Warning this episode contains references to violence. Please use discretion when listening. How do you end a war? This was the question on everyone's mind in nineteen eighty nine. For almost a decade, El Salvador was steeped in a devastating war. Both sides, the military and the FMLN, were convinced that with one final push, their side could win. Meanwhile, the country that they fought for was in shambles. The economy was worse off than before, a quarter of the population
had left, and tens of thousands lay dead. It was a battle to rule over the ashes. To Father Ignite Yakuria, the only answer was a negotiated ceasefire.
Mitesi principal a key in Estaufo niedos is the siefke estaufo neiedos no eincontralo la solucion del Salvador.
Father Yakuria was a Jesuit priest and philosopher who taught at the University of Central America in San Salvador. We call it Lauca. He'd known Oscar Romero and Rutilio Grande, and he'd watched the war unfold before his eyes. He'd spent that war documenting the truth contradicting the lies of the government and teaching the next generation of young people at the university, people like Hector Lindo Fontees.
Being educated by the Jesuits kind of helped you open my mind to too many things that would not have been possible even to see or to hear about in other places.
Professor Hector Lenwentez is now retired, but he spent his entire career teaching Latin American studies, most recently at Fordham University. He grew up in El Salvador and studied under his then professor, father at Yaquitia.
He was not a big guy.
He was.
Not particularly slender, but she was by no means an imposing person in the physical aspect. But intellectually he was really a giant. He was a very brilliant and incisive mind.
Father at Yaquitia's brilliant and incisive mind made him a giant both on and off campus. He was the rector of the university, the leader among all the other Jesuits, and a published author who traveled the world giving lectures and conferences. And it was his brilliant mind that made him the perfect negotiator. Just like Archbishop Romero before him, a equitia was meeting with high ranking officials on both sides of the war, trying to create a dialogue between them.
This included talks with then President Alfredo Christiani.
After winning the election, but before going into office, I had a few talks with Father ya Kuria and asked him to go meet with the commandant to say how would they look at this.
That's Christiani in an interview with Duke University. As you can hear, he spoke perfect English. Christiani was an old school oligarch, a businessman who studied at Georgetown and had family ties to the coffee industry, and President Christiani could see that the war wasn't just hurting the poor. The rich were losing out too. Production was down, the FMLN were blowing up bridges and specifically targeting the oligarchy and
their ability to profit off the country. And at this point the FMLN was receiving financial and military support from communist allies in Cuba and Russia, further complicating an already complex international relationship. Christiani wanted a way out, and he basically had Father Yakuria on speed dial.
He was kind of a go between, and he was really interested in promoting the idea of a negotiated solution.
Father at Yaquaria and Christiani were working together trying to find a way to end this terrible war, which is why it was so shocking that on the night of November fifteenth, nineteen eighty nine, just hours after a phone call with the President, Father Yaquitia was murdered.
There were there was shot in the brain.
A Yequaria, along with five other Jesuit priests, Their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered. Their bodies were dragged out onto the campus slawn displayed for everyone to see. Nineteen eighty nine was the beginning of the end of the civil war, and if Oscar Romero's murder was the catalyst to start it, Father e Equitia and the Jesuit murders
were the catalyst to end it. The Jesuit massacre would send shock waves through El Salvador and beyond, and the question of who gave the order and who knew would get at the heart of who really held the power in El Salvador. I'm Jasmine Romero and this is sacred scandal. Nation of Saints, Episode eight. The Jesuits. We'll be right back after the break.
She has when I'm trying to make your patience worthwhile. Because you spent so much time chasing.
Me down, you are very well worth it.
I'm trying to make it well worth it.
That's Professor Terry Carl. I could read you her bona fides, but it would basically take up the entire podcast.
I'm an emeritus professor from Stanford University. I was a professor at Harvard before then.
Professor Carl was the expert witness for cases on elm sulte Oscar Romero's assassination, and the murder of the Jesuits, just to name a few. She is by far the foremost American expert on El Salvador. But she's not just an academic. She was also on the ground throughout the entire war, getting information that no one else was getting.
I'm small, I was female, brown haired, kind of cute, I think, and I was not a journalist, so I could go around and ask questions and find things that journalists really had a harder time on because people were afraid that they would be.
Quoted, including doing things like spending three weeks on the campaign trail with Roberto Dawison.
It's quite an intimidating guy, you know, and especially if you knew that he had already killed people, which I did.
She later used her insights on that Wison to give testimony at the trial for Oscar Romero's murder. So, yeah, Professor Carl is the real deal. I And in the late nineteen eighties, Professor Carl was working on an academic project.
So I was at that point trying to map out violence and I had, I mean, all these undergraduates spending a little yellow and red and pink and different color pins in a map.
She was constantly flying back and forth collecting information on the ground in Elsavador and bringing it back to the US to analyze. And one of the places that she was getting a lot of her information was from the Jesuits at Lauca, you know.
Every time I would come to Al Salvador, which was quite a lot at that time, I just kept checking in with them. And then eventually, when I moved to Stanford, I formed a work group with Nacho's help in a acuitius help.
Now, Father Yakuria is probably the most important person in this story, but before we get into him, I want to take a second to talk about the other Jesuit priest that he was working with. I kind of think of the Jesuits at Lauca like the Ninja turtles. Stay with me. Just like the Ninja turtles, each one of the Jesuit priests working at Lauca had a specialty, something
that they were uniquely talented at. Take Father Ignacio Martin Berro, who Professor Carl affectionately calls Martin Barot, was an incredible psychologist. His focus was on understanding what the war was doing
to the psyche of the Salvadoran people. He traveled all over the world giving lectures on his findings, talking about his theory on the militarization of the mind, that living under violence for so long was fundamentally changing Salvadorans, creating and perpetuating further cycles of violence, that violence was becoming the only way for Salvadoran society to respond to its problems. Here he is at a lecture.
Lack is worth nothing in Salvador, or the lull of the strongest. I rather say the most violent is a social criteria and corruption that's a life style, thus precipitating a vicious circle which tends to perpetuate the war.
And then there's father Segundo Montes, an incredible speaker who was studying the impacts of the refugee crisis that the war was creating.
Segunda Montes could relate to anybody. Eddie Peasant. I mean, you just got him out there and he was just People loved him. They loved him, and they would mob him.
Father Jaquez Lopez founded schools for poor children. Father Juandre mon Moreno took care of the libraries and was a meticulous cataloger of information. And Father Lopez Guintania was an expert gardener who took care of Lauca's mango trees. For the record, Professor Carl agreed with my Ninja Turtle's analogy.
You're absolutely right. They were really admired in love for their particular ability.
And as we know, the ninja turtles are led by an anthropomorphic rat sense named Master Splinter, and the master Splinter in this scenario is, of course, Father Ignacio Yakuria.
Akudia was very patrician. He was a very He just reminded me of a Spanish patrician of the Middle Ages or something, just the way he carried himself, the way he looked, the way you know, he was an extraordinary mind.
Very master splinter. So Father Yaquaria is leading the Jesuits at the university and doing his academic work.
But on the side, what he's doing is he's doing shuffle diplomacy. That's what he's doing. He's the guy who's back and forth, back and forth talking to this book. He's the only one that the commandantes on the flon we'll talk to, but Soulo Christiani, and he's making progress because all kinds of people who said we're not going to negotiate start saying, well, you're you know, you're right. There's too much death, there's too much killing, there's too much this, there's too much of that.
Which seems like a good thing, right, I mean, who wants more war? President Cristiani was definitely on board, and so was the US, who at this point had spent the last nine years shoveling money into a war that would not end well. Some people were extremely unhappy that a Equitia was trying to end the war.
We call them spoilers in the negotiating business, if I can put it that way, because they're the ones who are going to do something to spoil any chance of peace.
On the left, you've got the extremists in the FMLN, the ones that are convinced that normal civilians, if just given the chance, will revolt against the government. And on the right you've got Latandonna.
The biggest graduating class nineteen sixty six, the so called Tandona graduating class in the military, has taken power now. They are the hardest of the hardline. They're not a big number, because remember officers are the elite. They're not a big number. They're making money hand over fist.
Latandona is a group of colonels who all graduated the Salvadoran Military Academy together in the class of sixty six, and they're the highest ranking officers in the Salvadoran military, the Minister of Defense, the chief of Staff, the head of the air Force. They're the ones calling the shots and getting rich off of the military aid from the US.
They're not just committing human rights abuses, but they're all in business and they're trafficking and there's you know, people are selling visas, they're selling i mean everything is up for sale.
Selling arms, taking the salaries of dead soldiers. The Gordons of Latona had all kinds of schemes that they were running to profit off of the hunhundreds of millions that the US was sending over and they were in no rush to end the war and give all that up. Meanwhile, you've got father Yakaria.
Getting back and forth and go back and forth and back and forth. Now, if you're to the Tondona, your biggest threat to say a Cordea.
And it wasn't just Latandona who had a bone to pick. The Jesuits had also made enemies of the oligarchy, those famed fourteen families.
The only word I kept hearing was tracion, trac trac, you know, traders, traders, traders. I'd say, would you explain to me what that means? It means, you know, we used to be able to send our kids here. We didn't have to send our kids to the United States. We believed in the Oka as a very good education, and now we can't do that anymore because they come back and they say, you know, I think you should
pay the peasants more. The whole thing was your traders to us, and the anchor he was really at the Jesuits and was really at a equidia. Being the rector.
In the days leading up to the massacre, Salvador and Colin radio shows were filled with people calling for the Jesuits to be thrown out, to be jailed, to be killed, saying that they were traders to the country, or that they were the real leaders of the FMLN. But Father Ediquitia still believes that there's a chance for peace. He believes in President Cristiani that with Gristiani's help, they'll find
a way forward. In mid November of nineteen eighty nine, a Equitia went to Spain to give a lecture, but while he was gone things escalated between the left and the right and El Salvador. So President Gristiani calls him and tells him, you need to come home. I need your help to calm things down.
Everybody warned Equity not to come back. Everybody who knew don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't trust this. It wasn't really about trusting Christiani per se. Just don't even trust this, right, So he decides to come back. When he gets back, a number of people incluting me said you have to get out of the UK. They're going to kill you. By this point, I had gotten to be quite an expert in anticipating killings. And I'm seeing the being able to smell the crescendo. You know,
did you call him? Not him? I didn't call Equity. I got somebody else, and I said, they're going to kill you. And I went to the President of Stanford and I said, you've got to help me. I know these intellectuals, said the rector, the vice rector, blah blah, and they're going to kill him. And I got to get him out of there.
The next morning, Professor Carl heard that there had been a massacre at Lauca. Around two thirty am, the Atlakatal battalion, the same one that committed the massacre at Elmosote, broke into the jesuits sleeping quarters. I've been there. The rooms are spartan, just four walls of concrete. Some of them are shot in bed, others are dragged out onto the lawn and shot. There. A witness heard father Martin Barol
shout estresu nam hustisia, this is an injustice. They also found El Barbarrios, the Jesuit's housekeeper, huddled in her room along with her fifteen year old daughter, Selena. They were also shot and killed. The soldiers then fired a couple of shots into the walls and put a flame through to the Jesuits rooms to create the impression of a shootout. The news broke like a bomb.
Six Jesuit priests were brutally executed and sent Salvador last week. Their deaths have triggered a heated congressional debate on continuation of military aid to that country. Even President Bush has been dogged on the road by repeated protests and questions about the United States policy.
Let me just say a word about El Salvador.
Maybe it'll help.
It was the FMLN, the Marxist Leninist FMLN, that shot its way into the middle of El Salvador, trying to disrupt Salvador's democracy, and President Christiani told me on the phone that they will do everything they can to bring to justice, whether they're from the right or the left, those who wantonly murdered those priests.
Right away. The reaction was, this is not going to stand. This is not going to stand.
After the break, a Boston brawler, a failed cover up, and finally an end to.
The war, and it seems to me that it is incumbent on us to guarantee that if we're going to put a million dollars a day somewhere, that million dollars is going to live up to our standards, and if it can't live up to our standards, then we shouldn't be putting it there, no matter what the outcome. Well, I listened here, then you get back, then you get back into the questionable.
That's a snippet of a Congressional hearing from the weeks after the Jesuit massacre, and the hearing then Senator John Kerry is questioning whether the US should continue sending military aid to Alsabador in light of the news. Bernard Aaronson, the Assistant secretary from the Department of st argues that pulling the military aid will just make the situation worse. Mind you, this is now ten years into the war.
Ten years. In those ten years, never, not once, was the military aid that was sent to El Salvador met with any kind of restrictions or demands. It was literally free money that the US sent to the Salvadoran military. And it had been ten years of these kinds of debates. But if it were to be discovered that the murdered Jesuit priests were in fact killed by the salvadorn military. Well, that might finally change the story.
All the times the United States shook its finger at El Salvador's military and said, now, if you do that one more time, we're going to cut off aid it didn't have any meaning. But this time it did. And that's what was so important, is that this time, this time it did.
The Jesuits weren't just small town priests like Oscar Romero. They weren't nameless civilians in Elmosolte. These were the ninja turtles. They had given speeches at Berkeley, They'd met senators and heads of state. These guys were well connected and well respected scholars. It wouldn't be so easy to just write
these guys off as communists. In the immediate aftermath of the Jesuit massacre, the Salvadoran government would claim that the FMLN was responsible for the attack, and President Gaiticiani announced that he would conduct a thorough investigation of the same old story, lie and deny. But with US attitudes rapidly shifting on El Salvador, this time would be different, partially because of a Congressman from Boston named Joe Moakley.
Moakley let me tell you about Moakley. He was just Moakley, great Irish Catholic. Moakley was a street fighter, and he had been appointed by the Congress to have a fact finding commission on who killed the Jesuits.
I have to admit I really wasn't sure exactly where Al Savado is. I don't know that is Central America or South America.
A hard talking brawler from Boston, Congressman Moakley had long been critical of the US's involvement in El Salvador. So the Moaglely Commission goes down to El Salvador with a couple of investigators, determined to find out exactly what happened to these Jesuit priests, barging into meetings and talking to high and low ranking officials, asking a lot of questions.
Is Smouthly was like a bulldog. He would stop you couldn't stop him.
And Moakley can see that the Salvadorans aren't being totally honest about what happened. They're sending him on fake leads or outright lying. But he can put two and two together. He's looking at the evidence and saying, if the military had complete control of the university on the night of the murders. How could the FMLN be the ones that killed the priests? Moakley and his team start sniffing dangerously close to the truth, and if the truth gets out,
well there goes all that American cash. But Latnona, that cohort of colonels that's running the military, they have a plan in place just for this kind of problem. In the days leading up to the Jesuit massacre, there was a series of closed door meetings, meetings where they decide exactly when and how the Jesuits will be killed, and they decide that just in case anything goes wrong, they're going to need a fall guy. They land on the director of the military academy.
Now, the thing about Colonel Menavides, it's so important in this cover up story, is that Benavides would never have come up with this idea by himself.
Neveres was part of Latandona, but he's sort of the black sheep of the group. He's the guy that everyone keeps around because well he's part of the group, but he's not out there making policy decisions or running operations. He's running the military school. It's a relatively low level
position for a man of his rank. Two days before the Jesuit massacre, the Atla Coadel Battalion was transferred to Benavidez's command, and on the night of November fifteenth, he's given an order to take care of the Jesuit problem, and he does so. He didn't realize at the time that he was being set up to be the fall guy.
Oh, I don't think so. I don't think it would have ever occurred to any member of the Tendona that they could be a fall guy.
Once Mokeley came sniffing around, Benavivez was presented as the sole intellectual author of the killings. Now to be clear, benavives was given an order by a superior officer, a member of Latandona, but he never testified as to who gave him that order.
So why doesn't he talk? Why doesn't he say I didn't do this. I'll tell you why. Because Colonel Montana threatened his family.
Goronell Montano, the Minister of Security and member of Latandona's inner circle.
It's a mafia organization ton down. It's like we know where you live, we know where your son goes to school.
Benevidez, along with eight other low ranking military officers are arrested for the murder of the Jesuits. The Salvadoran government quickly pushes the case through and finds Benevidez and one other guy guilty. It's a farce quote a kangaroo court to make kangaroo's blush, in the words of a US Court of Appeals judge who reviewed the case, but let them don't have figures. Hey, we tossed them Benevivez. Now everything should go back to normal, but it's too late.
Congressman Mowchlely has seen how these guys operate. He goes back to Washington and tells everyone how quote the American people and Congress have been played for fools.
I still encounter members of the armed forces who fail to demonstrate any remorse, any regret over the assassination of the Jesuits. Mister Chairman. They don't even fake it very well. I cannot think of one single instance where one single member of the Salvadoran Armed Forces has openly and voluntarily provided any evidence of any significance that has helped move this case forward.
Six months after the Jesuit massacre, Mowgli passed a bill to cut aid to El Salvador by fifty percent. The salvador In military, seeing their cash cow is drying up, finally comes to the table to negotiate an end to the war. But what about President Christiani. I mean, he's the president, after all, the commander in chief of the armed forces, and he'd been on the phone with Father
Yakuria just hours before the murders. From the very beginning, Gristiani has claimed that he did not know about the plot to murder the Jesuits, that this was strictly a military operation. The Professor Carl has her doubts.
I'm pretty sure Christiani must have known, but I don't know that for a fact, and only he can tell us that. And maybe they didn't confide in him because they didn't trust him because he was with you know, I don't know that there are other colonels who say he knew. There are people who said he knew, and they're all dead. They've all been murdered, every single one of them.
In the years since the Jesuit murders, Pristiani has been accused multiple times of being a co conspirator, but it's never been proven in court. There's currently a warrant out for his arrest in El Salvador. His whereabouts are unknown. About two years after the Jesuit massacre, the FML and the Salvadoran government agreed to the nineteen ninety two to Pultepec Accords, the official end to the Salvadoran Civil War. President Gristiani is hailed as the man who ended the war.
As part of the agreement, the f MLN turned into an official political party and even one seats in the Legislative Assembly. Parts of the Salvadoran military were disbanded and a new, more impartial judicial system was implemented. But to me, the most important thing that comes out of those negotiations is the UN Truth Commission. In an attempt to heal the country, the UN sent investigators in to uncover all of the human rights abuses and finally bring those responsible
to justice. And if they had that might be where our story ends.
But everything's falling apart because the Truth Commission is naming names.
The UN Truth Commission starts to uncover everything the perpetrators of all of these crimes they named that we saw in the intellectual author of Oscar Romero's murder. They uncover the chain of command for the Jesuit massacre, directly naming officers in Latandona, and they find the bodies in Enmosulte. And it's not just the salvadorn military being named. The
investigators also uncover abuses committed by the FMLN. All these retired military captains, who have now become politicians, realize that they're about to be sent to jail, So of course.
The Irena dominated Congress passes a self amnesty.
Total amnesty. The Salvadoran legislature passes a law that declares that no matter what you did during the war, no matter what side you were on, you won't be punished for it.
There are fml AND commanders who went quite along with this, partly because they also are guilty of human rights violations.
Some of these commanders, members of the FMLN who are now part of the Salvadoran government, also voted to pass this sweeping amnesty law that left everyone in Pune.
Anybody who committed a human rights crime in one of the armed forces, or in the desk squads or something probably was pretty okay. Was okay.
The Cold War is over, the US pulls its funding and all the killers go free, just like that it's as if none of it had ever happened at all. So what happens to the people of El Salvador? What becomes of a person when you can see your rapist at the grocery store, or when your mother's killer becomes a senator, when your pain and your suffering is unacknowledged and the guilty go free. Terry Carl read me a quote by a judge who oversaw the Nurenberg trials after
World War Two. Trials were the Nazis were condemned.
If you were to say that these men are not guilty, it would be as true to say there had been no war, there were no victims, and there had been no crime. In El Salvador, there was a war, there were victims, and there has been a crime.
Seventy five thousand dead, a million more displaced, and no hope of justice. The Peace Accords did end the war, but they also left a giant wound exposed, a population left with the trauma of war, and, in the words of Father Martin Barol, a society with a militarized mind.
What I would say is, if you do that down the road, you will have another iteration, not the same way not necessarily two armed forces, not with the ideology involved. But you will have another iteration down the road, whether it's twenty years or thirty years or forty years of the same kind of violence, except worse.
El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Like thirteen and eighteenth Street, have been at war for decades. They work like the mafia, extorting money from local businesses, fighting for territory and killing with impunity.
That's next time own Nation of Saints Sacred Scandal. Nation of Saints is a production of AJA Podcasts in partnership with Iheart's Michael Dura podcast network, and is hosted and written by me Jasmine Romero, produced by Jasmine Romero with help from Alvaro Sesbelees. Research and reporting by Jasmine Romero, edited by saydre Kevelo. Nation of Saints was recorded in New York City at the Relic Room, with engineering by
Brett Tuban, mixing and sound designed by Pachiquinones. Original music by Golden Mines, Darko and Diame based on Patrick Hart's original composition, fact checking by Erendira Aquino Ayala. Executive producers are Gorman gerterol isaac Lee Rose Reed and Nando Villa. Our executive producers at iHeart are Giselle Mansis and Arlene Santana. Sacred Scandal was created by Melanie Bartley and Paula Badros. For more podcasts, go to the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.