The National Court has sentenced Inocente Montano, a former colonel and vice minister of Public Security of El Salvador, to 133 years and four months in prison for the crime of the UCA in El Salvador in 1989.

The five Spanish Jesuits for whose death he is sentenced are: Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín Baró, Segundo Montes Mozo, Armando López Quintana and Juan Ramón Moreno Pardo. The court also considers Montano to be the author of the murders of Joaquín López y López SJ, Julia Elba Ramos and Celina Mariceth Ramos, but does not condemn him for these victims because the trial is limited to the Spanish victims.

The resolution analyses the context in which the events took place: the role of the Church, and of Ignacio Ellacuría in particular, in the search for a negotiated solution to the Salvadoran conflict, the enemies that this process had in the armed forces and the precedents - threats, searches, attacks - that had taken place.

The sentence relates the meeting of officers, including Montano, in which it was ordered to kill Ellacuría and leave no witnesses, as well as the events of the night of the crime.

The Spanish Provincial of the Society of Jesus, Antonio España, expressed his satisfaction that "the principle of Universal Justice, applied in Spain, has served to legally guarantee the truth". He also points out that the sentence does not exhaust the responsibilities, and shows his desire that the sentence should lead to progress in this sense in El Salvador itself.

The Universidad Centroamericana, for its part, has declared that the sentence will help "both the national conscience and the Salvadoran judicial system to take real steps in favour of truth and justice, not only in the so-called Jesuit case, but also in all pending cases of serious human rights violations"..