• The great massacre of the Spanish Jesuits "I heard shots... They were my companions destroyed and thrown face down"

  • Matanza "In the trial in El Salvador, the lawyers for the military whispered to the jury"

The

Fourth Court of Penitentiary Surveillance and Sentence Execution of San Salvador

has granted early conditional release to Colonel

Guillermo Alfredo Benavides Moreno,

sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murder of six Jesuit priests -five of them Spanish- and two women perpetrated by the military on November 16, 1989.

"The special hearing procedure was carried out, and the result was positive, there was a grant from the judge to grant the benefit of early conditional release in favor of my client," Benavides's defense attorney,

David Campos,

reported .

the Salvadoran newspaper

El Mundo.

Campos has highlighted that the requirements have been met: having served more than 60 years of age and

a third of the sentence,

that is, 10 of the 30 of the total sentence.

"They were fulfilled in October. Therefore, the conditions were in place, since in addition to that, he is 77 years old to grant him early parole," Campos highlighted.

Benavides will be subject to comply with standards of conduct and always be under the surveillance of the court.

Benavides is

convicted of material responsibility for the massacre

in the 1990s, but was released under the

General Amnesty Law.

He went back to prison after the repeal of the law, in 2016.

MASSACRE ON THE UCA CAMPUS

The massacre took place in November at dawn on the 16th of 1989 on the UCA campus in

San Salvador,

the country's capital.

Among the victims is the ideologue of

Liberation Theology,

the Spanish

Ignacio Ellacuría,

then rector of the UCA.

The Spaniards

Ignacio Martín Baró

(vice-rector),

Segundo Montes, Amando López and Juan Ramón Moreno also died,

as well as the Salvadorans

Joaquín López, Elba Ramos

and their daughter

Celina.

All of them were killed in the middle of a guerrilla offensive on San Salvador by soldiers from the

Atlacatl

battalion of the Salvadoran Army.

In September 1991, a court tried nine soldiers who were listed as material authors without taking into account the intellectual authors, according to humanitarian organizations.

Colonel Guillermo Alfredo Benavides was found guilty of all the murders and Lieutenant

Yusshy René Mendoza

was held responsible for the death of the minor Celina.

Tribute to the victims on the 33rd anniversary of the massacre.MARVIN RECINOSAFP

Both officers were released under a 1993 amnesty law, but Benavides was jailed again to complete his 30-year sentence, after the amnesty was declared time-barred in 2016.

The case was reopened on January 5 of this year to try the alleged masterminds: ex-military officers Juan Orlando Zepeda, Francisco Elena Fuentes and Rafael Humberto Larios.

The case has also had its judicial journey in Spain and in September 2020 the National Court sentenced Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano Morales to 133 years in prison.

The civil war ended on January 16, 1992 with the signing of peace agreements between the government and the guerrillas of

the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.

The conflict left more than 75,000 dead, 7,000 disappeared and millions in losses in the economy.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • National audience

  • The Savior

  • Justice