What has been most shocking to acquaintances of the victims is that they were not politicians, but academics. But the forces behind the massacre reveal a brutal history in Salvadoran politics that frequently leads to academic repression.

Hollenbach, speaking at St. Paul's Rectory on 34 Mt. Auburn St., echoed the former Salvadoran right-wing slogan, "If a patriot, kill a priest."

At Harvard, the two priests worked with the CFIA and the Harvard-based Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities (LASPAU).

Montes was commissioned in 1985 to write a report titled "Non-violent resistance against Salvadoran regimes using Institutionalized Terror in the period 1972-1987" for the CFIA's Program on Nonviolent Sanctions.

"He basically was doing an inventory of methods of non-violent struggle as they are manifested in an extremely hostile environment," says Christopher Kruegler, associate program director for the Program on Nonviolent sanctions. "There's some irony in the fact that he was studying the phenomenon which ultimately claimed his life."

Martin-Baro participated in the LASPAU-administered Fulbright Academic Exchange Program, which helps train foreign university professors at U.S. institutions. Martin-Baro earned his doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago. Upon return to his teaching and administrative post at UCA, Martin-Baro became the regional LASPAU coordinator.

"He quickly became the academic vice rector and was our main contact there when we reopened the program in 1984," says Ned D. Strong, a director of LASPAU. "He was [also] the contact with all academic exchange with the embassy and UCA."

Former director of LASPAU John Mullaney remembers Martin-Baro's enthusiasm for LASPAU. "When Padre Nacho came here he said that he admired LASPAU and the Fulbright Exchange as the best foreign policy program of the United States in El Salvador."

"He loved children," continues Mullaney, who now works at Harvard's Institute for International Development. "You could just see his whole face change. 'What are we doing to them?' he would say and shake his head."

"But he also loved his faculty, particularly his younger ones. It was like they were all on this mission together. It was palpable. He was so enthusiastic," Mullaney says.

"I think he had the unique ability of making people fall in love with his ideas. And that was what made him such an attractive, engaging person. He would come up to you and embrace you."

Associates say Montes was a more reserved person. "The Jesuits have a phrase that would describe him--'contemplative in action.' He was a very spiritual man as well as an academic," Mullaney says. "But he was always out in the fields getting his hands dirty with the displaced people, the migrant populations. He was a very attractive and magnanimous person."

Political Targets

Although their friends fiercely affirm that none of the priests were politicians, the nature of their academic studies and UCA's prominent efforts to bring about a negotiated settlement to the Salvadoran war made them highly political targets of the Salvadoran right wing.

"Because of the war, I think some of the more extreme right-wing supporters targeted people who were visible and outspoken about a peaceful solution to the war," says Pablo Mateu-Llort, a United Nations advisor working in El Salvador. "Definitely those priests were more outspoken supporters of dialogue."