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On Anniversary of El Salvador Jesuits' Slaying, Momentum for Justice
News Feature
By Mary Jo McConahay, Pacific News Service
Fifteen years ago on Nov. 16, six Jesuit priests and two others were
murdered in San Salvador by the Salvadoran army for their outspoken
stance in defense of the poor. Now, legal and legislative efforts to
bring justice to victims of El Salvador's civil war are picking up
steam, especially in the United States, which armed, trained and
educated many death squad members.
November 15, 2004 - On an early morning 15 years ago
in San Salvador, a handful of reporters walked cautiously into the
walled garden of the Jesuit university residence and saw the bodies of
four well-known priests lying dead on the grass. Inside were the bodies
of two more priests. A few steps below the garden, in a room where they
had asked to spend the night to avoid a city raked by fighting, lay the
bodies of the priests' housekeeper and her 15-year-old daughter, riddled
with bullets, the mother fallen partly over the girl as if in protection
when army gunmen burst through the door.
The Jesuits had researched causes and effects of the 12-year civil war,
publicly suggested poverty and lack of political space were at its
roots, and had called for a negotiated solution. Their deaths shocked
the world and helped spur an end to the conflict.
Today, despite the passage of time, calls for accountability for crimes
committed in the Salvadoran conflict are re-emerging outside the
country, including in the United States.
Nineteen of the 24 accused assassins attended the U.S. Army School of
the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., which still trains Latin American
officers; today, many are from Colombia. This week, thousands of
students and other activists descend on Fort Benning for an annual
procession and protest against training officers who return to countries
with questionable rights records, and to commemorate rights victims. A
bill to close the school, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation, counts 130 congressional supporters, including
nine Republicans.
The Jesuits' murders are among a series of new, high-profile cases
aiming at legal redress and punishment of former U.S.-backed
authorities. A seemingly dauntless network of low-paid rights workers,
lawyers and victims bring cases not only in Central America, but in U.S.
towns where one-time officers and death squad operatives now live, often
comfortably. The history of the El Salvadoran conflict, which lasted
over a decade until 1992, is being documented in a way it has never
been. Legal precedent is being created, and a new generation exposed to
one of the most bloody faces of the Cold War era.
The trials are part of a global movement that began in l998 when Spain
charged Chilean strongman Gen. Augusto Pinochet with murder, torture and
kidnapping, insisting egregious human rights crimes fall under a
universal jurisdiction not limited to the countries where they were
committed. In El Salvador, where courts have not held abusers
accountable, the United States supported a brutal Salvadoran military
with money and advisors against leftist rebels. Seventy-five thousand
died, mostly civilians, until a negotiated settlement in l992.
In September, a federal judge in Fresno, Calif., ruled a former
Salvadoran air force captain living in Modesto was liable for $10
million in damages for involvement in the 1980 daylight murder of Roman
Catholic Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. A key trial witness was the
driver of the getaway car, also now residing in the United States, who
said he had carried out 15 other death squad missions. In 2002, a West
Palm Beach jury named a former El Salvadoran Defense Minister and a
former Director of the National Guard responsible for the torture of
three Salvadorans now living in the United States, and awarded them
$54.6 million. Both generals had retired to south Florida in l989, the
year the Jesuits were killed. An unsuccessful 2000 Florida court effort
to name the generals responsible for the rapes and murders of four U.S.
churchwomen in 1980 in El Salvador is under appeal.
"Having our cases opened here will help open other cases there -- in El
Salvador it's still forbidden to talk about the atrocities," says Carlos
Mauricio, a plaintiff in West Palm Beach. Now a San Francisco high
school teacher, Mauricio was captured while giving a class in animal
nutrition at El Salvador's national university in 1983, accused of being
a guerrilla and tortured by government forces for three weeks. In San
Salvador, Maria Julia Hernandez, director of the diocesan Legal Aid
Office, which reported closely on abuse during the conflict, told local
press the Fresno decision "without any doubt contributes to opening to
road to justice in El Salvador." She called upon the government to
re-start prosecution of the Romero case.
Over 2 million El Salvadorans live in the United States, many who fled
the war, and among them are witnesses finally ready to speak of the
past. "It could be the passage of time, or their consciences, or
possibly a persuasion that a United States court is honest and that
justice will be done, so that they don't put themselves at risk for
nothing," says Sandra Coliver, director of the San Francisco-based
Center for Justice and Accountability, which brought the California and
Florida cases.
The history of the Jesuits' case is a litany of refusals to prosecute
and references to an amnesty that effectively shelters military rights
abusers. Director Benjamin Cuellar of the University of Central America
Human Rights Institute said another case being heard internationally of
two sisters ages 3 and 7, last seen when soldiers captured them during
an operation in l982, may affect the government most of all. In San
Jose, Costa Rica, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is likely to
issue a December decision that El Salvador must pay damages and admit
guilt, the first against it for the forced disappearance of at least
hundreds of children during the war. The government has accepted the
court's jurisdiction and is bound to accept the judgment.
Cuellar said taking the Jesuits' case abroad "is a door we may knock
on," but that it is "dangerous" to continue without cases being resolved
inside the country itself. "Justice here remains the same. That's the
reason the war started in the first place -- the poverty, lack of
political spaces and impunity."
Mary Jo McConahay is a PNS editor who covered the
war in El Salvador in the 1980s. |
