Rene Emilio Ponce, a Salvadoran army general and former defense minister accused of ordering the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests and two others during the country’s civil war, died on Monday. He was 64. Ponce — who faced an investigation in Spain for crimes against humanity — died of heart failure in a hospital in San Salvador, the Defense Department said in a statement. A U.N. truth commission report released in 1992 found Ponce ordered the killings of the Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter when Ponce was a colonel in the Salvadoran army. The priests, who worked at the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana, had been suspected of sympathizing with the country’s leftist rebel movement. A U.S. congressional investigation found they had been rousted from their beds and shot by soldiers in the killings, which sparked international outrage. Ponce was promoted to general the year after the massacre. He was defense minister from 1990 to 1993.
Link (here) to read the full article at the Washington Post.
2 comments:
Heart failure, how appropriate.
I don't have anything nice to say. I do have this: he was responsible -- whether by his own orders, or those he willingly passed along -- for the vicious murder of an innocent woman, her sixteen year old daughter, and six innocent priests. And he was guilty of covering up the crimes afterward. In this country he would be in prison sitting next to Charles Manson. I hope Manson lands on his lap in hell.
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