Remembering Church Workers Murdered in El Salvador

Last August I received an invitation from Margie Swedish, a dear friend who has been executive director of the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico for twenty years, to come to Washington, D.C. to participate in the twentieth-anniversary commemoration of the murders of four North American Church workers by the Salvadoran National Guard. The four were Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and Cleveland Diocese lay missionary Jean Donovan.

The memorial stone erected on the spot the bodies were found (the women shown are Maryknoll sisters who were there for the 19th anniversary, Dec. 2, 1999.)

Regular readers of these pages will be aware of my interest in El Salvador and will not be surprised that I accepted the invitation. Propitious air fares and scheduling, and a lot of luck managed to get me to Ronald Reagan (gag!) National Airport in time to cab to Trinity College for the first event of the two-day affair: the showing of the PBS documentary, “Roses in December,” chronicling the lives of the four martyred women, and the events leading up to and following the murders. Particularly vivid were the comments of Jean Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the U.N., claiming that the women were “not just nuns, but political activists,” implying they had brought the deaths on themselves. In testimony to Congress, Alexander Haig suggested that their vehicle tried to “run a roadblock” and that there was an “exchange of fire.” As a matter of fact, the four women were tortured, raped, and shot execution-style.

Recently the families of the murdered women lost a court case in Florida trying to hold Generals José Guillermo García and Eugenio Vides Casanova, both former Salvadoran defense ministers now living in comfortable retirement in Florida, accountable under the Torture Victims Protection Act. More lawsuits are pending.

Saturday, Dec. 2, the day of the anniversary, we heard from Melinda Roper, mm, who was president of the Maryknoll Sisters at the time of the events, and Jon Sobrino, SJ, theologian on the faculty of the University of Central America. Melinda now works on the Colombia-Panama border, among communities harassed by drug smugglers and right-wing paramilitaries. Jon survived the murders of six Jesuits and two women co-workers in November 1989 at the UCA; as luck would have it, he was visiting in Thailand at that time.

Melinda described her grief, anger and pain following the killings: “To forgive we must know whom we are forgiving, and for what….People can be forgiven; structures need to be changed.” Jon said, “Not only have the rules of good been violated [by these events], but the rules of evil as well.” The women were innocent; their crime was to be good people, to protect children and peasants. He went on to talk about how protecting U.S. interests in Central America required killing, and then lying about it.

In the afternoon, we gathered in groups to reminisce and recommit to the future. One Maryknoll worker described being invited during the 1980’s to talk to the faculty of West Point (ironically, just across the Hudson from Maryknoll). Gathered around a conference table were a number of uniformed military officers with yellow pads and ball-point pens. Their question: “What is the Church’s plan for Central America for the next five years?” When he answered that there was none, their incredulous response was, “You mean you’re willing to start something you can’t control?” Melinda Roper had described the grass-roots changes happening in Central America as “like a rain forest—lush and unpredictable.” There were many young people at the meeting. They have their own issues—sweatshops and the School of the Americas—that are seamless with the concerns of the martyrs. Where evil abounds, hope and goodness superabound.