Who is Guillermo Benavides, the soldier convicted of the Jesuitas case and now on probation?

SAN SALVADOR – Guillermo Alfredo Benavides Moreno is the first highest-ranking officer in the Salvadoran army to be sentenced to 30 years in prison for the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests and two women.

Benavides graduated from the Salvadoran Military School in 1966, a promotion to which the officers with the highest positions of responsibility and power in the Salvadoran Armed Forces belonged.

He began his military career in 1984, after being appointed lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. He was also the commander of the Belloso Battalion and, lastly, direct of the “Captain General Gerardo Barrios” Military School in 1989.

That school was located in an area where the offensive of the guerrilla groups united in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) was strong. And it was an area, moreover, where the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA), home of the Jesuit priests, was located.

Benavides had the security of the perimeter on his shoulders, and there was no troop that moved without his knowledge.

On November 16, 1989, the priests Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Armando López and Joaquín López; along with Elba Ramos, a domestic worker, and Celina Ramos, Elba’s daughter, were murdered on the university premises.

The army of the time considered the UCA Pastoral Center a “refuge for subversives” and bordered on the Liberation Theology professed by some Jesuit priests.

Although the case was brought to trial, only two soldiers were convicted: Lieutenant Yusshy René Mendoza and Colonel Benavides. The rest, who were seven, were released.

Colonel Benavides was sentenced to thirty years in prison in January 1992; 14 months later, it came out after the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly approved the Amnesty Law that sought to extinguish the responsibility of the perpetrators of crimes committed during the war.

But the law was annulled in 2016, and Benavides was recaptured.

A report from the Truth Commission in 1993 revealed that Benavides transferred the order to the lieutenants who carried out the massacre. That fact and the hierarchy in the area where the massacre occurred earned the jury their conviction.

Benavides now

Two days after El Salvador commemorates the martyrdom of two women and six murdered priests, a prison judge on November 14 ordered early parole for military man Guillermo Benavides.

The parameters used for the release were that the soldier is already 77 years old and a third of the sentence has been served.

The case has gone through a series of ups and downs before the Salvadoran justice, one of them occurred on September 8, 2020, when three magistrates of the Criminal Chamber of the Court established that “the intellectual authors of the slaughter” and decreed the definitive dismissal of the case.

But the Human Rights Institute of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA) denounced magistrates in the Prosecutor’s Office. The Court annulled the Chamber’s ruling and ordered the reopening of the case.

For the same case, Spain judged and sentenced ex-colonel Inocente Montano to 133 years in prison.

The Jesuit community in El Salvador demands that the mastermind of the case be clarified and that the participation of the military and former President Alfredo Cristiani be investigated.

The Salvadoran armed conflict ended in 1992, with the signing of the El Salvador Peace Accords, held in Chapultepec, Mexico, between the Government of that country and the FMLN guerrilla group.

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