The Other Americans: Salvadoran Military Official on Trial for 1989 Killing of Jesuit Priests

[Judi Lynn]

The brutality was known by the Reagan and Bush administrations, but they lied to cover up the massacres for their own political gain.

by Jeff Abbott

July 30, 2020

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.

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.”

More:
https://progressive.org/dispatches/salvadoran-official-killing-jesuit-priests-abbott-200730/