The United States is helping to prosecute Salvadoran military officers it once partnered with, who are accused of atrocities in the Central American country's 1979-92 civil war.

The Department of Justice is supporting the extradition of Orlando Montano Morales, El Salvador's former vice minister of defense, the New York Times reported. Spanish authorities have said Montano participated in a meeting that resulted in the order to kill a prominent Jesuit, as well as anybody who witnessed the assassination.

Montano suspected the Rev. Ignacio Ellacurría, who at the time led the José Simeón Cañas University of Central America, of serving as an intellectual leader of the leftist guerrillas with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The vice minister and 19 other former officers have been charged with murder and terrorism in the massacre that ended in the deaths of six priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.

Montano is being held in the United States on immigration charges and was was living in Massachusetts, when he was arrested by federal officials in 2011. He is the only defendant currently in custody, the newspaper detailed.

At an Aug. 20 court appearance, a public defender representing the former official "bombarded" a U.S. district court in North Carolina with 44 pieces of evidence -- mostly declassified diplomatic cables -- before Judge Kimberly Swank gave parties until mid-September to submit written arguments, the Guardian noted.

"Obviously it has taken me some time to digest this, and obviously it will take some more time," Swank said.

But whatever the outcome of Montano's extradition procedure, the fact that Washington is turning on its former Cold War allies marks a "really significant shift" in its policy toward the Western Hemisphere, Geoff Thale, a program director at the Washington Office on Latin America and longtime El Salvador observer, told the New York Times.

"The U.S. government has moved from an era in which we help provide visas to resettle the Salvadoran military in the United States to an era in which we are supporting their deportation and extradition for criminal charges," Thale commented.