'I Miss Them, Always': A Witness Recounts El Salvador's 1989 Jesuit Massacre
Six priests became modern-day martyrs in one of the most high-profile religious crimes in recent Latin American history. A woman who witnessed the incident says the FBI pressured her to stay quiet.
On Nov. 16, 1989, a housekeeper named Lucía Cerna was startled awake by a violent commotion outside her window.
"I heard shooting, shooting at lamps, and walls, and windows," Cerna writes in her memoir, La Verdad: A Witness to the Salvadoran Martyrs. "I heard doors kicked, and things being thrown."
Armed soldiers broke into the José Simeón Cañas Central American University on the outskirts of El Salvador's capital, and raided the residence where six Jesuit priests were sleeping.
"I saw them," Cerna, 73, recalls vividly in an interview with NPR in her living room. For privacy, she does not want to disclose where she lives today."I saw the men with all their equipment and uniforms. I was seeing it and
