Movie: Llegaron de Noche (What Lucia Saw)

Llegaron de Noche tells the story about the massacre of rector, five other Jesuit priests and two women at Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in El Salvador in 1989. What happened to the eyewitness Lucía Cerna and why?

Director Imanol Uribe (Dias Contados, Bwana) has created a captivating and humane dramatisation of the 1989 events at UCA.

On the night of 16 November 1989, soldiers from the El Salvadorian military academy and the elite batallion Atlactal raided the UCA campus in San Salvador. Their mission was to assasinate the recor of the university, the Spanish Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuría (59). When the soldiers had completed their task, eight people were brutally slaughtered. Under orders of leaving no witnesses, the soldiers murdered not only Rector Ellacuría, but also:

• Fr. Ignacio Martín-Baró (47), vice rector at UCA
• Fr. Joaquín López y López (71), one of the founders of UCA
• Fr. Segundo Montes Mozo (56), director of UCA's Institute of Human Rights
• Fr. Juan Ramón Moreno (56), university librarian 
• Fr. Amando López Quintana (50), former rector at the Jesuit university in Nicaragua
• Julia Elba Ramos (42), the housekeeper of the priests
• Celina Maricet Ramos (16), the daughter of the housekeeper

Still, there were eywitnesses to the crime. One of them was the housecleaner Lucía Barrera de Cerna. She saw that the perpetrators were army soldiers. 

Short introduction to the movie by Hans Egil Offerdal. He was a visiting student at UCA in 1993. After the movie there will be a conversation with Q&A.

The screening is a cooperation between Cine Latino, the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, the Department of Comparative Politics, and the Department of Foreign Languages.

Resources:

• Article "The Jesuit Martyrs of the University of Central America" by professor Robert Lassalle-Klein
• Short review of the book behind the movie La Verdad: A Witness to the Salvadoran Martyrs
• EFE interview with director Imanol Uribe (in Spanish)
• "El Salvador: Conviction of one of those responsible for the murder of Jesuit priests must break the chain of impunity" (Amnesty update 2020)
• Official trailer for the movie
• Blurb from Cine Latino (where you need to purchase a ticket to see the movie)