It took more than thirty long years and the culmination of a complex procedure for justice to be finally served. On Wednesday February 3, the Spanish Supreme Court confirmed the sentence of one hundred and thirty-three years in prison handed down at first instance, in September 2020, against the former vice-minister of El Salvador in charge of security, Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano, by the National Hearing, the high court in charge of terrorism and organized crime cases.
Now 77 years old, Mr. Montano was convicted of the assassination of five Spanish Jesuits in 1989, in what the Court defined as “State terrorism”. If it is unlikely, given his age, that he will serve the entire effective thirty years of maximum imprisonment, the sentence remains. “Historical”, as the families of victims and the Association for Human Rights of Spain (APDHE), who had brought civil proceedings, as well as the international organizations defending the principles of “Universal justice”.
In 1989, the massacre of the Jesuits upset international public opinion and marked a turning point in the civil war that had raged for ten years in El Salvador before ending with the peace accords of January 16, 1992. The reconstruction of the facts is “A horror story”, summed up the Court. On the night of November 15 to 16, 1989, in the residence of the Centroamericana José-Simeon-Cañas (UCA) University in San Salvador, five Spanish Jesuits and a Salvadorian were awakened in their sleep, as well as the cook of the places and her 15-year-old daughter “A commando group made up of around forty soldiers, belonging to the elite battalion of the armed forces, trained by the United States army, heavily armed and equipped”. Without the slightest ability to defend themselves, they were taken to the courtyard, where the soldiers ordered them to lie down with their stomachs on the ground, before firing salutes of AK-47 and M-16 assault rifles in their heads.
The target of this nocturnal military expedition was the Basque Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the university and long-standing public commitment to a peaceful solution to the violent conflict between the ruling extreme right and the Farabundo Marti Front of national liberation (FMLN), a Marxist movement. “He was the person who most intensely and effectively encouraged and tried to bring the two sides of the conflict to peace, through dialogue and negotiation,” recalled the high Spanish court.
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