PVC 1990 Delegation – Part Thirteen: University of Central America

The following notes have been edited to correct errors and to add explanations and updates. Parenthetical notes and remarks from the original are enclosed in parentheses. Present day [2022] updates are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.

5 October 1990, 3:00 PM - University of Central America

We are welcomed to the university and led back a hallway to a conference room/library where some of the items which were attacked during the massacre are on display. [On the night of 16 November 1989 members of the elite Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran military invaded the UCA and massacred six Jesuit priests/scholars, their housekeeper, and her daughter.] There are text books and a Bible which were machine-gunned into tatters. A scorched and blistered portrait of Archbishop Romero hangs in a charred wooden frame. The glass which had once covered it drips in icicles from the lower edge of the frame, melted by flame throwers and solidified again into tortured columns. The wooden panel above the door frame is pierced repeatedly with bullet holes, mementos of that terrible night nearly a year ago.

A slightly-built, middle-aged Spanish priest enters the room and takes his seat at the head of the conference table. He is introduced to us as Rafael Sivatte, an assistant to Fr. Jon Sobrino.

"I have been here since 1985, more or less - teaching at the university three months of each year. The last time that I was here was just before the massacre. But now I am settled in to stay as the Old Testament professor and assistant to Jon Sobrino.

Looking Back; Looking Forward

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.”