Justice is on the way for six Jesuit Priests whose lives were cut short 32years ago.

El Salvadoran Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered the reopening of an investigation into the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests that sparked international outrage.

The efforts of El Salvador to investigate and prosecute the masterminds of the killings during the country’s civil war have been hindered by legal maneuvers since the high court in 2016 declared the 1993 amnesty established after the war to be unconstitutional.

A lower court has ruled that the investigation into the alleged involvement of a group of military officers and former President Alfredo Cristiani in the killings could proceed. But the investigation was halted when the authorities appealed the matter to the Supreme Court in 2019.

Attorney General; Rodolfo Delgado insisted the case be reopened and welcomed Wednesday’s decision.

“The case will be reopened,” Delgado wrote in his Twitter account. “We are going after those responsible to bring justice for these horrific murders.”

On November 16, 1989, an elite commando unit killed six priests—five Spaniards and a Salvadoran—in the clergy’s residence along with their housekeeper and the housekeeper’s daughter. The killers tried to make the massacre appear as if it was carried out by leftist guerrillas.

Nine members of the military were initially tried, but a court acquitted seven of them. The two officers served short sentences but were released under pardon in 1993. After the Supreme Court found the pardon unconstitutional, a judge ordered one of the officers, Colonel Guillermo Benavides, to be sent back to the prison where he lives.

While the case stayed at home, in 2020 a Spanish court sentenced former Salvadoran colonel Innocent Orlando Montano to 133 years in prison for killing priests. The court called the genocide perpetrated by powerful interests, including Christiani, “state terrorism”, aimed at “the capture of their positions of privilege within power structures”.

The former president has denied any involvement or knowledge of the plan to kill the priests. Efforts to contact him for comment after Wednesday’s decision were not successful.

Everyone deserves justice whether dead or alive. We hope the guilty ones get the punishment they so deserve.