Continued from The Deadly Chronology

No Answer to the Question of Murder

Old Tip O’Neill never got an answer from the Reagan administration or from the El Salvadoran government to the question, “who killed the three United States nuns and the other US woman church worker in El Salvador?” On Feb. 11,1981, the Reagan administration dropped its insistence on an impartial investigation into the deaths of the four US Roman Catholic churchwomen, as a condition, if one can believe it, FOR GIVING MORE ECONOMIC AND MILITARY AID to El Salvador!¹

The Los Escuadrones de la Merte, (the Squadrons of Death), or as they were known in English, the Death Squads, continued to operate their reign of terror. They were known as Right-Wing Death Squads, which being interpreted, means the Roman Catholic Death Squads. They were linked to both the Roman Catholic oligarchy and to the “Christian,” meaning Roman Catholic Democrats.

The three main parties in the struggle in El Salvador were the Christian Democrats, the Christian Revolutionaries, and the Christian landed Oligarchy. So it was a wonderful bunch of Christians all fighting together in a beautiful Rome-sponsored egalitarian society, a Jesuit “Christian” Social Order.

If one substitutes the words Roman Catholic for Christian, he will come closer to reality. But we will, for the sake of quotations from other writers, continue to use the words which have been used to describe El Salvadoran politics.

The Christian Democrats in El Salvador were fairly progressive. They consisted of lawyers, teachers and business men. The Party probably could be considered as a middle ground between the Christian Revolutionaries and the old landed oligarchy and its military dictatorship.

The Marxist-Christian Revolutionaries consisted primarily of the working classes and the peasants aided and abetted by Marxist priests and Marxist Jesuits. They wanted a redistribution of the land, better wages, and some kind of safety net for unemployment.

The Oligarchy consisted of fourteen, some now say about 26, families who owned about 80 per cent of the arable land among them, and who backed the military juntas who really controlled the country in the sectors that mattered. The hill country usually sheltered the rebels and the Revolutionaries.

The Death Squads were linked to the military and the Security Forces. This, of course, was denied by the military.

The military junta which ruled El Salvador at this time was a conservative Roman Catholic one. It became alarmed at the rise of what was called “Marxist” Roman Catholic priests who were engaged in the armed struggle. None of these priests was ever defrocked, removed, or even disciplined in any way by the Vatican Hierarchy. Some were shot while engaged in actual combat, but none was ever disciplined by the “church.” Which is surely strange if the Vatican is really the strong anti-communist force it is supposed to be.

It is safe to say that the Death Squads targeted anyone who was perceived as a threat to the military junta which ruled the country. So the Marxist clergy were considered legitimate targets in El Salvador by the ruling conservative Roman Catholics.

The “official” position of the “church” continually shifted. The Hierarchy waffled back and forth depending upon which way things were going. They sided with Archbishop Romero because he was popular with the peasants and the poor, but when he was assassinated, they did an about-face. The man they appointed to fill his office aligned himself with the ruling military, who had just eliminated Romero.²

The murder of the four United States churchwomen briefly shocked the country. At first, one could be forgiven for thinking that the nasty Communist Cubans, or the dirty North Vietnamese, had done the dastardly deed. However, it soon became apparent that all four had been murdered execution style by someone, or some people, OTHER THAN the Marxist revolutionaries.³ It soon became apparent that they had been executed by the Roman Catholic Death Squads, in the same way that the IRA kills Roman Catholics in the North of Ireland, when it suits their purpose.

Investigations into such crimes were superficial, if there were any at all. No one was ever tried for Romero’s assassination, and it was several years before anyone was apprehended and tried for the murders of the four Roman Catholic churchwomen.

Finally, because of pressure from members of their families, several unimportant National Guardsmen were arrested and tried. In 1984, four years after the killings, they were found guilty and sentenced to thirty years in prison. They also were reported as saying that they had acted on their own initiative in killing the four women.

It has taken seventeen years for the rest of the truth to come out into the open. On April 11, 1998, the four Guardsmen who have now been in jail for fourteen years finally broke their silence. They admitted that they did NOT ACT ALONE, but that they were obeying direct orders from the military command when they murdered the four US churchwomen.⁴

The families of the slain women have been trying all these years to get an interview with the men accused of the killings. They finally gained an audience with them last year, eighteen years after the murders were committed.

In spite of the confessions of the four unimportant men, who were sacrificed to cover up the orders from the government, the United States State Department issued a statement that it does NOT accept that the Defense Minister and Commander of the National Guard of El Salvador at that time were guilty. Michael Hahn, a spokesman for the State Department, said that the United States concluded that although there may have been a cover-up, the evidence was based on hearsay only.

He also said that the United States government was NOT looking for Defense Minister General Jose Guillermo Garcia, and the former National Guard Commander, Colonel Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, both of whom now live in Florida.⁵ It is remarkable how those engaged in documented Death Squad activities can now reside peaceably in Florida, while the United States and Britain put their weight behind the efforts to arrest Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb Leader. Those who serve the Vatican are now apparently protected by the United States and Britain, and those who oppose the Vatican are hunted down like dogs. Yet at one time, the United States and Britain were the two greatest Protestant countries in the world! How the mighty have fallen.

(But perhaps one should not be too surprised when he realizes that 7,000 Jesuits, the most Jesuits in any country of the world, are at present in the United States fostering their Vatican Social Order with the help of the Reformed Theonomists! One can only envision the horror if such an order is ever achieved, if the Christian Social Order of El Salvador is any criterion.)

Eduardo Gamarro, in commenting upon the recent disclosure by the four imprisoned El Salvadoran guardsmen, said, “the same kinds of atrocities committed by the Death Squads in El Salvador are being committed by Death Squads in Colombia today.”⁶ Gamarro is an expert on Latin America at Florida International University. Carlos Salinos corroborates what Gamarro said. He noted on the same subject, just “like in El Salvador, the United States is now in bed with a military known for its atrocities against civilians (in Colombia) and like El Salvador, the public does not know the extent to which we are getting involved in Colombia.”⁷ In other words, to translate what Gamarro and Salinas are saying into plain English, the United States is supporting the System of Rome in Colombia today, as she did in El Salvador twenty years ago.

References

1. Gettleman, op.cit., p. 64.
2. Ibid., p. 206.
3. Ibid., p. 140.
4. Atlanta-Journal-Constitution, April 11,1998, p. B5.
5. Loc.cit.
6. Loc.cit.
7. Loc.cit.

(To be continued.)