A Salvadoran court granted on Monday the benefit of probation to Guillermo Benavides, a colonel accused of ordering the murder of six Jesuit priests during the Central American nation’s civil war in the 1980s, according to his lawyer.
David Campos, legal representative of the 77-year-old ex-soldier, said that a judge granted the measure due to his client’s advanced age and because he had already served a third of the sentence handed down in 1992, which entailed a total of 30 years in prison. prison.
“The special hearing procedure was carried out and the result was positive. The judge [otorgó] a benefit of early parole in favor of my client because the established parameters had been met,” Campos told reporters.
According to the investigations, a military commando of the Salvadoran army broke into the campus of the Jesuit Central American University (UCA) on November 16, 1989 and assassinated six priests on Benavides’ orders, including the rector and two of his collaborators.
Reuters He did not immediately obtain comment from UCA authorities or his lawyer on the case, which is considered one of the most emblematic crimes of the conflict.
The colonel was released in 1993, after the approval of an amnesty law, but in 2016 magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice declared said law unconstitutional, for which the soldier was recaptured.
El Salvador suffered a war between 1980 and 1992 that pitted the ex-guerrilla leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the Salvadoran Army, financed by the United States, which left 75,000 dead and 8,000 missing.
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