Former US-backed Salvadoran Killer Living in Massachusetts

Horhey · Mar 14, 2012

They're comin out of the woodwork..

The Boston Globe: War crime suspect found in Everett

Former Salvadoran official accused of role in Jesuit priests’ killings

EVERETT - A former Salvadoran government minister accused of colluding in the infamous killing of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador two decades ago has been living a quiet life in a modest apartment building in Everett, says a human rights group pursuing a legal case against him.

Inocente Orlando Montano, apparently living in Massachusetts for years under his own name, is among 20 former military officers charged with conspiring to kill the priests in fresh indictments from Spain.

The international indictments issued in May seek justice for the clergymen, five of them Spaniards; their housekeeper; and her 16-year-old daughter, who were roused at night from their beds on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador and executed by an elite unit of the Salvadoran military.

Most of those accused of the notorious war crime have never faced justice.
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The Jesuit Priest execution style murders were carried out by the Atlacatl Battalion in November 1989. The Jesuits' killers were under the tutelage of US special forces from Fort Bragg, N.C., just 48 hours before they killed the six priests their cook and her daughter at the Central American University:

The New York Times: Salvadoran Justice Wears Out Patience

The squad that killed the priests had just undergone two days of advanced training by American advisers and formed part of the American-trained Atlacatl Battalion - a unit that consistently has carried out the worst massacres of civilians in the war.
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Human Rights Watch noted:

Human Rights Watch: A year of reckoning: El Salvador a decade after the assassination of Archbishop Romero

The Atlacatl Battalion is an elite unit created, trained and equipped by the United States.

Atlacatl soldiers have committed some of the most prominent and horrifying atrocities committed in the course of the war, culminating with the murder of the Jesuits.

Almost from the start, the Atlacatl Battalion — "the first Salvadoran army battalion to be created from scratch by U.S. funding and training" — was engaged in the murder of large numbers of civillians.
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The Los Angeles Times reports:

the Atlacatl Battalion is the largest and oldest of El Salvador's elite U.S.-trained counterinsurgency battalions, a unit that came to symbolize both the most aggressive in fighting and the worst in atrocities.
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The Los Angeles Times: Threat to Salvadoran Priests Is Nothing New

SAN SALVADOR — Symbols are rarely subtle in El Salvador, as in the execution-style slayings of six Jesuit educators last week. The killers not only left the bodies for all to see but, in case anyone should miss the point, they shattered the priests' skulls, too.

"Like in the Spanish Civil War, they are crying, 'Death to the intelligentsia!' " Father Cesar Jerez said after a Mass for the victims Saturday.

"Jesuits have always wanted peace with justice--not war, but justice, and there you touch very profound (economic) structures. That is why they were killed," he said.

Jesuits, and Roman Catholic priests in general, are an integral part of Salvadoran history and society, and such violence against them is nothing new.

The Jesuits' first conflicts with the country's landed oligarchy were over education. In 1974, priests teaching at the elite Externado de San Jose decided to open the doors of its elementary through high school to poor students. The decision offended the rich.

"The dominant classes felt betrayed," said Jerez, who served with the Society of Jesus then. Today, he is the rector of the UCA in Nicaragua.

In the following years, many young Salvadoran priests took up the Vatican's call to denounce institutionalized violence and to work for the "preferential option of the poor," a religious current that became known as "liberation theology."

One of those, a Jesuit named Rutilio Grande, moved to the town of Aguilares, north of San Salvador, where he lived with impoverished farmers and backed their demands for land and better salaries.

Grande was assassinated by unidentified gunmen in March, 1977. Two months later, another priest, Father Alfonso Navarro, was killed in his parish in the capital. More than a dozen others were expelled or denied re-entry into El Salvador. The Jesuit-run radio YSAX was bombed, and pamphlets circulated that said, "Be a Patriot! Kill a Priest."
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Former US-backed Salvadoran Killer Living in Massachusetts

Horhey Well-Known Member

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Former US-backed Salvadoran Killer Living in Massachusetts

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