Republican Power and the slaughter of innocents

03Nov1995 USA: GUILTY WALK FREE IN US 'BACKYARD'. 
By Phil Gunson.
The mass graves of death squad victims in Central America are being
unearthed but Washington's policy-makers are not in the dock.

SURROUNDED by reporters, members of the top-level United States delegation
pushed their way towards the exit of the presidential palace. Trailing in
the rear was the assistant secretary of state for human rights and
humanitarian affairs.
"Mr Secretary, will you be seeking a meeting with the government's human
rights critics?" Elliott Abrams was asked.
His verbatim reply: "Ah, we will be leaving early in the morning."
The year was 1984, the country Honduras. A weak civilian government and a
powerful military establishment were doing the strategic bidding of the
Reagan administration - containing the communist menace at home and lending
their territory for the fight against leftwingers in neighbouring Nicaragua
and El Salvador.
If, in the process, a few "subversives" had to be rubbed out, that was no
cause for complaint - especially if Washington could maintain "plausible
deniability".
As a senior political officer at the US embassy in the Honduran capital,
Tegucigalpa, explained, these were "pathological killers" who deserved to be
"crushed like cockroaches". Many, of course, were simply trade union or
student activists.
A decade later, the human cost of that cynical approach is coming to light
in the shattered, twisted bones of its victims, prised from the earth by
teams of volunteers and forensic experts.
Hundreds have been unearthed already in El Salvador and Guatemala. Just a
handful so far in Honduras, where the toll was light by regional standards.
Each country on its own is attempting to deal with the delicate issues of
truth, justice and reconciliation to which there are no easy answers.
Further south, in Argentina and Chile, the mass murder committed by military
regimes in the 1970s remains an open wound.
In El Salvador, the former defence minister responsible for ordering the
killing of six Jesuit academics in 1989 was last year appointed to an
official body charged with consolidating the peace process.
No one was ever prosecuted for the 1981 El Mozote massacre, in which
800-1,000 unarmed Salvadorean peasants, including 139 children, were herded
together and slaughtered by US-trained troops.
For well over a decade, the US government said the Mozote killings were a
figment of the left's imagination.
The mass killings in Guatemala - perhaps 150,000 between 1966 and 1986 -
began in earnest when Washington sent in teams of Green Berets to school the
local army in "counter-insurgency". The US had in 1954 hired mercenaries to
overthrow the country's democratically elected government.
More recently, the CIA maintained a covert assistance programme to the same
Guatemalan army, while offical policy was to keep it at arm's length. Only
when a CIA "asset" (one Colonel Alpirez) made the mistake of having a US
citizen murdered, along with the husband of another, was the CIA taken to
task for failing to keep Congress informed.
Recognising "some mistakes" and sacking two senior employees (nine others
were disciplined), the CIA promised to try to play by the rules. It was
undoubtedly a shock for those singled out. For if impunity has been the rule
for client armies, it has been no less prevalent among their white-collar
apologists.
It recently came to light, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act
request by the Baltimore Sun newspaper, that at least one Honduran torture
victim had been visited in clandestine detention by the CIA. At the time,
the family of Ines Murillo was demanding to know her whereabouts, yet the
embassy said nothing. Her captors were members of Battalion 3-16, a
US-trained "intelligence unit" turned death squad. Unusually, Ms Murillo
survived, and with her the truth.
The US ambassador to Honduras was John Negroponte. His career has not
suffered; he is now ambassador to the Philippines.
And what of Mr Abrams? After being promoted to assistant secretary for
inter-American affairs, he was convicted of lying to Congress on the
Iran-Contra affair. His conviction was overturned on a technicality, and he
now practises law and appears frequently on television.
The country that the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes dubbed "the United
States of Amnesia" has no equal, it seems, when it comes to the law of
"forgive and forget". 
Quelle: GUARDIAN 3/11/95 P14 

02Okt2000 EL SALVADOR: SALVADORAN ATTORNEY GENERAL REFUSES TO REOPEN JESUIT
MURDERS CASE. 
San Salvador, Oct 02, 2000 (EFE via COMTEX) - The Jesuit order announced
Monday it would appeal the Salvadoran attorney general's refusal to re-open
the investigation of the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests and two women to
the supreme court and possibly to the International Court of Justice in The
Hague.
Fr. Jose Maria Tojeira, dean of the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA),
called the a1/4torney general's refusal to admit the request made four
months ago as "arbitrary, fickle and irrational."
He insisted that "we are going to go before the Supreme Court," but said the
motivation was not revenge but instead "to have the truth legally
validated."
Last March 27, the Jesuit order filed a request to the attorney general's
office to investigate the possible role of former President Alfredo
Cristiani and Gen. Rafael Humberto Larios as "authors by omission of the
crime of murder."
The Jesuits also requested an investigation of retired generals Rene Emilio
Ponce, Juan Orlando Zepeda, Francisco Elena Fuentes, Inocente Orlando
Montano and Juan Rafael Bustillo as "instigators of the crime of murder."
In rejecting the Jesuits' request, the attorney general's office cited the
1993 amnesty law which pardoned the perpetrators of political crimes
committed during the 1980-1992 civil war.
The Jesuits appealed the resolution and the attorney general's office
rejected the new request Friday, court sources said.
"To learn the truth is not to open wounds. Those persons responsible for the
murders don't have wounds, the victims do. We're not seeking revenge but
instead justice and reconciliation, truth in this case, legally validated
truth," Tojeira insisted.
On Nov. 16, 1989, the dean of the UCA, Spanish Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuria and
Spanish Jesuits Ignacio Martin-Baro, Amando Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno and
Segundo Montes, and the Salvadoran Jesuit Joaquin Lopez y Lopez were
murdered.
The Jesuits' cook Elba Julia Ramos and her 16 year-old daughter Celina were
also killed.
In September 1991, Col. Guil
ermo Benavides, former director of the military academy at the time of the
murders, was indicted along with a dozen Salvadoran army officers.
A jury condemned Benavides and Lt. Yussy Mendoza to 30 years in prison, the
maximum sentence in El Salvador, but both were released in March 1993, hours
after the legislature passed the amnesty law. EFE

chm/nj/mrm

http://www.efe.es
</cgi-bin/tlink.exe?session_id=AVde0253783|url=http%3a//www.efe.es|pg=add> 

15Jan2000 EL SALVADOR: O.A.S. Blames Salvadoran Government for
Murders.(ruling holds the government of El Salvador ... 
O.A.S. Blames Salvadoran Government for Murders.(ruling holds the government
of El Salvador responsible for the 1989 killing of two women and six
Jesuits)(Brief Article).

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American
States said the government of El Salvador is responsible for the murders of
six Jesuits and two women in 1989. In a report released in late December,
the Washington-based commission found that Salvadoran state agents carried
out the murders and covered them up in violation of international human
rights law and the Geneva Conventions concerning the conduct of internal
armed conflict. The commission called on the Salvadoran government to
rescind its amnesty law, complete a full investigation into the murders and
punish those responsible.
In the early morning hours of Nov. 16, 1989, Jesuit Fathers Ignacio
Ellacuria-then rector of the Central American University in San
Salvador-Martin Baro, Armando Lopez, Joaquin Lopez Lopez, Segundo Montes and
Juan Ramon Medrano were dragged from their beds and shot dead by an elite
army unit. Their housekeeper and her teenage daughter were also murdered.
A 1993 truth commission, set up at the end of the conflict, concluded that
the murders had been ordered by members of the army high command at the
time. But a post-war amnesty law has meant that none of those named has been
brought to trial. In 1991 a group of lower ranking officers and one colonel
were found guilty of carrying out the killings and were briefly imprisoned
before being released under the same amnesty law.

America, Vol.182, No.2
COPYRIGHT 2000 America Press, Inc.
(c) 2000 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.
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AMERICA 15/01/2000 P5 

19Nov1999 EL SALVADOR: Remembering the martyrs of El Salvador. 
Jesuit colleges around the country marked the 10th anniversary of the 1989
murders of six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter, with
mid-November lectures, vigils and screenings of documentaries about the
killings and the struggle for justice in Latin America.
Meanwhile the activist group SOA Watch prepared for its annual protest at
Fort Benning, Ga., home of the School of the Americas - a training facility
operated by the U.S. Army for Latin American military officials. A 1995
United Nations truth commission report linked 19 graduates of the School of
the Americas to the Jesuit slayings in El Salvador.
Graduates have also been linked to a variety of other human rights abuses
throughout the hemisphere.
The initial protest at the school was held in 1990, on the first anniversary
of the jesuit murders. It has subsequently become an annual event. SOA Watch
expects a crowd or more than 10,000 at this year's demonstration, set for
the weekend of Nov. 19-21.
It was a decade ago - Nov. 16, 1989 - that elements of the El Salvador army
burst onto the grounds of the University of Central America in San Salvador
and gunned down six Jesuit priests: Ignacio Ellacuria, Joaquin Lopez y
Lopez, Amando Lopez, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Segundo Montes and Juan Ramon
Moreno. Also killed in the attack were the housekeeper, Julia Elba Ramos,
and her 15-year-old daughter Celina Mariset Ramos.
The University of Central America played a leading role in the effort to
resolve El Salvador's decades-long civil war. Jesuit faculty members, who
often spoke out against human rights abuses, were accused by the government
and the military of providing intellectual support for the FMLN rebel
uprising.
Though Ellacuria, the university's rector, was the best-known of the six
Jesuit victims, each had a distinguished academic career. Martin-Baro, for
example, pioneered the use of opinion polls in El Salvador, and his results
helped temper the frequently exaggerated claims of politicians and military
leaders to massive popular support.
Several of the Jesuits were associated with liberation theology, which
sought to align the church in Latin America with the interests of the poor
majority. After the killings, some of the victims were found with their
brains scooped out, a gesture of warning to intellectuals and academics.
The murders prompted a reevaluation of U.S. policy toward El Salvador and
accelerated momentum toward a settlement of the civil war. A formal
cease-fire was declared in February 1992.
Around the United States, dozens of Jesuit colleges planned events to
commemorate the anniversary, according to the Association of Jesuit Colleges
and Universities in Washington.
Boston college will hold a special screening of the documentary "Enemies of
War" about the murders on Dec. 1, with comments to follow by U.S.
Representative Joseph Moakley (D-Mass.). Moakley, who helped press the case
for an investigation following the murders in 1989, has also been on of the
leaders of the congressional effort to close the School of the Americas.
Georgetown University planned to hold a teach-in in honor of the Jesuit
martyrs on Nov. 12, with a special commemoration Mass on Nov. 16. The next
day faculty were to hold a discussion on "What Could the Legacy of Martyrs
of El Salvador Mean for Georgetown?"
Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles planned to plant eight crosses on
university grounds, one for each of the victims, during the week of Nov.
13-19. On Nov. 16 the university was to stage a reenactment of the killings
along with a special liturgy.
At Loyola University in Chicago, a special "Mass of the Martyrs" on Nov. 16
was to be followed by an interview on the ABC-TV news program "Nightline"
about the anniversary.
Loyola University in New Orleans planned to stage three days of performances
of "The Witness," a dramatization adapted from interviews with witnesses to
the slayings. The university was also to offer a Nov. 16 lecture by Jesuit
Fr. Ernesto Valente, who once belonged to the FMLN rebel movement in El
Salvador.
Fordham college in New York planned to hold a lecture Nov. 11 on "Ought Not
the Jesuits to Have Died?" by Teresa Whitfield and a Nov. 12 lecture on
"Liveration Theology, Then and Now" by Paul Signmud. On Nov. 16, eight
crosses were to be placed on the campus in memory of the victims.
The November issue of the Jesuits' magazine company offers five articles on
the El Salvador killings. The magazine is available on-line at
www.companysj.com
</cgi-bin/tlink.exe?session_id=AVde0253783|url=http%3a//www.companysj.com|pg
=add> .
Several of the Jesuit colleges planned to sponsor delegations to the protest
at the School of the Americas. The SOA Watch Web site offers details on the
planned action: www.soaw.org
</cgi-bin/tlink.exe?session_id=AVde0253783|url=http%3a//www.soaw.org|pg=add>
.
At the University of Central America itself, events to commemorate the
anniversary were scheduled throughout the month of November. Details are
available on their Web site: www.uca.edu.sv
</cgi-bin/tlink.exe?session_id=AVde0253783|url=http%3a//www.uca.edu.sv|pg=ad
d> 
Enemies of War
A new documentary on the civil war in El Salvador, "Enemies of War," will be
offered to PBS stations this fall. Narrated by Martin Sheen, the film offers
as well as U.S. Congressman Joseph Moakley. Call (212) 598-0958 for details.
RELATED ARTICLE: Sobrino offers a bittersweet look back
In an Oct. 12 lecture at the University of Notre Dame, Jesuit theologian Jon
Sobrino offered a bittersweet analysis of development in the decade since
the murders of the six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter.
Sobrino is well-known liberation theologian and a Salvadoran who escaped
death in the attack on the University of Central America because he was
teaching theology in Thailand at the time.
"The dominant impression today is that the majority of churches, both
pastors and faithful, are turning back to the past," Sobrino said. "This
church no longer hears the voice of the poor majorities, listening rather to
that of its traditional public, those who go to Mass.
"Notwithstanding a flood of words and documents - many of them good - we
have gone form a church of the poor, dedicated utopianly to their defense
and prophetically to the denunciation of their oppressors, to a church that,
pendulum-wise, would seek to get back to normality, to harmony with the
powers of this world," Sobrino said.
Sobrino ended on a hopeful note, with a short quotation from his friend
Ignacio Ellacuria, one of the six Jesuits killed:
"All this blood of martyrs shed in El Salvador and in all Latin America, far
from plunging us into discouragement and despair, instills a new spirit of
struggle and new hope in our people. In this sense, even if we are not a
`new world' or a 'new continent,' we are clearly and verifiably ... a
continent of hope.
"This is an extremly important symptom of a future society in contrast with
other continents that have no hope and have only fear," Ellacuria had
written.

National Catholic Reporter, Vol.36, No.5
COPYRIGHT 1999 National Catholic Reporter.
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NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER 19/11/1999 P3 

17Nov1999 USA: The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology.(Review) (book
reviews). 
By Ashley, J. Matthew.
The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology. Edited by Christopher
Rowland. Cambridge University Press, 260 pp., $19.95 paperback.
IN SAN SALVADOR in the early morning hours of November 16, 1989, soldiers of
the elite, U.S.-trained and equipped Atlacatl Battalion crept onto the
campus of the University of Central America and assassinated six Jesuits,
including the university's philosopher-president, Ignacio Ellacuria.
Instructed to leave no witnesses, they also brutally murdered two women:
Elba Ramos, who cooked for the Jesuits, and her daughter, Celina. This
crime, coming at the end of a decade of similar and worse atrocities,
finally compelled the U.S. government to pressure the Salvadoran government
and military to come to the peace table. The resultant peace is scarred by
the enduring poverty that brought the war in the first place, and by the
violence all too commonplace in countries where the "cold war" was
fought-countries still awash in weapons.
This story encapsulates many of the complexities and ambiguities faced by
any guide to liberation theology. It illustrates that the stories of
liberation theology are local and often intensely personal. They are
concerned with living a faith threatened by the inhuman forces released by
the globalization of information, technology, economies and violence.
Consequently, as Christopher Rowland states in his introduction, "one first
of all does liberation theology, rather than learns about it." This raises
great difficulties for those who appreciate or strive to evaluate this
theology "from the outside." It also raises the question of who the subject
of a work on liberation theology should be. Is it the story of intellectuals
and administrators like Ellacuria, or of poor men and women like Elba and
Celina Ramos, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Is its currency
and success to be evaluated by its presence in books and on university
campuses or seminaries? By the response of church leaders? Or does it turn
on the faith, hope and love of those countless and often anonymous persons,
like the two women, whom Ellacuria so tellingly named "the crucified
peoples," "Yahweh's suffering servant today"?
Books on the subject tend to identify liberation theology with its most
prominent proponents, usually academies. Yet liberation theology simply
cannot be understood without an appreciation of how these proponents
struggle to hold themselves accountable first and foremost to the poor they
serve. Liberation theology's development has been driven not just by the
genesis and dash of concepts, the back and forth of academic argument, but
by the clash of ecclesial visions and superpowers, and the simple struggle
to survive.
This book's opening essay by Gustavo Gutierrez and its central section,
where it captures this complexity, are its most successful parts. A fine
essay by Andrew Dawson on the birth and development of small Christian
communities in Brazil emphasizes that they did not grow out of an
ecclesiology derived elsewhere. Rather, they resulted from an often ad hoe
process in which the spiritual and physical needs of the poor, the teachings
of Vatican II, the intentions of the Brazilian hierarchy (running both for
and against the emerging agenda of liberation theology), the brutal
repression perpetrated by Brazilian dictators, and the work of academies all
played a part.
Gerald West's essay takes up the crucial problem of how the Bible can belong
to and inspire believers and theologians in an age in which scripture
scholars claim that they alone understand its "true" interpretation. He
details the struggle to find a methodology which respects both the expertise
of the trained scripture scholar and the insights of the ordinary reader,
who is laboring not just to understand the text but to enflesh it. Finally,
Charles Villa-Vicencio takes up the new work of making liberation theology
not just a theology of resistance but of reconstruction in places like South
Africa and El Salvador, where civil war has ended but the crushing burdens
of building a more humane society continue-in a new world order with less
and less compassion or creative insight for the plight of the poor.
These essays present liberation theology as a theology that has come of age
and that may have become less attractive to journalists because it has taken
up the often unglamorous work of extending a core paradigm shift into the
whole discipline. Part of this difficult work, particularly as it deals with
economics, must be interdisciplinary. As Valpy Fitzgerald and Villa-Vicencio
point out, liberation theologians (and liberation economists?) must move
beyond general indictments of globalization and neoliberalism to the
development of specific analyses and proposals for action, both in micro-and
macroeconomics. It will continue to be important to appropriate more and
more of the Christian tradition, as both Denys Turner and Oliver O'Donovan
urge.
Unfortunately, Turner and O'Donovan's essays evince the continuing ignorance
of liberation theology on the part of European and North American
theologians. It takes one's breath away to read a scholar of Turner's
stature write that liberation theology is "strangely silent on issues of
theodicy." One of Gustavo Gutierrez's acknowledged masterpiece is On Job:
God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Turner clearly knows his Marx,
and he makes a compelling case that until Christian theology recovers the
insights of the apophatic tradition, with its exacting strictures on the
ways we too easily talk about God, it will be justly subject to critiques
like Marx's. But Gutierrez has already explored this terrain. As early as
1982, in We Drink from Our Own Wells, he was proposing an innovative
cross-fertilization between the Exodus narrative, the experience of the poor
in Latin America, and the apophaticism of John of the Cross.
O'Donovan worries that liberation theology is so trapped by its reliance on
ideology critique that it cannot produce either the content or even the
ground on which to make authoritative positive proposals for the future. He
seems either unaware of or unwilling to grapple with Gutierrez's consistent
grounding of the authority of a Christian vision for the future not in
ideology critique or economic analyses, but in praise, contemplation and
eucharistic celebration.
In sum, this book both details and at certain points instantiates the
embattled place that liberation theology continues to hold today. Much of
the church has heeded its clear warning that Christianity cannot continue
(in Jon Sobrino's words) to talk about cross and resurrection while ignoring
the world's crucified peoples and their need for resurrection. Many of its
central terms (like "the preferential option for the poor") have become part
of the contemporary theological lexicon. This genie cannot be put back in
the bottle. Yet the profundity with which liberation theologians have worked
out this warning and deployed its terminology continues to be misunderstood
and distrusted by too many ecclesial authorities (as Peter Hebblethwaite's
essay recounts), and trivialized and ignored by too many academics.
Finally, the story of liberation theology is the story of men and women like
Elba and Celina Ramos; it is about the way that hope in the resurrection is
breaking out, especially now, in the lives of the world's crucified peoples.
As long as this hope, nourished by the Holy Spirit, resides in the hearts of
the world's poor, there will be theologians who attempt to give an account
of that hope. Perhaps this book does the most that any text about liberation
theology can do: it invites us to consider what it would mean to have that
hope-both for the poor and for all of us.
Reviewed by J. Matthew Ashley, assistant professor of systematic theology at
the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

Christian Century, Vol.116, No.32
COPYRIGHT 1999 The Christian Century Foundation.
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CHISTIAN CENTURY 17/11/1999 P1135 

25Jul1998 EL SALVADOR: RIGHTS-EL SALVADOR - PENAL REFORM FREES MURDERERS OF
U.S. NUNS. 
SAN SALVADOR, (Jul. 23) IPS - Legal reforms in El Salvador - aimed at
humanizing the justice system here - led to freedom for three of the five
men convicted of murdering a group of U.S. nuns in 1980.
Five members of the National Guard were sentenced life in prison in 1984 for
the murder of Ita Ford, Maura Clark and Dorothy Kazel, all nuns of the
Maryknoll order, and lay missionary Jean Donovon, on Dec. 2, 1980.
But Judge Gloria Platero from the city of Zacatecoluca ordered three of them
released for good conduct yesterday after serving only half of their 30-year
sentences.
The five former Guards, Antonio Colindres, Daniel Canales, Jose Moreno,
Carlos Contreras and Francisco Recinos all had their cases reconsidered
under new legislation passed on April 20 in order to mete out swift, correct
justice and resolve pendant cases.
Most of El Salvador's 8,000 inmates are in prison awaiting trial.
The new penal code compensates detainees for the years they spend in custody
prior to a court hearing, discounting more than one day against a day
served. It also grants an early release of those serving more than half
their sentences based on the good conduct.
Colindres, Canales and Moreno all made the grades, raising controversy and
reawakening cries of "impunity" from human rights groups.
Ana Esther Posada, of the Commission for the Defence of Human Rights in
Central America, said this murder case amounted to "partial impunity," as
the material perpetrators of the crime had been tried and sentenced, while
those who masterminded the offense had never been traced.
The mass murder took place during the escalation of tensions and violence of
the early 1980s, only months after Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador
had been assassinated.
In October of the same year, five insurgent groups united and formed the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), turning the conflict into
declared civil war.
Posada told IPS the reformed Penal Code planned to humanize the legal system
and sentencing.
"I think the guards had completed their sentences. And while this is painful
for us, we, as human rights organizations, must respect the right of the
individual to recovery and rejoining in society," she said.
"But," she added, "we are sorry to see those behind (the murder) have still
not been tried."
The freeing of the three men, announced 15 days ago, also brought strong
reactions from other sectors.
The business sector, for instance, claim the new legislation is
inconvenient, as it favors criminals over the honest members of society.
According to the Jesuit priest Rodolfo Cardenal, assistant rector of the
University of Central America (UCA), "the problem is not that the guards
have been released, the problems is that they declared they received orders
from above to commit the murders, and even so, the legal system has taken no
interest."
UCA was hit hard by the illegal repression which accompanied the civil war
in the 1980s. On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests were murdered by
members of the armed forces, including a university director, Ignacio
Ellacuria.
The freed guards themselves complained they had been unfairly tried as
common criminals, as their offence should have been classified as a war
crime, given that they had operated by orders from above.
Without offering any name, Canales said he was prepared to collaborate with
the U.S. government in its investigations to discover who was behind the
murder of the four nuns.
However, should this investigation come about, it would be up against the
Salvadoran judiciary system's decision that the case closed.
The Salvadoran civil war ended in 1992, with an agreement between the
government and FMLN sponsored by the United Nations. The years of fighting
left 75,000 people dead, 8,000 disappeared and nearly a million in exile.

Distributed via COMTEX News. 
Quelle: INTER PRESS SERVICE 25/07/98 

25Apr1998 EL SALVADOR: El Salvador Urged to Reinvestigate '89 Priest
Slayings. 
By JUANITA DARLING DIEGO ALEMAN, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES.
SAN SALVADOR - LEAD: Friends and colleagues have taken steps this week to
reopen the investigation into the 1989 murders here of six Jesuit priests-a
highly publicized, brutal act that caused the United States to reexamine its
long, costly involvement in Central American civil wars.
"The case of the Jesuits has been presented to the Inter-American Human
Rights Committee of the Organization of American States to propose a
friendly arrangement with the Salvadoran government to find out the truth
about the masterminds" of the killings, Father Rodolfo Cardenal said
Thursday. He is vice rector of the University of Central America, where the
slain priests taught.
This is the second time in a month that the Salvadoran government has been
called on to reinvestigate atrocities that occurred in the 12-year civil war
that claimed an estimated 70,000 lives and created hundreds of thousands
refugees before it ended in 1992.

Human rights groups three weeks ago asked for further inquiries into the
1980 murders of four U.S. religious women after four of the five soldiers
convicted of the killings said they had acted on orders from superiors.
Judicial sources said this week that the five soldiers convicted of the
women's slayings will be freed from prison any day now under a new penal
code that lets prisoners with good conduct be released after completing half
their sentences.
Military officials have reacted angrily to the requests for new
investigations.
Retired Gen. Mauricio Vargas, who held high command posts during the war,
told reporters that these were attempts to disgrace the armed forces.
But "these cases keep resurfacing because they were never satisfactorily
cleared up," said Henry Campos, a law professor at UCA, the Jesuit
university.
The truth about the cases must be known, said Father Jon Sobrino, who lived
and worked with the murdered priests, adding: "A country that continuously
lies about what has happened cannot prosper. We want to know the
truth-whether the defense minister gave the order, whether [the] president
[Alfredo Cristiani] was implicated."
The murders of the priests, several of them internationally respected
researchers, shocked the world and forced the United States to reconsider
its multimillion-dollar support for the war effort of El Salvador's
right-wing government, which was fighting leftist guerrillas.
"This accelerated the peace negotiations," said Sobrino, who escaped death
with the six other priests only because he was on a visit to Thailand. Many
observers believe that the murders helped shift the United States from
pressing for a military victory to favoring a negotiated peace.
At dawn Nov. 16, 1989, UCA Rector Ignacio Ellacuria, Vice Rector Ignacio
Martin-Baro, Segundo Montes of the Human Rights Institute, three others,
their housekeeper and her daughter were killed by gunshots at their home on
the university campus.
The killers left a sign, referring to the initials of a leftist guerrilla
group, reading: "The FMNL executed spies. Win or die. FMNL."
Many on the Salvadoran right still believe that the Marxist insurgents of
the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Army were responsible for the
killings as part of an elaborate plot to discredit the armed forces.
During the war, and still today, the UCA provokes enormous hostility from
the Salvadoran right because it publishes research that documents the
economic and social disparities in this country. This grates on many because
the university was founded in 1965 as an anti-Communist bastion, in reaction
to the influence of Marxism in the National University of El Salvador.
Father Charles J. Beirne, the institution's historian, said UCA is
considered "the university of the poor ... because it spoke out on their
behalf, it gave them a voice."
Nine officers and soldiers were arrested in the priests' murders. In 1981,
the top officers accused, Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides and Lt. Yusshy
Rene Mendoza, were sentenced to 30 years in prison; the other seven were
absolved.
The two officers were freed in a 1993 amnesty.
That same year, a United Nations-sponsored truth commission found that the
killings were ordered by members of the military high command who later
engaged in a cover-up to clear themselves.
"The report is explicit about the planning ... but there are probably other
clues that the commission did not follow up," Cardenal said. He emphasized
that the Jesuits do not want revenge or prison sentences for the
masterminds, but they are determined to learn the whole truth behind the
murders.
"If the government does not respond or does not satisfy the [human rights]
commission, the commission can go before the Inter-American Human Rights
Court in Costa Rica," he said.
Darling is chief of The Times' San Salvador Bureau, where Aleman is a
researcher.
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Quelle: LOS ANGELES TIMES 25/04/98 P3