A Court Case In Spain Raises Hope For Justice For Priests Killed In El Salvador

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13 Авг 2020, 20:45

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A mural made by artist Josué Villalta on the wall of a building of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University showing the faces of Jesuit priests who were executed by members of the Salvadoran army in 1989.

Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty Images

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Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty Images

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Former Salvadoran official Inocente Orlando Montano attends a trial in Madrid on June 8 for his alleged role in the killing of five Spanish priests in El Salvador in 1989.

Kiko Huesca/EFE via AP

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Kiko Huesca/EFE via AP

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‘I Miss Them, Always’: A Witness Recounts El Salvador’s 1989 Jesuit Massacre

More than 75,000 people were killed, 8,000 disappeared and more than a million displaced. The conflict ended in 1992 with a United Nations-brokered peace agreement.

Experts say the 1989 Jesuit killings marked a turning point in El Salvador’s civil war.

«U.S. policy changes with the murder of the Jesuits,» said academic Terry Lynn Karl, who has researched the case for decades. Washington began demanding accountability or it would cut the aid, she explained. International outrage and a congressional investigation led the U.S. government to pull its support for El Salvador’s military regime.

Karl testified for six hours as an expert witness, via video, in the Madrid trial. She told the Spanish judges a hit list appeared in newspapers and army radio broadcast threats, specifically targeting these Jesuits. «The murderous military threatened people,» she later told NPR.

«I handed the Spanish court 34 pages of attacks against the Catholic Church and the Jesuits,» she said. «It is not easy in Latin America to kill a priest so you have to build a climate to allow you to do that.»

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This July 1989 photo shows from left: Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, then head of the Salvadoran armed forces joint chiefs of staff, Rafael Humberto Larios, then defense minister, Col. Inocente Orlando Montano, then public security vice minister, and Col. Juan Orlando Zepeda, then defense vice minister, in an undisclosed location in El Salvador.

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In the aftermath of the killings, El Salvador’s high command initially tried to pin blame on rebels who had launched an offensive on the capital days before the priests were killed.

«I knew the military had done it,» said Luis Parada, who was a Salvadoran military intelligence officer at the time. «I did not know that the military was going to cover it up. It did not cross my mind.»

Parada said he was in a meeting with top military and intelligence commanders when the executions were reported back to headquarters on an internal army radio. He was one of the first officials to arrive at Central American University. «I went to see with my own eyes. When I saw the bodies, I was shocked,» he said.

Parada said he testified in the Madrid trial that there was an «institutional cover-up at the highest level.»

Now living in Washington, D.C., Parada’s role in the trial was significant as a critical witness and as one former military officer testifying against another. «It is my duty,» he said. «Some people live by a code of silence. I live by a code of honor.»

The past has its claws in the future. You can’t have truth, you can’t have historical memory, if you don’t know what happened in the past.

Terry Lynn Karl, researcher

Montano had also been residing in the United States, in Everett, Mass., until the U.S. government extradited him to Spain in 2017. El Salvador refused to hand over officers charged in Spain.

«What the Spaniards have done is open a conversation about peace, about justice,» said Karl as she awaits the verdict. «The past has its claws in the future. You can’t have truth, you can’t have historical memory, if you don’t know what happened in the past.»

Spain’s legal principal of universal jurisdiction means it can try alleged war crimes committed in any country.

But Karl said, «This trial should be in El Salvador. Justice is closest, always, to where the crime was committed.»

She hopes the trial in Spain spurs accountability in El Salvador. «It’s shaming their judiciary, it’s shaming their political system. High people are involved,» she said.

The Spanish court provided a video livestream of the proceedings for people to follow it in El Salvador and the feed was broadcast on social media and by various news outlets. The Salvadoran news site, El Faro, recorded 69,000 views on the final day of the trial.

«It was in the middle of the night for me and very early morning in El Salvador,» said Almudena Bernabéu, a Spanish human rights lawyer who is prosecutor in the case. She appeared in court via video from her home in San Francisco.

Bernabéu spent more than a decade building the case, relying on a trove of declassified U.S. documents, including from the State Department, the CIA and the FBI.

«The lapse of time only has one positive aspect,» she said, referring to the files that convinced Spanish judges to proceed.

«It is state terrorism, killing five Spanish priests using the apparatus of the state,» Bernabéu told NPR after the trial.

Among the court records, a cable from the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador dated Feb., 19, 1991, makes clear that embassy officials were aware that El Salvador’s military had played a role in the killings and the cover-up.

«In the 12 months since the ESAF responsibility for the murders was revealed,» the cable said, referring to the armed forces. «The military’s leadership has resisted all appeal for an honest accounting of what [it] must have possessed from the beginning — the truth.»