Four former Salvadoran soldiers were arrested Friday by the Salvadoran National Police at the behest of Interpol — the world’s international police organization — for their role in the 1989 execution-style murders of six Catholic priests along with their cook and her teenage daughter, according to Salvadoran Daily La Prensa Grafica.
Their families have been seeking justice through the Spanish judicial system, which honors universal claims of justice, for years since they are unable to do so in El Salvador in due to the country’s 1992 amnesty law. according to The Guardian. Five of the six murdered priests were from Spain.
Salvadoran President Salvador Sanchez Ceren has publicly called upon the remaining former soldiers to turn themselves in to the authorities. The Salvadoran Supreme Court will decide if the four arrested will be held beyond 72 hours without bail or released pending an extradition request to Spain.
A lawyer representing 13 of the 17 accused former soldiers has called upon the Salvadoran Supreme Court to release his clients on bail and to ultimately not honor the extradition request to Spain. The lawyer’s justification for disregarding the Spanish extradition request was because in May 2012 the Salvadoran Supreme Court could not extradite its citizens. The court’s 2012 ruling determined that since international extradition was not agreed upon between Spain and El Salvador at the time of the murders, the soldiers cannot be extradited now.
The four arrests in El Salvador come on the heels of Federal Judge Kimberly Swank of North Carolina approving the extradition of former Salvadoran Colonel Orland Montano Morales. Montano Morales is accused of having orchestrated the murder of the six Jesuit priests. Approval for Montano Morales’ extradition is the result of judicial actions dating back to 2011 when a Spanish court indicted him and 19 other Salvadorans associated with war crimes.
Shortly after the gruesome murders were carried out, The New York Times reported in November 1989, “Most of the priests were dragged from their beds in cubicles in a dormitory at the Jose Simeon Canas University of Central America on the outskirts of the capital and shot in the head with high-powered rifles, apparently of the same type issued by the army. The Jesuits’ cook and her 15-year-old daughter were also shot to death.”
After the murders were reported, former President George H. W. Bush’s administration “condemned the killings ‘in the strongest possible terms,'” and said it had asked then-Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani to make a full inquiry, according to The New York Times. Over the course of El Salvador’s civil war, from 1980 to 1992, “a total of 75,000 people were killed and 8,000 disappeared,” according to La Prensa Grafica.
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