Paul KeenanEl Salvador’s civil war killers face fading immunity, writes Paul Keenan
The truth will out. It was difficult in looking at separate events in the Latin American nation of El Salvador last week and not think that simple yet powerful phrase.
On the one hand, there was the case of former president, Francisco Flores, who, if charges levelled against him by a Salvadoran court are proved, will become yet another example of a corrupt politician who works as hard to ignore the warning that ‘truth will out’ as he does to feather his own nest at the expense of the electorate. Among other charges, Mr Flores has been ordered to stand trial for allegedly embezzling at least $15 million in donations from Taiwan destined for victims of El Salvador’s devastating earthquake of 2001 and then failing to cooperate with the committee established to investigate the money’s disappearance.
Then, in the same week, at the little village of San Francisco Hacienda, some 30kms from the capital, San Salvador, family and colleagues of Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan, all Americans, gathered to remember the women on the 35th anniversary of their brutal killings during El Salvador’s bloody civil conflict.
Masterminds
After the service, a young American woman named Claire White stressed that it remains all important that “the Salvadoran government and prosecutors… open this case, so that the masterminds of this crime do not walk free, with impunity”. And, though calls similar to Ms White’s have been made repeatedly before over 35 years, it is now more likely than ever that the full truth surrounding the slain nuns will come out at last.
In the annals of slaughter that marked the fight for control of El Salvador, the case of the murdered American nuns did more than others to heighten international awareness and discomfort at the activities of El Salvador’s ruling elites and the backing offered to them by US administrations in the name of fighting communism.
Just months after the high-profile assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in March 1980, members of the National Guard targeted Sr Clarke and her colleagues as they drove along a lonely road from the capital.
Both before and throughout the civil conflict, the Salvadoran regime was acutely aware of the succour offered to ordinary citizens by the Church and intensely suspicious of its calls for justice and human rights for all.
The tracked nuns and missionary were halted by soldiers in civilian dress before being beaten, raped and shot, their bodies dumped in the woods. Later, and only when locals informed a priest – ignoring the earlier advice of officials to bury the bodies and forget everything – were the dead recovered and repatriated by US Ambassador Robert White, the late father of Claire – who knew two of the slain nuns and whose murders transformed him into an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in El Salvador.
For those hoping for justice then, the timing of events could not have been worse.
Despite initial outrage at the killings from President Jimmy Carter, by early 1981 his administration had given way to that of President Ronaldw Reagan, whose fervent anti-communist manifesto ushered in an even more positive mood towards the harsh but pro-US regimes of Latin America (Ambassador White was removed two weeks after Mr Reagan assumed office).
Thus, despite an investigation into the nuns’ deaths, by 1984, just five low-ranking officers were tied to the crime and punished with 30-year sentences (three would be freed in 1998 for good behaviour).
This, of course, was not the whole story, and the question of who ordered the slayings was not fully answered by the investigations, leading to the UN to form its own Truth Commission, which in 1993 concluded that General Carlos Vides Casanova, commander of the National Guard in 1980, must have at least known the truth about the killings, while then-Minister for Defence Jose Guillermo Garcia was found to have made no real efforts to uncover that truth.
Perhaps not unsurprisingly, given their close links to the US, both General Casanova and Mr Garcia fled El Salvador at the end of the conflict in 1989 to take up residence in the United States from where they successfully contested a number of attempts to find them culpable for their actions in a conflict that saw the wholesale slaughter of some 75,000 civilians by summary execution and the torture of many thousands more.
But the Cold War ended in 1991, leading to a shift in attitudes on the part of subsequent US administrations. Thus it was that in 2011, a Salvadoran man named Inocente Orlando Montano Morales was arrested at his home in the state of Massachusetts on foot of an extradition request from Spain.
Another friend of the Reagan administration, Morales, as a former vice minister of defence in El Salvador, is directly implicated in the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests at their residence in San Salvador (five of the Jesuits were Spanish).
The arrest of Morales became the writing on the wall for both Casanova and Garcia.
Targeted by the US State Department for visa violations, the men were later detained and brought before a judge who found that, as a minister, Garcia had “assisted” in the murders of the nuns in 1980, while Casanova had “assisted or otherwise participated in the extrajudicial killings of the four”.
Just as shocking, the judge also found that Casanova had direct links to the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Garcia remains in the United States as he appeals his deportation, while Casanova was returned to El Salvador in April.
There, for now, he remains free under the terms of the Amnesty Law, agreed at the end of the conflict to help foster a political solution between those who otherwise would have faced prosecution for human rights violations. However, amid continued pressure from ordinary Salvadorans seeking truth and justice, a court signalled in 2013 that the law may in fact be unconstitutional.
General Carlos Vides Casanova is running out of road in his hopes of defying one little statement that will define his legacy and offer justice at last for Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan.
The truth will out.