He's been luckier than is appropriate.
Found a sketchy bit of info. in a quick search:
El Salvador: The Jesuits Massacre Case
THE DEFENDANTS
A. Alfredo Cristiani Burkard
At the time of the Jesuits Massacre, Alfredo Cristiani Burkard was the President of El Salvador and the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. According to the complaint, he played an active role covering up the crime and obstructing the subsequent investigation. At the time of the Jesuits Massacre, Cristiani had been President of El Salvador and the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces for approximately 16 months.
According to the UN Truth Commission report and the complaint, a few days prior to the massacre Cristiani called Father Ellacuria in Spain and asked him to return to El Salvador. In addition, Cristiani was in almost daily contact with the architects of the scheme to murder Ellacuria and his fellow priests. His office was immediately adjacent to that of General Emilio Ponce.
Cristiani is a member of the ARENA and a successful businessman who married into one of El Salvador's leading oligarch families known as the “Fourteen Families.” He was educated at the Escuela Americana (American School) in San Salvador and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
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http://www.cja.org/cases/Jesuits_Docs/jesuits_defendants.shtmlHave also seen a reference I've lost which metioned his taking a trip to Washington D.C. around that time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~ Chicago Tribune
March 1, 2009
El Salvador amnesty law lets perpetrators of priests' murders walk free
Spanish court bids to prosecute 1989 slayings of priests
By Oscar Avila
Tribune correspondent
SAN SALVADOR — It was one sort of grief that Father Jose Maria Tojeira felt when he entered the home of his fellow Jesuit priests that day in 1989. Before him, he saw corpses and bloodstained walls, testament to one of the most notorious massacres committed during El Salvador's civil war.
Twenty years later, another anguish lingers in Tojeira from the knowledge that the military officers accused of killing six priests and two others in their home now live openly without fear of punishment.
A controversial law granting amnesty to the perpetrators of abuses is once again in the spotlight in El Salvador after a judge in Spain agreed in January to prosecute 14 military officers in the slaying while explicitly leaving the door open to indicting former President Alfredo Cristiani in the coverup.
From the current trial of Khmer Rouge members in Cambodia to the international tribunal prosecuting Balkans war crimes, the quest for justice after a conflict means overcoming legal barriers and revisiting the trauma of the violence itself.
El Salvador is still wrestling with how to achieve justice after a 12-year conflict between Marxist rebels and a military regime propped up by the Reagan administration.
While international human-rights groups say prosecution is the only logical avenue, both leading candidates in March's presidential election have taken the opposite approach, vowing to keep the amnesty law in place.
That angers Tojeira, now rector at Central American University, which houses a shrine to the slain priests. "We call it an insult to the victims of El Salvador," he said. "The amnesty law attempts to say that nothing happened here, that the living are the ones who count and the dead don't matter. It is a lack of respect to human dignity."
The facts of the murder of the Jesuits have been re-affirmed by national and international investigators. El Salvador's truth commission determined that high-level military officers planned the attack on the priests, who were considered "subversives" because they favored peace talks and had contacts with FMLN rebels.
Investigators have determined that the soldiers, part of a military trained by the United States during the Cold War-era clashes that flared throughout Central America, entered the priests' residence, tortured them and then ordered them to lie face-down in the garden. There, they were shot.
According to El Salvador's truth commission, military and security forces as well as death squads aligned with the government were responsible for about 95 percent of the 22,000 registered acts of serious violence.
More:
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/elsalvador/amnesty-law.htm~~~~~~~~~~~~"... military and security forces as well as death squads aligned with the government were responsible for about 95 percent of the 22,000 registered acts of serious violence" is an unbroken pattern all over Latin America. Everyone knows this. EVERYONE. The people who deny it are conspicuous liars.
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