Segundo Montes

Segundo Montes Mozo SJ (born May 15, 1933 in Valladolid , † November 16, 1989 in San Salvador ) was a Spanish - Salvadoran Jesuit , liberation theologian and university professor . In 1989 he was murdered by members of a death squad .

Life

Montes grew up in his native Valladolid in Spain. In 1950 he entered Orduña as a novice in the Society of Jesus. In 1951 he was sent to Santa Tecla , El Salvador. The following year he began studying human sciences at the Catholic University in Quito ( Ecuador ), which he graduated in 1957 with a degree in philosophy . Montes then returned to El Salvador, where he became a teacher at the Jesuit private school Colegio Externado San José and worked until 1960. In that year he began to study theology , which he completed in 1964 as a licentiate at the University of Innsbruck . In 1963, while studying, he was ordained a priest . In 1970 he became one of the first Spanish Jesuits in the Central American country to take on Salvadoran citizenship.

Between 1966 and 1976 he again taught (as a physics teacher) at the Externado San José in San Salvador. From 1973 he was also rector of the institution. It was a time of conflict for the private school as the ideas of liberation theology began to be heard among teachers and students. This caused displeasure among the parents of the pupils, because the Externado San José was traditionally an elite school where the conservative upper class of the country had its pupils trained.

Around the same time, between 1970 and 1976, Montes also served as dean of the human sciences faculty at the Jesuit Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” (UCA), which had developed into an intellectual center of liberation theology under the direction of Ignacio Ellacuría SJ. He then took up postgraduate studies at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid . In 1978 he received his doctorate with a thesis El compadrazgo. Una estructura de poder en El Salvador in the subject of social anthropology . Between 1978 and 1982 he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Estudios Centroamericanos . In 1980 he became dean of the UCA's social science faculty. From 1984 he headed a research project on refugees from the Salvadoran civil war (1980–1992). This resulted in the establishment of the UCA Human Rights Institute (IDHUCA) in 1985.

In addition to his teaching activities, Montes was parish priest in Santa Tecla. He used his academic position to publicly denounce the increasing human rights violations and expulsions during the civil war .

At the beginning of November 1989 the FMLN guerrilla forces began an offensive against the Salvadoran government, during which they penetrated into the capital. The troubled government accused the Jesuits of the UCA of providing shelter for the guerrillas on the university campus and of supporting them with propaganda. On the night of October 16, one of members of the penetrated army existing death squad in the residential district of the Jesuits. Segundo Montes, his friars Ignacio Ellacuría, Amando López , Joaquín López y López , Ignacio Martín-Baró and Juan Ramón Moreno and two domestic workers were killed.

legacy

Segundo Montes wrote numerous works on Salvadoran social structures, migration, social redistribution and the consequences of the civil war. The town of Ciudad Segundo Montes in the Morazán department, inhabited by refugees from the civil war, is named after him.

Fonts (selection)

• El compadrazgo. Una estructura de poder en El Salvador. 2nd Edition. UCA Ediciones, San Salvador 1987, ISBN 84-8405-012-2 ( Colección Estructuras y procesos. Volume 2).
• Migration to the United States as an Index of the Intensifying Social and Political Crisis in El Salvador. In: Journal of Refugee Studies , Volume 1, 1988, ISSN  0951-6328 , pp. 107-126.

literature

• Mandy Macdonald, Mike Gatehouse: In the Mountains of Morazán. Portrait of a Returned Refugee Community in El Salvador. LAB, London 1995, ISBN 0-906156-94-7 .
• Thomas Sheehan: Friendly Fascism. Business as Usual in America's Backyard , in: Fascism's Return. Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980 , ed. v. J. Richard Golson, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, pp. 260-300 ( PDF ).

Web links

• Segundo Montes on the UCA website