Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76Plough Quarterly • Winter 2015 61 and the country’s leading public intellectual: “Kill Father Ellacuría and leave no witnesses.”1 The meeting took place at the national military academy, of which Colonel Benavides was direc- tor. Within the hour, he summoned Lieutenant Ricardo Espinoza, a young graduate of San Sal- vador’s Jesuit high school, and ordered him to carry out the assassination. The targets included not only Ellacuría but also Lieutenant Espinoza’s former high-school principal. “It’s them or us!” Benavides told Espinoza.2 The young officer, who attempted to hide his identity with camou- flage grease, later testified that his eyes filled with tears as he hurriedly left the scene of the crime after giving the order for the killing.3 The United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador states that around 2:30 a.m. on November 16, Ellacuría and four fellow Spanish-born Jesuits were executed with machine guns by Espinoza’s unit as they lay face down in the grass behind the Jesuit residence at the university. One neighbor reports that “just before the gunfire” she heard “rhythmic whispering, like a psalmody of a group in prayer.”4 Minutes later, Elba Ramos, a cook for the university, and her sixteen-year- old daughter Celina were repeatedly shot as they huddled in each other’s arms in the Jesuit residence, where they had sought refuge. The brutality ended with the murder of an elderly Salvadoran-born Jesuit priest in his room. Several sources later testified that El Salvador’s newly elected president, Alfredo Cristiani, was present at the national military academy at the time when the attack was planned and that he met with Colonel Ponce and other military officials during the operation. 1 United Nations, Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador: From Madness to Hope: The Twelve-Year War in El Salvador (March 15, 1993), 50. 2 Extrajudicial statements of Lt. José Ricardo Espinoza Guerra and Lt. Yusshy René Mendoza Vallecillos, cited in Martha Doggett, Death Foretold: The Jesuit Murders in El Salvador (Georgetown University Press, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1993), 65. 3 Extrajudicial confession of Lt. José Ricardo Espinoza Guerra, cited from “Narración de los hechos,” prepared by the Jesuits of Central America, which appeared in Estudios centroamericanos (ECA) nos. 493–494 (November–December 1989): 1162. 4 Doggett, Death Foretold, 282, 68. In addition to Father Ellacuría, the Jesuits who died included Father Ignacio Martín-Baró, a university vice president and the director of El Salvador’s only functioning public-opinion poll; Father Segundo Montes, director of the university’s Human Rights Institute and supe- rior of the Jesuit community; Father Amando López, professor of theology and philosophy and former president of the university’s sister institution in Managua; Father Joaquin López y López, national director of Fe y Alegría, a program for children in poverty; and Father Juan Ramón Moreno, assistant director of the newly constructed Óscar Romero Pastoral Center, built by the Jesuits to commemorate the archbishop of San Salvador who had died nine years earlier by a rightwing assassin’s bullet. Why Were They Killed? One month after the murders, Major Eric Warren Buckland, a senior US military advisor in El Salvador, testified that his Salvadoran counter- part, Colonel Carlos Armando Avilés Buitrago, chief of psychological operations for the Sal- vadoran Joint Command, informed him in advance of the planned killing; afterward the same source confirmed both that the crime had been committed by specific high-ranking Sal- vadoran military officers, and that it was being covered up.5 Major Buckland’s account matched the testimony of Lucía Cerna, a neighbor of the Jesuit fathers and the only living witness to the crime. Both Major Buckland and Cerna would come under intense pressure from the FBI to back away from their stories implicating Sal- vadoran forces; Buckland soon recanted his admission of prior knowledge of the killings. Newsweek later reported, “The [George H. W. Bush] administration didn’t want that story to come out . . . because it wasn’t productive to the conduct of the war.”6 5 Sworn statement by Eric Warren Buckland, January 11, 1990, handwritten adden- dum, Washington, DC, p. 10 (on file at Lawyers Committee for Human Rights). Cited in Doggett, Death Foretold, 225. 6 Doggett, Death Foretold, 228.