WOLA: Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas
21 Oct 2009 | | News

House Resolution Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of Jesuit Martyrs in El Salvador

WOLA is pleased to see that H.Res. 761, introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern and 33 co-sponsors, was approved today in the U.S. House of Representatives. This resolution remembers and commemorates the lives and work of the six Jesuit priests and two women who were murdered in El Salvador nearly twenty years ago. On Nov. 16, 1989, armed men burst into the Jesuit residence at the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, killing the six Jesuit priests who were there,  along with the community’s cook and her daughter.

More than 70,000 died during El Salvador’s civil war, the vast majority of whom were civilians killed by the Salvadoran armed forces and paramilitary death squads. The Jesuit case galvanized an outcry for human rights and justice from the international community, played a key role in shifting opinions in the U.S. Congress, and helped to spark the peace process that brought the civil war to an end. WOLA is pleased to see the Congress commemorating this important historical moment, and to see that the resolution urges the United States today to collaborate with El Salvador’s new government on the unfinished tasks to which the Jesuits were committed – the “efforts to reduce poverty and hunger and to promote educational opportunity, human rights, the rule of law and social equity for the people of El Salvador.”

To read the resolution click here.