Salvadoran ex-soldiers turn themselves in after indictment in priests' murder

[G_j]

Source: AP /Guardian Uk

Salvadoran ex-soldiers turn themselves in after indictment in priests' murder

Former soldiers named in Spanish indictment over 1989 killing of Jesuits turn themselves in to court in El Salvador


Associated Press
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 August 2011 22.10 BST Article history

Nine former soldiers have turned themselves over to a court in El Salvador after being indicted in Spain in the 1989 killings of six Jesuits and two other people during the civil war in the central American country.

El Salvador said on Monday that the nine former soldiers turned themselves in at a military base and were handed over to a Salvadoran court.

A 10th suspect in the Spanish case has since died, and 10 other suspects have not been located.

Salvadoran officials have said it is unlikely that El Salvador's supreme court will vote to extradite the men to Spain.

Spanish courts have used international jurisdiction doctrines to prosecute the killings of the priests, five of whom were Spanish.


Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/08/el-salvador...

[Peace Patriot]

1. 19 of these 26 soldier-killers of priests were trained by the U.S. military at its infamous

U.S. Army "School of the Americas" in Benning, GA, (later renamed "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation" (kind of like Diebold got renamed ES&S, so's you won't notice)).

----------------

"On the morning of November 16, 1989, Salvadoran soldiers made their
way into the Pastoral Center at the Central American University in San
Salvador. They ordered five Jesuit priests to go outside and lie face
down on the ground, where they were subsequently shot and killed. A
sixth priest, the housekeeper, and her 16 year-old daughter were then
murdered inside the residence. The Jesuits had been labeled
“subversives” by the Salvadoran government for speaking out against
the socioeconomic structure of Salvadoran society.

"Of the twenty-six soldiers subsequently implicated in the murders of
the Jesuit priests and women in El Salvador, nineteen had received
training at the School of the Americas. Three officers had received
some human rights training while at the school. Additionally, one
soldier had attended the Special Forces Officer Course at Ft. Bragg in
late 1988 and early 1989.

"The battalion to which these soldiers belonged was being trained by
U.S. Army Special Forces in El Salvador in the days before and after
the murders.2"

http://www.law2.byu.edu/jpl/papers/v20n1_Bill_Quigley.p...

(my emphasis)

-----------------------

I don't know if the indicted soldiers who turned themselves in are the ones "trained" in Georgia and Fort Bragg, but, as the article states, the entire battalion was being "trained" by the U.S. Army Special Forces just before and after the murders.

Where is the accountability for the U.S. Army and its commanders and "trainers"? Where is the accountability for the butchers running the U.S. government--Reagan, Bush Sr.--and their policy of slaughtering the poor and the advocates of the poor not only in El Salvador but all over Central America--slaughters in Nicaragua, in Honduras, genocide in Guatemala, and more horrors in South America?

El Salvador, which managed to elect a leftist government, is still a U.S. client state, so it doesn't surprise me that justice is not yet possible in El Salvador. The article says that El Salvador's supreme court won't likely extradite them to Spain for trial. The U.S. protects its killers and proxy killers. It is still doing so with regard to rampant murders of the poor and advocates of the poor in Colombia, and rightwing death squads again at work in Honduras

So where is justice anywhere?

[G_j]

3. Presente

thank you for your post

[Judi Lynn]

2. Still No Justice for Priests in Notorious El Salvador Massacre 20 Years Later

Still No Justice for Priests in Notorious El Salvador Massacre 20 Years Later

In 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, were brutally murdered in El Salvador. Two decades later, the extent of U.S. complicity remains largely unspoken.
November 18, 2009 |

On November 16, 1989, an elite unit of the Salvadoran military entered the gates of the Jesuit-run Central American University in San Salvador. When they left, six priests lay dead, along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter.

I reported on the murders that year, for the local Wisconsin community radio station, WORT. The killings took place at a time when the capital city was in the midst of the largest offensive to date in El Salvador's decade-old civil war -- and the U.S. government was supplying about "supplying over $550 million dollars per year in aid to the Salvadoran government -- about one quarter of it directly to the Salvadoran military." The city was totally militarized, with an army base not far from the Jesuit university campus itself, but in spite of this, attempts were being made to blame the killings on the FMLN rebels -- a sign was even planted near the bodies claiming that the priests were executed by the guerrillas as spies.

During the war years, many Church leaders who were proponents of Liberation Theology were targeted by the right-wing forces for taking a stand on the side of the poor. Most famous of these was Archbishop Oscar Romero, killed March 24, 1980 while celebrating mass in San Salvador. Members of the Jesuit order in particular were considered by the military and the ruling party to be the intellectual leaders of the guerrilla movement -- which was, in fact, an army of Salvadoran peasants. Of the 26 soldiers cited in a 1993 United Nations report as having participated in these massacres, 19 were graduates of the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia.

Since its founding, the SOA has trained more than 60,000 soldiers and police officers from a variety of Latin American countries, many of whom were later accused of torture and other human rights violations. Activists, and several members of Congress, have worked to try and defund the school, seen by many as a relic of the Cold War, but the doors remain open at an annual cost of about $7.5 million taxpayer dollars. Since 1990, protests at the SOA have taken place every year at the time of the anniversary of the murder of the the six Jesuit priests and the women who supported them. Their deaths are symbolic of the more than 75,000 Salvadorans killed during the war between 1980 and 1992.

More:
http://www.alternet.org/world/144021/still_no_justice_f...

(My emphasis.)