Published at: 19/11/2025 09:00 PM

(Correo del Orinoco, November 16, 2014)

• November 16 marked the 36th anniversary of the massacre of six Jesuit priests and two women in El Salvador, carried out by the death squad known as the “Atlacalt Battalion”.
• This was one of the many massacres perpetrated by these units as part of Operation Centaurus.
• Operation Centaur was led by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and coordinated by the then Venezuelan ambassador to El Salvador, Leopoldo Castillo, and his right hand man in all these matters, career diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia.
• The main objective of the planning was to eliminate the religious who collaborated with the revolutionary movements in the Central American region.
• The meetings to implement the plan were held at the headquarters of the Venezuelan embassy in El Salvador and at the School of the Americas in Panama, attended by the said ambassador and his assistant.
• This covert operation took place between 1979 and 1990, during the presidencies of the extreme right-wing Social Christians Alfredo Cristiani and José Napoleón Duarte.
• The massacre is related to a series of orchestrated murders in Central America to silence the voices of priests, nuns, teachers and students linked to peace movements and Liberation Theology.
• During the presidency of José Napoleón Duarte (1984-1989), Luis Posada Carriles was his main and closest advisor on repression and torture.
• The truth is that, at the time of the massacre, the priest and rector of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA), Father Ignacio Ellacurina, was taking very important steps to get the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FFMLN) to lay down its arms, promote the necessary dialogue to achieve peace and achieve a definitive cessation of hostilities.
• Both the rector Ignacio Ellacurina and his fellow Jesuit Fathers Armando López, Juan Ramón Moreno, Ignacio Marti-Baró, Segundo Montes and Joaquín López, professors and students of the UCA, were subject to constant death threats and fascist attacks by paramilitary agents of the political party Revolutionary Alliance Nationalist (ARENA), whose leader was the murderer Roberto D'Aubisson, who planned several massacres together with Ambassador Leopoldo Castillo.
• That November 16, the aforementioned death squad unexpectedly broke into the university campus at 1:00 in the morning, while everyone was sleeping.
• Liberation Theology defenders and activists were taken from their rooms at gunpoint and butchered. Once in the gardens they proceeded to shoot them in the head. Domestic Julia Ramos and her 15-year-old daughter Celina Mariceth Ramos were also murdered.
• Little has been said about Venezuela's foreign policy in Central America during the years of the Punto Fijo Pact (1958-1990). The facts show that our foreign ministry, in combination with the CIA, were the main actors in the formation of the so-called “Death Squads”. These were nothing more than elite groups of the Salvadoran Army and a few Venezuelan police officers trained to carry out the systematic and selective elimination of priests and nuns whose priority was “the option for the poor”.
• Declassified CIA documents in 2009 warned that both the agency, the State Department and the Spanish Secret Services (CESID) were aware that the rector of the UCA and the priests were going to be assassinated.
• The list of those sentenced also included the names of Saint Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated on March 24, 1980, and the four nuns of the Maryknoll congregation, who were savagely tortured and shot on December 2, 1980 in El Salvador.
• During the war period in El Salvador (1979-1991), the CIA disbursed $1,500,000 a day to support the death squads and equipment of the Salvadoran Army. A fact that made it much longer and bloodier. Agents John Negroponte and Elliot Abrams directed all of these operations, as well as those related to arms smuggling financed by drug trafficking known as Iran Gate (Air Cocaine).

Mazo News Team