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 14Plough Quarterly • Winter 2015  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 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. officials during the operation. 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 Sal- vador, testified that his Salvadoran counterpart, Colonel Carlos Armando Avilés Buitrago, chief of psychological operations for the Salvadoran Joint Command, informed him in advance of the planned killing; afterward the same source con- firmed both that the crime had been committed by specific high-ranking Salvadoran 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 Salvadoran 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 pro- ductive 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.