• Ellacuría case: Father Tojeira uncovers US ties with the Salvadoran Army in the investigation of the massacre of the Spanish Jesuits
  • Courts.A UN expert gives the names of the military who ordered the killing of Ellacuría without leaving witnesses

A tremendous graphic analogy has crowned the penultimate day of the trial for the massacre of the Spanish Jesuits in El Salvador in 1989. "The High Command of the Salvadoran Army had the mice well locked in the mousetrap with no possibility of any way out." The phrase is from the prosecutor of the National Court , the mousetrap is the Central American University (UCA) of San Salvador and the mice are the eight victims of that massacre.

The image created by the prosecutor Teresa Sandoval illustrates the moment and circumstances of that crime: the UCA surrounded by several rings of troops, a battalion of 40 men who, in the dark of dawn, accesses the part of the campus where the rooms of the Jesuits and a domestic worker and her daughter and soldiers who machine-gun victims lying face down on the ground, unarmed and defenseless.

The Prosecutor's conclusions are conclusive: the crime against Ignacio Ellacuría was a planned terrorist murder , ordered and later covered up by a parallel military structure and on the fringes of legality. It was called La Tandona , and it was an extreme right-wing group that dominated the Salvadoran military power, from the Ministry of Defense to the headquarters of the General Staff. And between both ranks there were two vice ministries, that of Defense and that of Public Security.

In front of the second was the only one of the alleged intellectual authors of the crime who has been tried in Spain: Inocente Orlando Montano , who is 76 years old today. The Prosecutor's Office has cited the expert reports shown and ratified by its authors in the trial and the statements of Lt. René Yusshy Mendoza (one of the soldiers who accompanied the assassination battalion) to affirm that Montano was not only one of the leaders of La Tandona , rather, he was at the meeting in which five high-ranking military officials ( Emilio René Ponce, Juan Zepeda, Rafael Bustillo, Francisco Elena Fuentes and Montano himself) decided on the "elimination without witnesses" of Ellacuría. "A consensus was being reached between the Government and the guerrillas and Father Ellacuría was the bridge between both parties. 'La Tandona' saw his power be jeopardized and decided to eliminate it to continue his systematic violation of Human Rights . In his statement, Montano said that Ellacuría organized the 1979 coup d'etat , which advised President Alfredo Cristiani and the FMLN, and that the Army had photos of Jon Sobrino [another Jesuit supporter of Liberation Theology ] training children with weapons. It is evident that 30 years later, Montano continues showing animosity towards the Jesuits ".

For all that, the Prosecutor's Office, which in its brief asked for 150 years in prison, maintains its accusation towards Montano, although it has requested that the Penal Code of 1973 be applied as it is more beneficial to the inmate and that he be paid the time he has been in provisional prison.

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