General's SOA connection uncovered

Salvadoran implicated in 1989 massacre
was graduate, documents show

By LINDA COOPER and JAMES HODGE

National Catholic Reporter

December 10, 2004

Although his name does not appear on the official graduation lists of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, the Salvadoran army colonel who issued the orders to assassinate six Jesuit priests is in fact an alumnus of the notorious counterinsurgency school, a newly uncovered congressional document shows.

The priests were murdered 15 years ago by the Salvadoran army's so-called "anti-terrorist" unit that swarmed over Central America University on the night of Nov. 16, 1989, dragging the clerics from their beds and blowing out the backs of their heads with assault rifles. Their cook, Elba Julia Ramos, and her teenage daughter, Celina, were repeatedly shot as they lay dying in each other's arms.

Four years later, a U.N. Truth Commission cited 26 Salvadoran officers in the massacre, including Col. René Emilio Ponce. The commission charged that Ponce, who by then had become the country's defense minister, had ordered the killing of university president, Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría, along with the elimination of all witnesses.

Ellacuría and the other Jesuits -- Ignacio Martín-Baró, Segundo Montes, Amando López Quintana, Juan Ramón Moreno, Joaquín López y López -- were among the most respected intellectuals in the country. The priests had drawn the anger of the military's high command by refusing to keep silent in the face of brutal repression and calling for a negotiated peace.

The Truth Commission concluded that Ponce not only gave the assassination orders, but furnished the commando troops, destroyed evidence and pressured officers to remain mute about higher-level involvement.

When the commission issued its report in March 1993, five of the 26 cited officers had already been identified as SOA graduates by a task force headed by Rep. Joseph Moakley, D-Mass. Another 16 were found on the school's graduation rosters by SOA Watch, founded by Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois.

While some human rights groups suspected that Ponce had ties to the school, the name of the man who ordered the assassinations was nowhere on the SOA rolls. But a recently discovered Congressional document shows that Ponce had indeed attended the Army school, known for graduating numerous Latin American dictators and hundreds of officers linked to gross human rights abuses.

The document, dated May 21, 1990, and titled "Barriers to Reform: A Profile of El Salvador's Military Leaders," was prepared by the staff of the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus. The caucus report profiled El Salvador's top 15 commanding officers, using background information provided by the Salvadoran government and the U.S. Defense Department.

Of the 15, the report said, 14 "have risen to their positions despite having had documented abuses of human rights carried out by troops under their command." Of the 14, all but one is a graduate of the School of Americas.

Ponce was listed in the Foreign Policy Caucus report as a 1970 SOA graduate. In the late '70s through the '80s, it said, he was continually promoted despite reports linking him to atrocities.

Among the incidents in the caucus report were:

*      A 1981 case in which Treasury Police under his command killed 30 civilians in Soyapango. Many of the victims were taken from their homes and summarily executed. "The police claimed that the deaths had occurred in a shootout, but a number of bodies reportedly were found with their hands bound behind their backs," the report said. "After an investigation, the State Department called the Treasury Police's version 'not credible' and 'inane.' "

*      A 1988 case in which troops under Ponce, then commander of the Third Brigade, seized a 25-year-old cooperative leader and two teenage boys in Morazán. Two were later discovered dead with their ears, noses and thumbs cut off. The third was never found. Ponce told the media that the two dead youths were subversives who had died in a firefight, and that "we cannot investigate every combat report."

*     A 1989 massacre that Ponce, then chief of staff, told U.S. Rep. Gerry Studds, D-Mass., was the work of guerrillas. Ponce, the report said, claimed that "the head wounds found on 10 villagers killed in San Sebastian in September 1988 must have been the result of the rebels digging up the bodies and shooting them to fabricate a massacre that would be attributed to the army." After intense U.S. pressure, the army later acknowledged it had committed the massacre.

Despite these incidents and the Jesuit massacre, U.S. officials continued to back both Ponce and the Salvadoran military. While the killings provoked international outrage, just four days after the massacre the U.S. Congress approved legislation that continued the funding of the right-wing regime at a rate of more than $1 million a day.

Meanwhile, the FBI tried to intimidate one of the priests' housekeepers who had survived Ponce's scheme to eliminate witnesses. The housekeeper, Lucía Barrera de Cerna, was flown to Miami where the FBI held her for four days without access to a lawyer. The bureau also allowed a Salvadoran officer to participate in the woman's interrogation -- Lt. Col. Manuel Antonio Rivas Mejia, who had helped destroy evidence implicating the army in the Jesuit murders, according to the Truth Commission. Documents show that Rivas Mejia graduated from a counterinsurgency course at the School of the Americas.

De Cerna's treatment prompted Salvadoran Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas to lash out: "Instead of being protected, as people in the U.S. embassy in El Salvador had promised, she was subjected to an authentic brainwashing and the blackmail that she would be deported."

The FBI also grilled U.S. Army Maj. Eric Buckland, a senior U.S. adviser in El Salvador, who had told his superiors that both he and Ponce, then the armed forces chief of staff being groomed to be the next defense minister, had advance knowledge of the murder plot. Under the FBI's interrogation, Buckland retracted his statements, which were withheld for months from Moakley's congressional task force.

Moakley later charged that Ponce was the one who had given the assassination orders, but by then the Salvadoran colonel had already been appointed defense minister. Ponce would never face charges for the Jesuit murders and retired in the summer of 1993. Even after his role in the massacre was known, Gen. Colin Powell heaped praise on him at a ceremony in San Salvador, saying, "I wanted to take the opportunity to express once again my admiration for the El Salvadoran armed forces, for the leadership that Minister Ponce and the other gentlemen here today have given to those armed forces."

The Foreign Policy Caucus report that identifies Ponce as an SOA graduate also cites two other SOA grads, Col. Inocente Orlando Montano, vice minister for public security, and Col. Juan Orlando Zepeda, vice minister for defense, for denouncing the Jesuits as subversives just months before they were assassinated.

In the summer of 1989, the caucus report said, Montano "publicly accused the university of being a 'front group' that published 'lies' to discredit the army."

Two months earlier, the report stated, Zepeda accused the Jesuit university of "planning strategies of the FMLN [the rebel organization], being a refuge and haven for terrorist leaders and being accomplices in the April 19 assassination of the attorney general."

In denouncing the Jesuits, Montano and Zepeda seemed to be operating straight out of an SOA manual called "Counter Intelligence," which included priests in its profiles of terrorists: "The terrorists," it stated, "tend to be atheists, devoted to violence. This does not mean that all terrorists are atheists. In Latin America's case, the Catholic priests and the nuns have carried out active roles in the terrorist operations."

The manual -- along with five others, some of which advocated torture and assassination -- had been used at the school and distributed by Army Mobile Training Teams until 1991. A secret Pentagon report the next year found them in violation of official policy, but the findings were kept secret for four years. After they were finally released in 1996, public outrage grew until the Pentagon "closed" the school in 2000, only to reopen it under a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Linda Cooper and James Hodge are the authors of Disturbing the Peace: The Story of Father Roy Bourgeois and the Movement to Close the School of the Americas .