9 Salvadorans turn themselves in 1989 killings

[Judi Lynn]

9 Salvadorans turn themselves in 1989 killings
Aug 8, 1:47 PM EDT

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) -- Nine former soldiers and officials have turned themselves over to a court in El Salvador after being indicted in Spain in the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests and two other people during the Central American country's civil war.

The Defense Department said Monday the nine soldiers turned themselves in at a military base and were handed over to a Salvadoran court.

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

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

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_SALVADOR_JESUIT_KILLINGS?SECTION=HOME&SITE=AP&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

[Judi Lynn]

1. 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_for_priests_in_notorious_el_salvador_massacre_20_years_later

(My emphasis.)