Batallón Atlácatl

The Batallón Atlácatl was a unit of the El Salvador army in the 1980s . Its task was to react quickly to guerrilla attacks. The battalion has been implicated in some of the cruelest crimes of the Salvadoran Civil War .

The battalion was named after Ātlācatl , a legendary figure in Salvadoran history. It was founded in 1980 in the US Military Academy School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone and was initially located there. The unit arrived in El Salvador in 1981. She was trained in the US Army Camp Fort Bragg , North Carolina , by the US elite Special Forces (Green Berets).

As a result of this training, the Batallón Atlácatl had close relationships with American instructors and the Special Forces who were permanently active as military advisers in El Salvador during the civil war in the 1980s . The battalion was responsible for some of the most terrible crimes of the war, including the El Mozote massacre in December 1981 and the murder of six Jesuit priests , their housekeeper and their daughter in November 1989. Officers Orlando Zepeda, Elena, are believed to be involved in the murder Fuentes and Inocente Montano may have been involved. Defense Minister Emilio Ponce is said to have given the order . The battalion was disbanded in 1992 as part of the Salvadoran Peace Agreement ("Acuerdos de Paz de Chapultepec"), which ended the 11-year civil war.

In September 2020, the Madrid State Court sentenced Inocente Montano to 133 years in prison for the murder of five Spanish Jesuits.

See also

• Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas”
• Cerro de Guazapa
• Death squad

Web links

• Tracy Wilkinson: Notorious Salvadoran Battalion Is Disbanded: Military: US-trained Atlacatl unit was famed for battle prowess but was also implicated in atrocities . In: Los Angeles Times , December 9, 1992; Retrieved November 27, 2013

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Douglas D. Scott: Human Remains - Exhumation process - Forensic medicine - 2001 - Firearms Identification in Support of Identifying a Mass Execution at El Mozote, El Salvador (Historical Archeology - By Douglas D. Scott). International Red Cross and Red Crescent Organizations, archived from the original on February 1, 2012 ; accessed on April 11, 2015 . 
2. ^ The Trojan Horse .
3. ↑ El Salvador: Questionable Peace . In: The mirror . No. 2 , 1992 ( online ).
4. ↑ Tracy Wilkinson: Notorious Salvadoran Battalion Is Disbanded: Military: US-trained Atlacatl unit was famed for battle prowess but was also implicated in atrocities . In: Los Angeles Times , December 9, 1992; Retrieved November 27, 2013
5. ↑ Over 130 years imprisonment for Jesuit murders in El Salvador