"Since they directed academic centers they had huge publicity," Mateu-Llort continues. "They advocated a negotiated solution to the crisis. That gave them a lot of publicity, the type of publicity only politicians get."
The Jesuits also controlled two prestigious, academic, often anti-government publications: Estudio Centralamericana [ECA], a sociological journal, and La Boletin, an economics publication.
Under its editor-in-chief, Martin-Baro, ECA often published figures and analyses at odds with U.S. and Salvadoran government figures, Mullaney says.
"People in the U.S. embassy always disagreed with their analyses and the results of their analyses, calling them leftist or marxist," he says. "The figures that they would use on the number of people actually killed by the military or by death squads were always higher than those reported by the United States military and the United States embassy."
More Accurate Figures
"However, the university usually had sources that were in the field or on the parish level--in the community health clinics, together with the Green Cross [the Salvadoran equivalent of the Red Cross]. But it was always later proven that the figures reported by the UCA were always accurate," says Mullaney.
La Boletin also often found itself working against U.S. and government interests.
"La Boletin was doing economic analyses showing the guerrillas were succeeding with their strategy of destroying the economic infrastructure of the country," says Mullaney. "This put UCA, by telling the truth, at odds with people from the international banking community. The military was upset because it [contradicted] the efforts they were putting into propaganda."
Power Struggle on the Right
These factors have fueled the widely-held beliefs that the military or right-wing death squads were responsible for the priests' assassinations.
Harvey G. Cox, Thomas professor of Divinity School professor and close friend of Martin-Baro speculates that the massacre may have been part of a larger power struggle.
"It was an internal struggle between the military and the [rightist] Arena Party. This could very well have been a way for the right wing to show their rivals in the party 'Who's in charge,'" Cox says.
Right-wing violence directed against academic institutions has historical roots within El Salvador. The formerly prominent state-run Universidad Nacional de El Salvador (UNES) was devastated in 1979 by the army and was shut down from 1981 and 1984. Although since reopened, it has never been able to regain the international prominence it once commanded.
"They pay the professors a minimal salary, there are no books, no laboratories," said Strong, speaking of UNES.
But UCA and the Society of Jesus seem ready to press on with the fallen priests' work.
"Yes, they intend to continue," said Rev. Paul C. Kenney, Jesuit press officer for the New England province. "I would say that it is going to be more than business as usual. There has been a challenge to stop the intellectual opposition to the destruction in El Salvador."
"The new authorities of the university have publicly announced their profound sense of loss for those who were killed," says Werner Romero, a professor of philosophy at UCA. "However, the university authorities state that the UCA will continue to hold true to the same ideological stance of those killed. The university will continue its line of support for academic freedom, which is freedom of research, freedom of speech in defense of the poor majority of this country."
"The helicopters come at night and shoot projectiles that sound like trains passing overhead ending with explosions," he says, "But we continue to teach."