Justice After the Schizoid War

Ever since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the world has grown familiar with the idea of an international court putting to bed a brutal period in history. Nuremberg put a stark coda on the Holocaust, as may the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal on the genocide that took place in Yugoslavia.

But what of the countless wartime human rights violations that have gone untried? In Gail Pellett's latest documentary, "Justice and the Generals," that question is applied to El Salvador. By extension, it also is applied to the United States, which between 1980 and 1992 provided billions of dollars in aid to the Salvadoran military, abetting a 12-year civil war that by 1992 had claimed 75,000 (mostly civilian) lives.

"Justice and the Generals" is an international human rights drama with a strong message about the need for international law. Pellett, who produced, directed and narrates the film, focuses her story on two landmark human rights cases -- one involving the 1980 murder of four American churchwomen, the other brought by Salvadoran torture survivors; both against two high-ranking Salvadoran generals, Guillermo Garcia and Vides Cassanova, who were trained by the U.S. military. The film sheds harsh light on the U.S.'s conduct in Central American during the Cold War.

But will Americans care? Watching "Justice and the Generals," one can't help but wonder how it will be received by an audience that is a decade away from the Salvador debacle and in the midst of the most patriotic (and pro-military) period in recent U.S. history. Pellett seems to know this, though. Her film casts a net beyond the two human rights cases addressed, to larger questions of conduct for military powers as different as El Salvador and the United States. And her story is not pretty.

The film is organized in two parts. The first follows Bill Ford, the brother of one of the murdered nuns, in his quest to discover the truth behind the killings. Ford is a hard-nosed, indefatigable sort, who rolls up his sleeves to sort through reams of State Department documents, the many censored sections of which he likens to "small black windows shades."

Sister Madeline Dorsey examines a victim.

"The State Department was interested in protecting its client state in El Salvador," says Ford. "They wanted this matter just swept aside as soon as possible." But Ford doesn't let them sweep it away. Even after the Salvadoran authorities arrested five National Guardsmen, he is shown plunging ahead, arguing to Congress that these low-level soldiers were trigger-men for higher-ups in the Salvadoran military. (Indeed, in the mid-1990s, declassified U.S government records revealed that the State Department withheld information pointing to higher-level involvement by the Salvadoran military in the murders.)

Next, Ford travels to El Salvador to talk to those who worked with his sister, Ita Ford, and her dead colleagues, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan. Ford concludes that the women were killed for allegedly aiding the poor, who were identified with Communist insurgents. Pellett spares no images here, cutting between Ford's commentary and video of the dead nuns being dragged from a common grave with their undergarments around their ankles. Also shown are images of the Salvadoran military shooting students in peaceful protest, bloody bodies left to rot on the side of the road and terrorized children.

Eventually, "Justice and Generals" follows Ford to Miami, where the two high-ranking Salvadoran generals accused of Ita Ford's murder have retired. By the time the film gets there, it is hard to not feel that the generals, Guillermo Garcia and Vides Cassanova, deserve harsh punishment. But history and circumstances get in the way. Ford's case is arbitrated not in El Salvador but in Miami, and it is decided not by a war tribunal, which would be more effective, but by a U.S. jury, composed of people largely unfamiliar with the history of El Salvador or human rights law. In the end, the trial clears the generals in the murder of the churchwomen, because "effective command" -- a stipulation of the Torture and Victim Protection Act under which the case was tried -- could not be proved.