El Salvador’s Supreme Court orders the re-opening of an investigation into the 1989 massacre of 6 Jesuit priests that sparked international outrage.
Only two military officers have served short sentences after an elite military commando a group of priests, a housekeeper and her daughter and tried to make it look like it had been carried out by leftist guerillas.
Attempts within El Salvador to investigate and prosecute the masterminds of the killings during the country’s civil war have been deflected by legal maneuvers since the high court declared the 1993 amnesty established after the war to be unconstitutional in 2016. On Nov. 16, 1989, an elite commando unit killed the six priests — five Spaniards and one Salvadoran — along with their housekeeper and the housekeeper’s daughter in the priests’ residence. The killers tried to make the massacre appear as though it had been carried out by leftist guerillas.