They say time heals all wounds. But 20 years have gone by since six Jesuit priests, a domestic worker and her daughter were brutally murdered in El Salvador, and not only have the wounds not healed, but for many, justice has not yet been served.

On Nov. 16, the Salvadoran government posthumously bestowed the maximum honor in the country upon the six Jesuits. President Mauricio Funes said the state must rectify mistakes of the past. “This means to remove a veil of darkness and lies, and give way to a light of justice and truth,” said the president during an official ceremony. That is as close as anyone has gotten in trying to repair one of the most heinous crimes committed during the bloody civil war that killed 75,000 people in El Salvador.

It was on the morning of Nov. 16, 1989, that Salvadorans woke to the news that six Jesuits from the Central American University, including its rector, Father Ignacio Ellacuría, and two women had been brutally murdered. They were awakened in the middle of the night, taken out of their rooms and shot to death.

Messages were left behind pointing to the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, known as the FMLN, as the perpetrators. But it soon became evident that it actually was an elite unit of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army that committed the massacre. “Leave no witnesses behind” reportedly was the order from above. Hence, a domestic worker, who was in a room adjacent to the priests' dormitory, and her daughter also were killed. The alleged motive was the support that the Jesuits, who practiced Liberation Theology, gave to the rebels.

What the assassins had not realized was that a man and a woman who worked at the university had stayed the night in a room across the way. Their lives were spared, but after the couple declared that it was in fact the military and not rebels that committed the crime, they received death threats. The Jesuits helped them flee the country with the aid of the French Embassy.

In a rare interview for a television story I did recently, the couple told us that when they arrived in Miami after the shootings, they were interrogated for seven days by FBI agents and a colonel from the Salvadoran army. They claim to have been tortured psychologically and forced to recant their story. For the past two decades, they have lived anonymously in several cities across the United States.

Soon the couple will have to relive the memories of that horrific night. They have been summoned to testify in a court in Spain in a new case filed by the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, along with the Spanish Association for Human Rights, against former Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani and 14 members of the Salvadoran military, including the alleged mastermind, Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce.

Back in 1991, in what many consider a mock trial, nine members of the military were tried, and seven of them were acquitted. Only Col. Guillermo Benavides and Lt. Yusshy Mendoza were found guilty; however, they served only 14 months behind bars, having benefited from an amnesty declared by President Cristiani in 1993. Ironically, the amnesty law was issued by presidential decree just hours before a special United Nations Commission on Truth was to divulge the findings of its investigation, which blamed military commanders for the deaths of the Jesuits and several other civilian massacres.

The case was closed, and El Salvador began a process of reconciliation. However, too many crimes left unpunished and too many questions left unanswered have made the process an emotional and difficult one, to the point that there has been a renewed claim to invalidate the amnesty law. For some, that effort and the new trial in Spain serve only to reopen old wounds. But for the families of the Jesuits and other victims of the excesses of war, justice must be served, and those who committed crimes must ask for forgiveness in order to move forward.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www .mariaesalinas.com)

© 2009 by Maria Elena Salinas

Distributed by King Features Syndicate