On November 16, 1989, at the height of a massive guerrilla offensive, an elite commando unit of the Salvadoran military executed six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter at the Central American University in San Salvador. It was a calculated strike designed to silence the country’s loudest voices for peace—and it became the ultimate turning point in the Salvadoran Civil War.

The massacre horrified a global community already numb to the conflict's brutality. These eight lives were added to a staggering toll of 70,000 citizens lost to a twelve-year war of attrition. Shockingly, the killers belonged to the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion, and the field commander of the raid, Lt. José Ricardo Espinoza Guerra, was a product of a Jesuit education. One of the men he was ordered to assassinate had been his high school teacher.

A QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE chronicles Espinoza’s journey into the heart of darkness, from a Jesuit classroom to a campus execution ground. It is a story that cuts to the heart of El Salvador’s wartime tragedy, offering a chilling warning of how easily ordinary men can be weaponized into mass murderers.