Salvadoran officers face trial
By MARIANNE M. ARMSHAW
Special to the National Catholic Reporter West Palm
Beach, Fla.
After 20 years of grief, family
members related to four women, Americans renowned since their deaths in El
Salvador, sit shoulder to shoulder on a crowded courtroom bench. An imposing
presence, the relatives, relentless pursuers of truth, sit across the aisle
from the two El Salvadoran ex-generals they hold responsible for the brutal
deaths of their much-loved, long-mourned relatives.
Their names of those who were killed are familiar to many:
Maryknoll Srs. Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sr. Dorothy Kazel and lay
volunteer Jean Donovan.
While some describe the missionaries as saints or martyrs, the
media and the U.S. government have dubbed the four as simply
churchwomen.
The four missionaries served El Salvadors rural poor on
behalf of the U.S. Catholic church until they were kidnapped, raped and
savagely murdered by members of El Salvadors National Guard. The 20th
anniversary of their deaths occurs in just a few weeks. Killed Dec. 2, 1980,
they were victims of a bloody civil war that would eventually claim 75,000
lives.
The trial, which opened Oct. 11, marks the first time high-ranking
Salvadoran military officials face legal action for alleged war crimes. It is
the result of a 1992 federal statute that allows victims and their families to
hold high government officials accountable for the actions of subordinates and
could help define the legal principles for similar cases.
The murders of the American women shocked the conscience of
the American people and temporarily stemmed the flow of military aid to a
country awash in violence, according to Robert White, U.S. ambassador to El
Salvador during the Carter administration.
White, a prominent witness in the trial of ex-Gens. José
Guillermo García and Eugenio Vides Casanova has testified here about the
climate of violence and wholesale slaughter by the military in El Salvador at
the time of the murders -- violence that markedly increased following the
election of a pro-military president, Ronald Reagan, in November 1980.
Family members say they are glad to finally have a day in court.
They seek the meager best a flawed legal system can offer: a guilty verdict
that assigns command responsibility to the generals and could help
convince the Justice Department to end their comfortable retirement in Florida
by deporting them.
The families are grateful to their pro bono legal counsel, Florida
lawyers Robert Montgomery and Robert Kerrigan. The lawyers base their arguments
in the case on years of research and legal help from the Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights, a legal group that has collected the reams of
crucial and recently declassified information entered as evidence during the
trial.
The emotional toll mounts each day, as the jury ponders the story
of El Salvador in 1980. That blood-soaked year brought the murder of Archbishop
Oscar Romero followed by violence that spiraled out of control, culminating in
the exhumation of the womens bodies from their common grave on a dusty
Salvadoran hillside on Dec. 4, two days after the murders.
Family members Bill Ford, Julia Clarke Keogh, James Kazel and
Michael Donovan tirelessly give interviews to the representatives of the world
press that crowd the court each day. Prayer, they say, helps them get through.
Though the passage of 20 years may help them compartmentalize the grief,
reliving the deaths resuscitates the deep pain.
The world knows their sisters through the horrific circumstances
of their deaths. The families remember the joy, commitment and exuberant
humanity that defined the womens lives.
My sister loved the poor of El Salvador, remembers
Julia Clarke Keogh. Maura couldnt turn her back on someone in need.
These women were truly good people who gave up their lives doing what they
believed in.
Michael Donovan recalls Jeans love of horses and the lazy
Connecticut summers they spent at the beach. She left a successful career as an
accountant and put her engagement on hold to give something back to
God, Donovan said.
Every Christmas, James Kazel replays Dorothys tremendous joy
in the holiday and in his six children who still miss her most keenly during
that season. His wife, Cleveland writer Dorothy Chapon Kazel, wrote a short
book about her sister-in-law and lifelong friend.
Ita Ford believed one person could make a difference, her brother,
Bill Ford, remembers. Petite and vivacious, she was a skilled editor who gave
up a career editing childrens books to join the Maryknoll
missionaries.
Sometimes, someone will come up to me and say, You had
a saint in your family and I recoil, Bill Ford said. My
sister wasnt a plastic figure. She was a vital human being. Yet, in a
way, she belongs to everyone now.
The families lay the murders at the door of García and
Vides Casanova. Both men commanded Salvadoran forces during the civil war.
García, as defense minister, oversaw armed forces and internal police
subordinate commanders, including Vides Casanova, who ran the notorious
National Guard.
The generals deny wrongdoing and are expected to claim, when
attorney Kurt Klaus begins their defense later this month, that rogue elements
in the military, including the notorious death squads, acted without their
orders or knowledge in the murders. Plaintiffs attorney Robert Kerrigan
questioned García under oath Wednesday morning. The general denied any
involvement in or foreknowledge of the womens murders, but said the women
were not subversives and should not have been killed. He admitted that
Salvadoran armed forces committed abuses, but denied knowing of any civilian
massacres. (See accompanying story.)
The families hold no illusions that their historic civil suit will
give them justice. Well never have what some people call closure.
Nothing will bring my sister back, said Bill Ford.
Intense and focused, Ford, a New York trial lawyer, has for 20
years relentlessly pursued the truth about his sisters murder. He has
wanted to know who ordered her death and what role the U.S. government played
in maintaining the generals power.
In the years since their sisters died, Ford and Julia Keogh, both
New Yorkers, have traveled to Washington to speak to Congress and attend
briefings about purported progress of investigations into the
killings. Many family members have lectured publicly about El Salvador and the
murders. Keogh said she spoke everywhere I could, addressing
colleges, churches and civic groups to raise awareness that millions of dollars
in U.S. military aid helped create El Salvadors bloody reality.
Id ask people, Is this how you want your tax
money spent? she said. Members of her audiences, often
parishioners at Catholic churches in Nassau County where she lives, would
accuse her of lying about the governments role. The county is known for
its staunchly conservative Republicanism.
In 1984, five National Guardsmen were sentenced in El Salvador to
30 years in prison for the murders. Three have since been released. In 1998,
four of the five admitted to American attorneys from the Lawyers Committee for
Human Rights that they acted on orders from superiors.
Our sisters were not murdered on a whim of Salvadoran
low-ranking national guardsman. They were targeted and killed by a murderous
military machine that saw those working with the poor as enemies of the
military, Ford said.
In what was surely the most reckless calumny of the time, Jeane
Kirkpatrick implied that the women got what they deserved for meddling in
politics and not being real nuns. It was a remark former ambassador Robert
White described as an incitement to murder.
Some family members still struggle with anger and disillusion over
the U.S. governments role in El Salvador and the incoming Reagan
administrations response to the tragedy. On March 17, 1982, Alexander
Haig spoke before Congress and painted the women as pistol-packing guerrillas
who ran a security blockade while trading shots with Salvadoran military.
Its a memory that sparks Bill Fords anger.
Al Haig was willing to smear my sister and the other women,
even though he knew what he was saying wasnt true, Ford said.
Haig was a bad man working for a bad policy.
Haig later said that he was only repeating what the Salvadoran
government had told him at the time of his testimony, a claim Ford
dismisses.
The FBI and the U.S. government knew the truth, he
said.
Neither do the families realistically expect a money settlement,
despite the lawsuits requested compensation for extrajudicial
killing, summary execution and torture.
I doubt well ever see a penny, said James
Clarke, Mauras Clarkes brother.
I want the truth to come out. Ill leave the payment up
to God, said Michael Donovan. But I want them to know that they
cant murder people and then retire here.
The generals have spent more than a decade in retirement in the
Sunshine State. Both came to the United States in 1989, joining wives and
children already settled here. The generals have made a popular retirement
choice. With its generous legal protections for homes, property and other
assets, Florida often attracts former Central and South American military
officers fleeing their pasts with each change of government. Others living in
Florida include Anastasio Somoza and a large contingent of his government. The
right-wing leaders fled here when the Sandinistas chased them from
Nicaragua.
Vides Casanova, 62, is a permanent U.S. resident. García,
67, was granted political asylum after a hearing in Miami that called no
witnesses and received no evidence beyond Garcías report that he
received verbal death threats. Fear of death notwithstanding, he has traveled
to El Salvador repeatedly since his asylum petition was granted.
Ironically, their presence in the United States opened the legal
door to prosecution. The lawsuit invokes the Torture Victims Protection Act,
the statute that allows victims and their families to hold high government
officials accountable for the actions of subordinates.
Fewer than 10 lawsuits have been filed under the 1992 act, and
only a handful of them have gone to trial. In none of those suits did the
accused appear in court.
García and Vides Casanova face at least one other legal
challenge. The Center for Justice and Accountability, a human rights legal
organization based in San Francisco, filed a companion lawsuit to the one filed
by the families of the four women. It is expected to go to trial in May 2001.
Other suits are pending.
Michael Donovan no longer flinches when lawyers show the 10-member
jury a photo of the exhumation of his sisters body. Its the
other photos, the ones of Jean smiling -- the Jean I remember -- that still
hurt, he said.
Asked if the little sister he remembers from childhood is still
present, Ford grows silent for a moment.
Shes still with me, he said. She is very
much still here.
National Catholic Reporter, October 27,
2000
|