Colonel Guilty in Killing of 6 Salvador Priests

A five-man jury Saturday found Salvadoran army Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides guilty of murdering six Roman Catholic priests and two of their employees--the first time any Salvadoran officer has been tried, let alone convicted, in a human rights case.

Benavides was found guilty of ordering and organizing the Nov. 16, 1989, killings of Ignacio Ellacuria, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Segundo Montes Mozo, Amando Lopez Quintana, Juan Ramon Moreno and Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, all Jesuit priests and teachers at the University of Central America here.

The jury also convicted Benavides of murdering Julia Elba Ramos and her 15-year-old daughter, Celina Ramos, household employes of the priests.

One other soldier, Lt. Yusshy Rene Mendoza, was also found guilty of murdering Celina Ramos.

The seven other defendants, including one tried in absentia, were found not guilty of the murders and several lesser charges involving terrorism. There was no explanation of the verdicts, but informed sources said the prosecution believed those found innocent had been viewed by the jury as following orders.

Judge Ricardo Zamora has 30 days to sentence the two men. The sentence for murder is 20 to 30 years. They also were charged with lesser crimes, which Zamora will determine how to handle without a jury at a later time.

The verdicts, reached after about five hours of deliberation, marked the end of a three-day trial that was unique in several respects. Not only was it the first time any officer had been tried by a court for human rights abuses, it was the biggest and most complicated legal process in El Salvador’s history, according to legal experts.

The murders, which came at the height of a major offensive by the Marxist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrilla movement, were carried out in the middle of the night by about 30 members of an elite Salvadoran army unit.

The killings horrified the world and put the nation’s already bloody human rights record under critical international scrutiny. Although the United States has been charged with impeding the investigation into the case and even accused by Jesuit leaders of covering up others who might be involved, the U.S. Congress cut its $85-million military aid program in half as a result of the murders.

Benavides, 46, who was a military academy classmate of many of the country’s most senior officers, including Defense Minister Rene Emilio Ponce, was in charge of the area, including the University of Central America, the night of the killings.

He denied the charges, which held that he gave the orders to the other defendants to kill the Jesuit priests, whom Benavides allegedly felt were both intellectual and material supporters of the guerrillas.

During the course of the investigation, all the defendants except Benavides confessed to killing the priests although they later recanted. However, the confessions were included in Zamora’s summaries.

The confessions told the same story. An officer gathered the unit, composed of members of the special Atlactl battalion, and said they had “received an order” to “eliminate the intellectual leaders of the guerrillas.”

Other parts of the confessions said Benavides had assured the officers involved that nothing would happen to them and that he “would support” his men.

The trial process, almost unique to Salvador, provided no real drama. Most of the three days were taken up by the monotonous reading of a nearly 6,000-page summary of the evidence written by the judge.

Then came 18 hours of debate by the prosecution and defense--more an exchange of bombast than a discussion of the evidence. The most notable moment came when one defense attorney made a statement seen by some human rights and other observers as a threat to the jury.

Speaking directly to the jurors, whose identity were kept secret and who were hidden behind a wooden and smoked-glass partition, the attorney said “anyone can leave in the morning, and who knows what will happen to them in the afternoon.”

In spite of the judgment, many experts and observers question whether the case has been solved. The Jesuit leadership here has insisted from the beginning that Benavides did not and could not have planned and carried out the operation on his own.

Jose Maria Tojeira, the head of the Jesuit order in El Salvador, charged again Saturday that “the intellectual authors” of the murders had not been tried.

His theory, and that of many international human rights organizations, is that Benavides acted with the compliance and probably at the order of other senior officers and perhaps even ranking civilian government figures.

Even senior officials at the American Embassy, which Tojeira has accused of covering up the possible role of Gen. Ponce and President Alfredo Cristiani, have expressed doubts that all those responsible were tried.

One prosecutor, Sidney Blanco, said after the trial that the verdict gives the prosecution the ability to continue investigating whether other officers were involved.