The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday authorized the extradition of a former Salvadoran security minister wanted by the Spanish government in connection with the 1989 murder of six Catholic priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter during the Salvadoran civil war.
Inocente Orlando Montano Morales led El Salvador’s national police as vice minister for public security during the height of the Salvadoran civil war, during which the country’s fascist government struggled to suppress a dogged communist insurgency. El Salvador’s Catholic establishment, though generally wary of the communists, vigorously denounced the regime’s human rights abuses and attempted to act as mediator during the conflict. The Church’s denunciations precipitated a vicious repression, that frequently included state violence towards Catholic priests.
According to a detailed report submitted to a federal court in North Carolina by Professor Terry Lynn Karl, a Stanford scholar who studies the Salvadoran conflict, Montano ordered and abetted extrajudicial killings, torture, and kidnappings, and played a substantive role in the slaying of six Catholic priests on the campus of the University of Central America. All of the priests were Jesuits, and five of them were Spanish nationals, prompting the Spanish government’s longstanding interest in the crime.
Salvadoran soldiers dragged the Jesuits and two of their domestics into a courtyard in the middle of the night, and shot them in the back of the head, according to multiple accounts of the murder.
“Colonel Montano conspired with other high-ranking officers to incite to kill and then murder six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her young daughter,” the report reads. “He then engaged with these officers in a campaign of lying and a systematic cover-up of the crime.”
Montano fled to the United States after the war and secured provisional legal status. His status was later revoked when officials discovered he did not disclose his Salvadoran military service on an immigration application. He was charged and convicted of immigration fraud in 2012.
The Spanish government first sought extradition from the United States in 2014, in hopes they could try him for human rights violations. Montano fought the extradition through the federal courts, arguing there is not sufficient evidence to establish probable cause for his arrest. Federal courts must first confirm there is a reasonable basis for criminal prosecution before approving an extradition.
The justices declined to intervene in the case after Montano’s efforts failed in lower federal courts. He can now be extradited to Spain at any time.
Among the other Catholic clerics murdered during the Salvadoran civil war was Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated as he said Mass at a hospital in San Salvador in 1980. He was beatified by Pope Francis in 2015.
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