflict, amounting for seventeen percent of the total casualties in ten years of warfare.
Leonel Eugenio Gómez Vides was a Salvadoran political activist.
What Lucía Saw is a 2022 Spanish-Colombian drama film directed by Imanol Uribe which stars Juana Acosta, Juan Carlos Martínez, Carmelo Gómez and Karra Elejalde. It is a dramatization of the 1989 murders of Jesuits in El Salvador by the Salvadoran Army.