Friends,
Six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter were brutally murdered by a U.S. supported death squad in El Salvador on November 16, 1989. A Jesuit working in Nicaragua, Joe Mulligan, SJ, immediately traveled to San Salvador and went to the scene of this atrocity. While there, he scooped up some of the blood-stained dirt and brought it to Baltimore’s Jonah House. Eventually, an action was planned to take this blood-stained dirt to the White House on January 5, 1990, and twenty-nine of us were arrested. If you would like to watch a video of some of the action , go to https://youtu.be/9HW73O1ElJA. Thirty years later, a bit of justice surfaced in Madrid.
Kagiso, Max
Ex-Salvadoran colonel jailed for 1989 murder of Spanish Jesuits
Inocente Orlando Montano, 77, convicted in Madrid for carrying
out civil war atrocity
Inocente
Orlando Montano in court in Madrid in June. He admitted being a member of La Tandona, a group of corrupt senior
army officers who had risen to the top of El Salvador’s political and military
elite. Photograph: Kiko Huesca/AP
Sam Jones in
Madrid
Fri 11 Sep 2020 08.39 EDT
A former Salvadoran army colonel who served as a government security minister has been sentenced to 133 years in prison after being found guilty of the murder of five Spanish Jesuits who died in one of the infamous atrocities of El Salvador’s 12-year civil war.
Judges at Spain’s highest criminal court, the Audiencia
Nacional, on Friday convicted Inocente Orlando Montano, 77, of the “terrorist
murders” of the five Spaniards, who were killed along with a Salvadoran Jesuit
and two Salvadoran women 31 years ago.
Montano was handed a sentence of 26 years, eight months and
one day for each of the five murders. However, he will not spend more than 30
years in prison, the judges said.
The defendant, who had been accused of taking part in “the
decision, design and execution” of the murders, sat in a wheelchair in court as
sentence was passed, dressed in a red jumper and wearing a coronavirus mask.
The proceedings were held in
Madrid under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which
enables human rights crimes committed in one country to be investigated in
another.
Spanish trial brings hope
of justice for victims of Salvadoran death squads
The panel of judges examined the events of 16 November 1989, when senior Salvadoran military officers attempted to derail peace talks by dispatching a US-trained death squad to murder the Jesuits at their lodgings in the Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador.
The
soldiers carried with them an AK-47 rifle taken from the leftwing guerrillas of
the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in an attempt
to pin the blame on the group.
The UCA’s 59-year-old rector, Father Ignacio Ellacuría – originally from Bilbao and a key player in the push for peace – was shot dead, as were Ignacio Martín-Baró, 47, and Segundo Montes, 56, both from Valladolid; Juan Ramón Moreno, 56, from Navarra, and Amando López, 53, from Burgos.
The soldiers also murdered a Salvadoran Jesuit, Joaquin López
y López, 71, in his room before killing Julia Elba Ramos, 42, and her daughter,
Celina, 15. Ramos was the housekeeper for another group of Jesuits, but lived
on the university campus with her husband and daughter.
Inocente
Orlando Montano (second right) pictured in July 1989 with Col Rene Emilio
Ponce, formerly head of the armed forces joint chiefs of staff, Rafael Humberto
Larios, formerly defence minister, and Col Juan Orlando Zepeda, formerly
defence vice-minister. Photograph:
Luis Romero/AP
The Audiencia Nacional judges said that while they also considered Montano responsible for the murders of the three Salvadoran victims, he could not be convicted of their killings as the former soldier had been only extradited from the US to stand trial over the deaths of the five Spaniards.
During
the trial in June and July, Montano admitted being a member of La Tandona, a group of violent and
corrupt senior army officers who had risen to the top of El Salvador’s
political and military elite, and whose power would have been curtailed by the
peace talks.
However, he insisted he had “nothing against the Jesuits” and denied participating in a meeting where a plan was concocted to “eliminate” Ellacuría, a liberation theologian who was working towards peace negotiations.
Those claims were contradicted by Yusshy René Mendoza, another
Salvadoran former soldier who acted as a prosecution witness. Mendoza told the
court that members of the military high command – including Montano – had met
the night before the murders and decided “drastic” measures were needed to
tackle the FMLN guerrillas, their sympathisers and others.
According to the judgment, Montano took part in the decision
to “execute Ignacio Ellacuría as well as anyone in the area – regardless of who
they were – so as not to leave behind any witnesses”. Once the victims had been
killed, a soldier wrote a message on a wall reading: “The FLMN executed the
enemy spies. Victory or death, FMLN.”
The
massacre proved hugely counterproductive, generating an
international outcry and prompting the US to cut most of its aid to El
Salvador’s military regime.
The civil war, fought between the US-backed military
government and FMLN, cost more than 75,000 lives.
Ignacio Martín-Baró’s brother Carlos told the Guardian he was
pleased by the sentence, but added: “It’s just the start of justice. The
important thing here is that there should one day be justice and a trial in El
Salvador.”
Almudena
Bernabéu, a Spanish human rights lawyer and member of the prosecution team
who helped build the case against Montano and get him extradited from
the US, said the verdict demonstrated the importance of universal
jurisdiction.
“It doesn’t really matter if 30 years have passed, the pain of
the relatives carries on,” she said. “I think people forget how important these
active efforts are to formalise and acknowledge that someone’s son was tortured
or someone’s brother was executed.”
Bernabéu, a co-founder of the Guernica 37 international
justice chambers, said the case had only come to trial because of the
persistence of the Salvadoran people.
She added: “I think this could create a bit of a wave in El
Salvador.”
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Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore
Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.
Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything
to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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