A text from the Isidro Menéndez Justice Center states that Colonel Guillermo Alfredo Benavides’ testimony was heard, questioned by three prosecutors and his preliminary testimony recorded as a witness of the Republic’s Attorney General.
Benavides, convicted of the November 16, 1989 events on the UCA campus, where soldiers massacred six Jesuit priests and two collaborators, accused General René Emilio Ponce, then Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Camilo Hernández, deputy director of the Military School for the organization and direction of the massacre.
Benavides, the then principal of that school, said that the Jesuits were not considered FMLN allies or collaborators in the ‘Hasta el Tope’ offensive,” but General Ponce and Camilo Hernández put together the assassination plan and he only transmitted information but that he did not know that the order was also to eliminate them without leaving witnesses.
The justice source stated that Benavides was ordered to execute Father Ignacio Ellacuría while they were already there and they had to kill the others because they could not leave witnesses.
The late Ponce was accused by the Truth Commission of being the one who gave the order to murder the Jesuits without leaving witnesses, while Hernandez is one of 10 soldiers charged in the criminal case and one of those which arrived the day after the first hearing, when the case was reopened the previous year.
The events attributed to the Atlacatl Battalion represent one of the many massacres perpetrated by the military in the 1980s, including the killing of four journalists from the Netherlands and the Mozote massacre, which left more than a thousand people dead, most of them Women. elderly and children.
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