El Salvador reopens probe into 1989 killing of 6 priests
06.01.2022
Constitutional judges in El Salvador have ruled in favor of proceeding with an investigation into the massacre of priests during the country's civil war.
A Spanish court in 2020 branded the 1989 massacre as "state terrorism"
The Supreme Court of El Salvador on Wednesday ordered that a criminal investigation into the massacre of six Jesuit priests should be reopened.
There have been attempts to prosecute those behind the killings — during the country's civil war — since a 1993 amnesty was declared unconstitutional in 2016.
However, these efforts have so far been deflected by legal maneuvers. The decision came after an appeal was filed by the country's attorney general, Rodolfo Delgado.
What happened at the time?
An elite commando unit killed the six priests — five Spaniards and one Salvadoran — in the priests' residence along with their housekeeper and her daughter.
More:
https://www.dw.com/en/el-salvador-reopens-probe-into-1989-killing-of-6-priests/a-60344768
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Earlier article:
11.16.2019
EL SALVADOR
A procession honoring the victims of the 1989 massacre at Central American University (UCA) in El Salvador, on November 16, 2013. (Johan Bergström-Allen / Flickr)
Salvador, US-Trained Soldiers Murdered 6 Priests in Cold Blood
BY
HILARY GOODFRIEND
Today marks thirty years since the massacre of six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter by US-trained forces. But US brutality in Latin America isn’t a thing of the past: top military officials involved in the coup against Bolivian president Evo Morales were trained by the United States, too.
On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were murdered in their residence on the campus of the Jesuit Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador. Thirty years later, the massacre remains emblematic of the indiscriminate savagery exercised by the servants of the Salvadoran ruling class, the impunity they enjoy, and the devastating legacies of US intervention in the region.
The Jesuit murders drew international outcry, but the victims were only eight of some seventy-five thousand killed and ten thousand more disappeared during the twelve-year civil war (1980–1992). Formally, the conflict pitted the US-backed military dictatorship against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) leftist guerillas. But the Salvadoran state tortured and slaughtered civilians with abandon. At the war’s close, a 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report attributed only 5 percent of the bloodshed to the insurgents. The regime and its paramilitaries bore responsibility for the vast majority of the conflict’s deaths, disappearances, and displacements.
The Salvadoran security forces didn’t carry out these horrors alone. They were armed, trained, funded, and advised by the United States. The attack at the UCA was carried out by members of the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite counterinsurgency force trained at the infamous School of the Americas (SOA) in Fort Benning, Georgia. Several members of the military high command who gave the orders and participated in the cover-up were also graduates of that illustrious institution. The best way we can honor the victims of the Jesuit massacre and US-backed atrocities worldwide today is to stop them from recurring by severing the global tentacles of US empire.
The War
El Salvador’s civil war was the result of decades, indeed centuries, of dispossession and exploitation of the country’s impoverished majorities at the hands of a handful of landed oligarchic families. The military regime quashed a 1932 indigenous and Communist uprising with genocidal violence, and peaceful movements for democratic reforms and redistribution were met with brazen electoral fraud and escalating force throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Salvadoran students, unionists, and peasants increasingly turned to arms, eventually formalizing the FMLN in 1980.
More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/el-salvador-murders-jesuits-uca-school-of-the-americas
