Salvadorans Do Not Forget the Jesuits Massacred During the Civil War
A mural dedicated to the victims of the UCA massacre in El Salvador, 2024. X/ @ysuca91siete
November 14, 2024 Hour: 9:20 am
Former President Cristiani was implicated in the 1989 murders of the six Jesuits and two Salvadoran women.
On Wednesday, the community at the Central American University (UCA) remembered the victims of the civil war in El Salvador (1980-1992) on the 35th anniversary of the massacre of six Jesuit priests, five of them Spanish, and two Salvadoran women.
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The event included the inauguration of the exhibit “Traces of Memory” at the Monsignor Oscar Romero Center on the UCA campus. The exhibit features nine altars with candles, photographs, flowers, and personal items of some of the victims.
The commemoration remembers civilians—mostly women, children, and elderly—who were killed in massacres such as El Mozote, El Calabozo, El Sumpul, and the killings at Tenango and Guadalupe. It also honors figures like Monsignor Romero, Father Rutilio Grande, the Jesuit priests, and four Dutch journalists, all murdered by members of the Salvadoran Army.
“The UCA martyrs in some way represent all of El Salvador’s martyrs, all those who gave their lives for an unfulfilled ideal of justice and rights. What we have aimed to do here is not only to commemorate our UCA martyrs but to recognize the whole history of martyrdom, suffering, and longing for freedom and justice that we continue to be denied today,” said Nicaraguan Rodolfo Cardenal, director of the Romero Center.
“We are where we are because there is a past. If I lose the memory of that past, I don’t know where I am, and if I don’t know where I am, I can’t move into the future—or others will take me into the future, but not myself… The Salvadoran people, like any other, have the right to determine their future,” he added.
The exhibit will be open to the public until November 30, coinciding with the start of the preliminary hearing against 11 people, including former President Alfredo Cristiani (1989-1994), implicated in the 1989 murders of the Jesuits and two Salvadoran women. In the early hours of November 16, 1989, amid the largest guerrilla offensive during the Salvadoran civil war, an elite army unit executed the priests and the two women on the UCA campus.
The Salvadoran war, mainly fueled by poverty, social inequality, and military repression, erupted after the assassination of Monsignor Romero (March 1980) and left 75,000 dead, around 8,000 disappeared, and hundreds of massacres. The conflict pitted the U.S.-backed Salvadoran Army against the guerrilla group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which later became a political party and governed the country for 20 years.
teleSUR/ JF Source: EFE
