On the night of November 16, 1989,
members of the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite corps of the Salvadoran army,
invaded the residence of the Jesuit faculty of the Romero Center at the
University of Central America (UCA) and slaughtered six teaching scholars, along
with their housekeeper and her daughter.
Only Fr. Jon Sobrino, who was out of the country at the time, was spared
from the massacre.
By that time civil war had raged in
El Salvador for nearly a decade.
Strongly influenced by a Cold War mentality that viewed as a communist
plot any attempt by the poor of Latin America to overthrow oppressive regimes,
the U.S. was then funding the Salvadoran military at approximately one million
dollars per day. Some of that went to
equip the death squads. Much of the rest
lined the pockets of corrupt military leaders.
Indeed, military officers were fast becoming the new wealthy power in
the country, challenging the traditional oligarchy referred to as “the fourteen
families.”
