Salvador, 2 on November 15, 1989, Chief of Staff of the Salvadoran Armed Forces Rene Emilio Ponce, with the collusion of Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano and other high ranking officers, gave orders to Colonel Guillermo Alfredo Benavides to kill the long time rector of the UCA, Father Ignacio Ellacura and to leave no witnesses. The following day, a unit of the US trained Atalactl battalion entered the UCA and ordered Father Ellacura and four other faculty members, also Jesuit priests, to lay face down in the courtyard. A sixth priest was found inside the residence and the housekeeper and her fifteen-year old daughter were discovered in a nearby room. The Truth Commission describes what happened next: These cold-blooded murders were carried out by government forces in the course of an FMLN guerilla offensive that took the civil war to streets of San Salvador. As veteran commentator Peter Kornbluh points out, "Embarrassed by the strength of the insurgency, senior Salvadoran military officers decided to kill as many activists, labor leaders, and "subversive elements" as they could find...". 4 Why launch an assault on the UCA? The university was obviously not a military threat, having been surrounded by a security perimeter of about 300 soldiers days before the murders. Rather, it was the mission and praxis of the university that made it "subversive" to oligarchic interests and ideology. Since its founding in 1965, the UCA has played a prominent intellectual role in the cultural, social, and political life of the country. The