• Three decades.Chronology of the 'Ellacuría Case'
  • Justice. Former Lieutenant Mendoza: "The High Command gave the order to eliminate Ellacuría and the President of El Salvador knew it"
  • Courts.José María Tojeira, former Jesuit superior: "Five intellectual authors of the massacre are missing from the trial"

"The then Colonel René Emilio Ponce , in presence and in conspiracy with General Rafael Bustillo , the then Colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda , Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano and Colonel Francisco Elena Fuentes , gave Colonel Guillermo Benavides the order to eliminate Father Ignacio It happened without leaving any witnesses. "

If Covid had allowed the presence of the public, the phrase would not have rebounded with such echo in Room 1 of the National Court. Almost at the end of the seventh day of the trial that follows against those responsible for the massacre of the Spanish Jesuits in El Salvador in 1989, one of the witnesses has given names, surnames and charges to the military who gave the order. He is the American jurist Douglas Cassel , who was one of the three legal advisers of the United Nations Truth Commission, which in 1994 established the responsibility of the Salvadoran military hierarchy in the design, execution and subsequent cover-up of the crime.

But this Friday, that report has had a voice. And the names of the alleged culprits have been heard, one by one, by those who follow the trial. And among those names cited by Douglas was that of Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano, the only high command that has been tried in Spain. So, sitting in his wheelchair and protected by his mask, Montano has had to listen to how the United Nations expert has firmly argued that he was one of the intellectual and essential authors of the massacre.

Four military

"In the Truth Commission we established that we would only give names when we had solid and substantial evidence. And for this, we should have at least two independent and reliable sources. The murder order without leaving witnesses came from that group of four military members to the High Command and she was transferred to Benavides. And for this she had the Atlacatl battalion. Later, the cover-up and the measures to hide the murder were the work of a greater number of high military commanders of El Salvador, "said Cassel.

When Inocente Montano's defense attorney asked him what evidence he had to cite those names, Cassel explained that, during his investigation, his level of demand to consider something as evidence was very high: "The evidence was obtained from testimonies of military commanders that they knew the facts and, as elements of support, of secret and declassified documents of the United States Government. The newspaper written by Colonel Benavides from prison was an element of support, not substantial. "

The chief analyst of the George Washington University National Security Archive, Katerine Doyle , investigated the case thanks to thousands of documents from the State Department, the US Embassy in El Salvador, the Pentagon, the Office of Military Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI declassified in 1993. The so-called Infome Doyle was contributed to the cause that was opened by Court Number 6 of the National Court in 2009 and this afternoon its author has provided a phrase that sums it up: "There is a connection between planning, executing and covering up the crime. "

A covert action

The further the trial progresses, the more testimonies place the massacre against the Jesuits who denounced the violations of Human Rights and those who supported a negotiated peace as a premeditated and determined action in the High Command, executed by a battalion led by intermediate ranks and undercover by El Salvador's political, judicial, and military system in the early 1990s.

And that is well known to the former military officer Luis Alberto Parada Fuentes , who was head of the Analysis section of the National Intelligence Directorate (DNI) on that morning of November 16, 1989. His office and home were 200 meters away. from the Central American University (UCA), where the Jesuits, the cook and her daughter were killed. Parada Fuentes has said that on the eve of the crime, the director of the DNI, Mauricio Guzmán Aguilar , informed a small group of officers that he had come from a meeting in the General Staff where it had been decided to intensify the response to the FMLN guerrillas. The next morning, while Guzmán Aguilar had a meeting with his subordinates, something happened.

Parada Fuentes recounted it: "Captain Herrera Carranza entered and said that on the radio [the military] they report that they have killed Ellacuría when he has resisted arrest. All of us who were there reacted with surprise. But Colonel Guzmán Aguilar He said: "You see, things are beginning to happen." There was no surprise in him, he said it as if it were equivalent to part of the strategy. Another colonel said: "It is a serious mistake, it will have consequences for the Forces Armed. 'From the first moment we knew it had been the military. "

The Salvadoran Parada Fuentes, who has lived in the United States since receiving death threats in his country for collaborating with the investigation of the events, has been one more voice against the state apparatus that tried to hide that infamy: "From the first moment, produced an institutional cover-up at the highest level of the murder ordered by the High Command. "

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