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EDITORIAL Hennesseys remind us of U.S. complicity
Railing against the military at any
age might seem like picking a fight one is sure to lose. But that didnt
stop Franciscan Sr. Dorothy Hennessey, 88, and her sister, Franciscan Sr. Gwen
Hennessey, 69. Last July the women were trekked off to serve six months in
federal prison for their November 2000 protest of the U.S. Armys Fort
Benning, Ga.-based School of the Americas, renamed the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation.
As the United States pursues terrorists across the globe, the
women of fleet-footed spirit and others like them aspire to hold their country
to the noble standards of its birth and denounce U.S. complicity in its own
terrorism.
Thank God for these patriots and the consciences they have honed
through decades of faithful contemplation. And thank God for memory, the
cornerstone of conscience. It forges history and has the final word.
A brief essay in the Jan. 13 New York Times Magazine nudged
consciences once again. Here in America, the essay began, we
know what our victims need. The intense desire to name and acknowledge those
who died in the largest terrorist attack on American soil, the need to bring
the guilty to justice, the families urgency to possess a shard of bone to
bury -- these things Americans understand, instinctively, as the foundations of
healing. Yet they have been denied the families of those killed in what is
probably the largest act of terror in recent Latin American history, the
massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador.
The El Mozote massacre occurred during El Salvadors civil
war and was committed by the U.S.-trained and U.S.-financed Atlacatl Battalion.
Documented eyewitness accounts corroborate these facts: On the afternoon of
Dec. 10, 1981, units of the Atlacatl Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion
arrived in the village of El Mozote. The village consisted of about 20 houses
situated on open ground around a square. Facing onto the square was a church.
Not far from the village was a school, the Grupo Escolar.
When the soldiers arrived in the village they ordered everyone out
of their houses and into the square; they made them lie face down, searched
them and asked them about the guerrillas. They then ordered them to lock
themselves in their houses until the next day, warning that anyone coming out
would be shot. The soldiers remained in the village during the night.
Early next morning, the soldiers reassembled the entire population
in the square. They separated the men from the women and children and locked
everyone up in different groups in the church, the convent and various houses.
During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture and execute the men
in various locations. Around noon, they began taking the women in groups,
separating them from their children and machine-gunning them. Finally, they
killed the children. A group of children who had been locked in the convent
were machine-gunned through the windows. After exterminating the entire
population, estimated at between 700 and 926 people, the soldiers set fire to
the buildings.
Despite public complaints of a massacre and the ease with which it
could have been verified, the Salvadoran authorities did not order an
investigation and consistently denied that the massacre had taken place. At the
time, Thomas Enders, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs,
and others in the Reagan administration dismissed reports by Ray Bonner of
The New York Times and Alma Guillermopietro of The Washington
Post. There is no evidence to confirm that [Salvadoran] government
forces systematically massacred civilians
or that the number of
civilians killed even remotely approached the 733 or 926 victims cited in the
press.
Despite U.S. denials, Argentinean forensic scientists in the years
that followed the war began unearthing graves, adding substantial documentation
by human rights organizations and by the United Nations that confirmed the
ghastly dimensions of the massacre. Still, after nearly 20 years, the remains
of almost 600 of the dead have not been unearthed.
In all, 70,000 Salvadorans were killed during the 30-year civil
war, the greater proportion at the hands of U.S.-backed death squads. During
more than three decades of U.S.-backed military dictatorships in neighboring
Guatemala, 200,000 were killed. Many of the military leaders there were trained
at the School of the Americas. U.N. human rights reports referred to those
atrocities as genocide.
Several years back, President Clinton made a brief apology in
Guatemala for the U.S. complicity in the horrors that occurred during that
countrys civil war. However, El Mozote reminds us that much more must be
done in the way of apology and full disclosure by the U.S. government. Truth
commissions in Guatemala, El Salvador and elsewhere in Latin America have
helped those cultures to come to a certain honest, if not perfect,
understanding of the horrors that occurred. As we have said before,
(NCR, May 19, 2000): We need our own truth commission and full
disclosure of the CIA, military and other government agency documents that will
shed light on our role in Central America in recent decades.
Meanwhile, we rest with the comfort that memory and conscience
remain alive among us, not least because of the activity of the Hennessey
sisters and people like them.
National Catholic Reporter, January 25,
2002
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