A judge in El Salvador has ruled that the country’s former president and 10 others will stand trial for the wartime killing of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter in 1989. Source: NCR Online.
The whereabouts of Alfredo Cristiani, the president at the time of the murders, are unknown, and others who also are set to stand trial are missing.
A warrant has been issued for Mr Cristiani’s arrest as well as others, reported the Salvadoran newspaper El Diario de Hoy. No date for the trial has been set, according to the newspaper.
The November 18 ruling came almost 35 years to the day of the killings of Frs Ignacio Ellacuría, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Baró, Amando López, Joaquín López y López and Juan Ramón Moreno, along with Elba Julia Ramos and her daughter Celina Ramos.
They were fatally shot at the priests’ residence on November 16, 1989, on the campus of the Jesuit José Simeón Cañas Central American University in San Salvador, known as the UCA.
On the social media platform X, Jesuit Fr Jose María Tojeira, former rector of the UCA, wrote on November 20 that a trial doesn’t go far enough.
“The ideal is that the judge makes the military ask for forgiveness for what was an institutional crime,” he wrote. “To do it publicly and to promise to take clear measures so that it doesn’t happen again; 35 years without the [Armed Forces] taking responsibility for the crime.”
Most of the priests were wearing bathrobes or clothing indicating that they were getting ready for bed when they were ambushed, taken to a garden and shot point-blank, face-down in the head.
Their deaths took place during the country’s civil war, and like many of the more than 75,000 civilians killed during that time, their murders have gone unpunished – until recently.
In 2020, Spain convicted Inocente Montano, a former Salvadoran colonel, for the murder of five of the priests who had Spanish citizenship. He was sentenced to 133 years in prison. Montano also will be tried in the group of 11 in El Salvador.
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El Salvador to try former president in 1989 killing of Jesuits, companions (By Rhina Guidos, NCR Online)
