Spain: Salvadoran ex-colonel sentenced for assassination of Jesuits

Former Salvadoran colonel and deputy defense minister Inocente Montano at the start of his trial in Madrid on June 08, 2020. Kiko HUESCA / POOL / AFP

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A Salvadoran ex-colonel was sentenced to 133 years in prison on Friday September 11 for having ordered the assassination of Spanish Jesuits more than thirty years after the fact.

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In the midst of the civil war, the assassination of five Spanish Jesuits had horrified the international community.

The religious had been killed in 1989 on the campus of a university: the Central American University of San Salvador.

They were members of a religious order that acted as an intermediary between the government and the guerrillas to begin peace negotiations which would be concluded three years later.

The Salvadoran army battalion gave them no chance.

Trying to pass off the murders as a bloody guerrilla operation, they also massacred a Salvadoran priest, an employee of the religious and her 16-year-old daughter who was present in the pastoral center of the university.

The National Court of Justice considers Inocente Montano guilty of these eight murders but he was only tried and convicted for that of the five Spanish Jesuits because it was for these murders that he was

from the United States. to Spain.

The prosecution had requested 150 years in prison against the ex-colonel, accused of having " 

 ".

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