The Fourth Court of Penitentiary Surveillance and Execution of Sentences of San Salvador has granted early parole to Colonel Guillermo Alfredo Benavides Moreno, sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murder of six Jesuit priests -five of them Spanish- and two women perpetrated by military personnel on November 16, 1989.
«The special hearing was held, and the result was positive, the judge granted the benefit of early conditional release in favor of my client», informed Benavides’ defense lawyer, David Campos, according to the Salvadoran newspaper ‘El Mundo’.
Campos emphasized that the requirements have been fulfilled: to have completed more than 60 years of age and a third of the sentence, that is, 10 of the 30 of the total sentence.
«They were fulfilled in October. Therefore the conditions were given, since in addition to that, he is 77 years old to grant him early parole,» Campos has highlighted. Benavides will be subject to comply with behavioral parameters and will always be under court supervision.
Benavides was convicted for the material authorship of the massacre in the 1990s, but was released under the General Amnesty Law. He re-entered prison after the law was repealed in 2016.
UCA CAMPUS MASSACRE The massacre took place in November in the early morning hours of 16 1989 on the campus of the UCA in San Salvador, the country’s capital. Among the victims was the ideologue of Liberation Theology, the Spaniard Ignacio Ellacuría, then rector of the UCA.
Also killed were Spaniards Ignacio Martín Baró (vice rector), Segundo Montes, Amando López and Juan Ramón Moreno, as well as Salvadorans Joaquín López, Elba Ramos and her daughter Celina. All of them were killed in the middle of a guerrilla offensive on San Salvador by soldiers of the Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran Army.
In September 1991, a court tried nine members of the military who were listed as the perpetrators without taking into account the masterminds, according to humanitarian organizations. Colonel Guillermo Alfredo Benavides was found guilty of all the murders and Lieutenant Yusshy René Mendoza was held responsible for the death of the minor Celina.
Both officers regained their freedom under a 1993 amnesty law, but Benavides was jailed again to complete his 30-year sentence after the amnesty was declared time-barred in 2016.
The case was reopened on January 5 of this year to try the alleged masterminds: former military officers Juan Orlando Zepeda, Francisco Elena Fuentes and Rafael Humberto Larios.
The case has also been prosecuted in Spain and in September 2020 the National Court sentenced Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano Morales to 133 years in prison.
The civil war ended on January 16, 1992 with the signing of peace agreements between the government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front guerrillas. The conflict left more than 75,000 dead, 7,000 disappeared and millions of dollars in economic losses.
