Saturday, September 12, 2020


Ex-Salvadoran colonel gets 133 years in prison for Jesuit slayings


Former Salvadoran coronel and Defense Deputy Minister Inocente Montano was sentenced for the deaths of five Jesuit priests. File Photo by Kiko Huesca/EPA-EFE

Sept. 11 (UPI) -- A Spanish court on Friday sentenced a former Salvadoran colonel to 133 years in prison for the slayings of five Jesuit priests during his country's civil war three decades ago.

The National Court in Madrid handed down a sentence of 26 years, eight months and one day in prison to Inocente Orlando Montano for each of the five deaths.

The killings happened in 1989, during El Salvador's civil war. Catholic priests were accused during this time of collaborating with left-wing opposition members.

Troops dragged the five priests, a sixth priest, their housekeeper and the housekeeper's daughter from their beds at Central American University, and killed them.

The court found Montano responsible for the three other slayings but couldn't sentence him on those charges because his extradition from the United States to Spain didn't include those cases. The sentence was handed down for the five priests who were Spanish.

Montano is one of several military officials from El Salvador accused in the slayings.

Prosecutors said he shared oversight responsibility over a Salvadoran government radio station that urged the killings of the Spanish priests days before the massacre while he served as vice minister of Defense and Public Safety.

They said he also participated in a series of meetings during which a fellow Salvadoran army officer gave the order to kill the priests.

Montano, who previously lived in Everett, Mass., was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison in 2013 for immigration fraud and perjury

Nov 16, 2019 - 'I Miss Them, Always': A Witness Recounts El Salvador's 1989 Jesuit Massacre ... in a nearby house when the soldiers began firing on the Catholic priests. ... who reported during El Salvador's civil war in the 1980s as a freelance journalist. ... Yet the right wing accused the Jesuits of being communists, and .
The Salvadoran Civil War was a civil war in El Salvador fought between the military-led junta ... The growth of left-wing insurgency in El Salvador occurred against a ... While the death squads were initially autonomous from the Salvadoran ... and El Salvador's leading human rights group at the time) documented the killing

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