Salvadoran involved in massacre is deported

Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos, a former Salvadoran army lieutenant convicted in the 1989 death squad murders of six Jesuit priests, has been deported, federal authorities in Los Angeles announced Tuesday.

Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Guevara Cerritos was flown to El Salvador on Monday.

Guevara Cerritos was arrested in October at a motel near UCLA after entering the United States illegally in January 2005.

He was one of a group of Salvadoran officers and soldiers implicated in the killings of the priests, along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter.

The massacre was one of the most notorious in the Central American nation’s history.

The priests were viewed as subversives by some in the Salvadoran army amid the nation’s 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992.

Officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Guevara Cerritos, 43, was convicted in El Salvador of conspiring to commit acts of terrorism.

He was placed under house arrest for almost two years, but was pardoned under El Salvador’s General Amnesty Law of 1993.

Still, federal officials said they sought Guevara Cerritos’ deportation because of his illegal entry into this country and his “violent criminal past.”

“Removing human rights violators and other persecutors from the United States is one of ICE’s top enforcement priorities,” said Jim Hayes, director of ICE’s field office in Los Angeles, in a news release.

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