At 6:45 a.m. on Nov. 16, 1989, the Rev. José María Tojeira, the provincial (or leader) of the Jesuits in Central America, was shaving when he was brought the news.
Four of his fellow priests at the nearby Central American University, a Jesuit school in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, were lying face down in the school’s garden. They had been shot in the head at point-blank range. The bodies of two other priests and those of the gardener’s wife and their daughter were inside.
Father Tojeira arrived on the scene immediately after. That morning would define his life, thrusting him into the forefront of a decades-long pursuit of justice against his colleagues’ killers and making him a leading voice for human rights in El Salvador.
He died of a heart attack on Sept. 5 at Rafael Landívar University, a Jesuit school in Guatemala City, where he had traveled to deliver a lecture. He was 78.
His death was announced by the Society of Jesus in Central America.
Those killings were a watershed moment in U.S. relations with El Salvador, a country into which America had poured billions of dollars in aid and military assistance through the 1980s in a futile attempt to help the Salvadoran government stamp out the rebels of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or F.M.L.N.
One of those killed, the Rev. Ignacio Ellacuría, the rector of Central American University, had been helping in efforts to negotiate peace with the F.M.L.N., which was conducting a major offensive in San Salvador at the time of the massacre.
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The post José María Tojeira, 78, Dies; Pursued Killers of His Fellow Priests appeared first on New York Times.
