The murdered scholars of UCA

During the Salvadoran Civil War, on 16 November 1989, Salvadoran Army soldiers killed six Jesuits and two others at their residence on the campus of José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA El Salvador) in San Salvador, El Salvador. The Jesuits were advocates of a negotiated settlement between the government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the guerilla organization that had fought the government for a decade. The murders attracted international attention to the Jesuits' efforts and increased international pressure for a cease-fire, representing one of the key turning points that led toward a negotiated settlement to the war.

Note: All descriptions of events are taken from the Truth Commission's report and the summary of accusations admitted by the Spanish court against the members of the Salvadoran military who were sentenced for the crime.

The Salvadoran army considered the Pastoral Centre of UCA a "refuge of subversives". Colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda, Vice-Minister for Defence, had publicly accused UCA of being the center of operations for FMLN terrorists. Colonel Inocente Montano, Vice-Minister for Public Security, said that the Jesuits were "fully identified with subversive movements." In negotiations for a peaceful solution to the conflict, Ellacuria had played a pivotal role. Many of the armed forces identified the Jesuit priests with the rebels, because of their special concern for those Salvadorians who were poorest and thus most affected by the war.

Members of the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran Army, a rapid-response, counter-insurgency battalion created in 1980 at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, then located in Panama. The unit was implicated in some of the most infamous incidents of the Salvadoran Civil War.

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