• Documents confirm that the CIA knew that the Jesuit priest Ellacuría was going to be killed
by Jean-Guy Allard
THE U.S. State Department, the CIA, and the Spanish intelligence services (the old CESID), all knew that the Jesuit priest, Ignacio Ellacuría, rector of the Central American University (UCA), and five of his colleagues were going to be killed by a death squad from the Salvadoran Army. That has been confirmed in the Sunday edition of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, citing a series of "recently declassified" U.S. intelligence documents to be handed over to the Spanish courts.
The revelation further supports information indicating how CIA agent Carlos Alberto Montaner, who was stationed in Madrid, was well-informed about the conspiracy when he directly threatened Ellacuría a few days before the horrendous crime.
It also fits perfectly with the theory that international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, then a CIA agent and high official in the repressive Salvadoran apparatus, was involved in the plot. Carriles is currently being protected in the United States with the complacency of U.S. authorities.
The military death squad burst into UCA in the early hours of November 16, 1989, surprising the six Jesuits who were asleep. They ordered them to get up and then took them outside, where they were all shot in the back of the head.
Fathers Ellacuría, Armando López, Juan Ramón Moreno, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Segundo Montes and Joaquín López, all professors at the institution and defenders of liberation theology, were victims of constant attacks by ultra-fascists from the ARENA party, whose representatives are still active on the Salvadoran political stage.
Elba Julia Ramos, the priest’s housekeeper, and her 15-year-old daughter Celina were also victims of the massacre.
Monday, November 16 is the 20th anniversary of the murder while, in neighboring Honduras, the same class of Central Americans who continually sowed terror 20 years ago with CIA and the State Department support, have seized power.
Some of the material authors of the massacre were sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment in January 1992, but were scandalously given amnesty barely 14 months later, in April 1993.
The Spanish El Mundo reports that a series of documents from U.S. intelligence services have been declassified and will be given to the Spanish National Court, in Madrid, where charges have been filed for "those responsible for that slaughter."
"In the papers to be handed over to Spain, there is information that directly documents the fact that Colonel Milton Menjívar, military chief of the U.S. embassy in El Salvador and a high U.S. State Department official were aware of what the Salvadoran army was plotting against the UCA rector," El Mundo notes.
"According to analysts consulted by this newspaper, it can be deduced from studying these declassified documents that CESID also had this knowledge or was looking at the same information as the Americans," the newspaper specified.
PURE COINCIDENCE?
By coincidence, the El Mundo revelations have emerged while Carlos Alberto Montaner, a pseudo-intellectual of Cuban origin, is celebrating the fascist regime of businessman Micheletti in Tegucigalpa along with the son of Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa.
In a fervent speech to an assembly of coup negotiators, Montaner denounced, with his usual right-wing rhetoric, "the Castro-Chavism" that, according to him, has failed in Honduras, although "it will soon try to destabilize the country again."
It’s important to remember how, barely one week before the murder of the six Salvadoran Jesuit priests, that same Montaner threatened Ellacuría after the latter completed a "face to face" Spanish television program led by its pro-Franco host Mercedes Milá.
Years later, the Madrid ‘writer’, on the run from the Cuban justice system for his terrorist activity in Havana in 1960, described the presence of liberation theologians in Latin America as "a labyrinth of lost Jesuits and Maryknolls."
The U.S. Maryknoll Order was also a victim of the death squads. In 1980, the year when Monsignor Arnulfo Romero was murdered, four U.S. nuns were raped and killed by National Guard troops during Operation Centauro, which directed by Cuban-American CIA agents and Leopoldo Castillo, the Venezuelan ambassador in El Salvador.
Neo-fascist Leopoldo Castillo currently hosts a program on the right-wing Venezuelan TV station Globovisión.
POSADA’S ASSIGNMENT
In the period when the Jesuits were murdered, Luis Posada Carriles was personal advisor on repression to President José Napoleón Duarte, who had governed the country under State Department instructions since 1984.
When the arms for drugs trafficking operation directed in Ilopango ended in the Iran-Contra Scandal, the CIA placed Posada among former torturers of the Venezuelan secret police, who were then directing the Salvadoran National Police (PN), alongside the henchmen Mauricio Sandoval and Víctor "Zacarías" Rivera.
Posada became the advisor of Duarte who, it’s said, called him to his own home to resolve "particular cases." In those days he dedicated himself to giving orders to the death squads that were sowing terror across the country.
After leaving El Salvador after a change in presidents, Posada returned a few years later with his ARENA buddies and established a command center on behalf of the Cuban-American National Foundation, a U.S. intelligence anti-Cuban front organization.
It is important to note that, in November 2003, the UCA and the El Salvador Human Rights Institute petitioned the Inter-American Human Rights Commission to investigate former Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani (currently an unconditional supporter the Micheletti regime) and certain military officers from that country. Six years later, that agency of the Organization of American States has still not responded to the petition.
Translated by Granma International
(Connie with Rep. Satur Ocampo and former Vice-President Teofisto Guingona in Sept. 2007 during the NUPL Founding Congress.)
