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In mid-July was set for sentencing the trial of Inocente Orlando Montano, former Salvadoran deputy minister of public security, accused of being one of the intellectual authors of the Jesuit massacre and two employees of the UCA in 1989,.

In one of the sessions, two people testified. First, at the request of the accusations, Terry Lynn Karl, professor of political science and director of the Department of Latin American Studies at Stanford University in the United States. Based on numerous declassified documents and interviews, Karl concluded that there was a "code of silence" in the Salvadoran army to cover up human rights violations. Montano was part of the core that concentrated de facto power within the armed forces, where important decisions were made by consensus.

That same day, Mauricio Ernesto Vargas, a retired general of the Salvadoran Armed Forces and member of the Tandona, testified as part of the defence.

On Tuesday, Oscar Alfredo Santamaría, a former minister in President Cristiani's government and a member of the commission that drafted the General Amnesty Law, declared that the tasks of the deputy minister were purely administrative and technical advice. He reiterated, in response to questions from the defence, that the Armed Forces had always sought a peaceful solution to the conflict. During Tuesday's session, several testimonies of deceased witnesses were also read, accrediting the context of hostility towards the Jesuits and the conviction that the order to kill them came from the military leadership.

The last session of the trial was held on Wednesday 15 July. First, the reports by the prosecution and the defence were presented. The former spoke of a "pact for massacre", "state terrorism" and "war crime" and called for 150 years in prison; the latter spoke of "lack of evidence" and "unsubstantiated claims in documents or papers to the contrary" and called for acquittal and, if convicted, the application of exemptions from "state of necessity", "irresistible force" and "insurmountable fear".

Finally, the defendant, Inocente Orlando Montano, disregarding his lawyer, had the last word. He swore "before the court and before God" that he was not lying and that he did not participate in any meeting where the crime was ordered to be committed. He summed up his version of events in one sentence: "There was no preconceived plan, it was a mistake by the soldiers”.

The trial is set for sentencing and for history. Montano is the only alleged mastermind of the UCA massacre who could be tried in Spain under the principle of Universal Justice. While waiting for the verdict - which may come in weeks - the public hearing has brought to light testimonies, declassified documents, and the enormous work of investigators and experts, with the tireless support of family members and human rights organizations, who are pointing to a truth whose judicial sanction can help heal the wounds of a conflict that left 80.000 victims in the 1980s in El Salvador.

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