Former Salvadoran Military Official Implicated in Jesuit Murders Granted Continuance in Immigration Fraud Case

BOSTON/South Boston - An Everett man implicated in the 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests and two civilians in El Salvador abandoned his guilty plea on two unrelated immigration charges in federal district court Monday. The presiding judge agreed to continue proceedings on January 11th after it became clear the defendant did not understand the consequences of his plea.

Inocente Orlando Montano and 20 other Salvadoran former military officials were indicted last May by a Spanish judge for planning and ordering the slayings, which were carried out during the civil war in El Salvador that claimed 75,000 lives. Five of the Jesuit priests were Spanish citizens.

Montano, a retired colonel and one-time vice minister for public safety in El Salvador, was arrested August 25th after a San Francisco-based human rights organization alerted federal authorities that he was residing undetected in Everett, Massachusetts.

U.S. prosecutors subsequently charged Montano with fraud and perjury, alleging he concealed his membership in El Salvador’s armed forces on his immigration application. The charges carry a maximum penalty of ten years and five years respectively under federal sentencing guidelines.

The local case has attracted the attention of the Jesuit community. Among the dozen or so subdued spectators at the Moakley courthouse yesterday was Boston College chancellor Father J. Donald Monan, a Jesuit who was the college’s president at the time of the slayings and has been intimately involved in the case for over twenty years. “I went down to El Salvador right after the killings,” he said, adding that he met with top military and judicial officials, including the late colonel René Emilio Ponce, who was also implicated in the murders.

The United States armed and trained the Salvadoran military during the course of the civil war.

District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock postponed Montano’s plea hearing after an extensive examination to establish whether Montano’s plea agreement was made knowingly and voluntarily. The judge emphasized that conviction on the immigration charges allowed him to determine sentencing independent of any guidelines or agreements between the parties, telling Montano, “if you don’t like the sentence, you can’t withdraw your plea later.”

“I can’t withdraw?” asked an astonished Montano.

Judge Woodlock presided over the 2006 immigration fraud conviction of a man who had concealed his service with Bosnian Serb forces that massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War. After serving part of his 63-month sentence, Marko Boskic was extradited to Bosnia in 2010 to stand trial.

The judge instructed Montano’s lawyer to review the impact of the underlying facts of that case, including human right violations. “That indicates the way I’ll approach this sort of case,” he said.

Human rights advocates hope for a similar trajectory in this case. “The case could end 22 years of impunity for the perpetrators,” Almudena Bernabeu, lead counsel for the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, said earlier this month. Her organization brought the case before the Spanish National Court.

The Spanish government has begun formal extradition proceedings for 15 former Salvadoran military officials, including Orlando Montano and another U.S. resident, Héctor Ulises Cuenca Ocampo. The other 13 defendants reside in El Salvador, where a 1993 amnesty law has prevented their prosecution.

It is unclear whether the U.S. will honor a Spanish extradition request, however. Montano faces certain deportation to El Salvador if convicted of immigration fraud, raising the possibility that he would be returned to that country at the conclusion of any sentence instead of standing trial in Spain.

“If he’s deported to El Salvador he will be free within hours,” said Bernabeu.

Father Monan was visibly disappointed by the delay. “It’s unfortunate that it’s postponed again,” he said. “We had made a lot of progress in getting a judgment.”

The U.S. Department of Justice declined comment.