Still No Justice for Priests in Notorious El Salvador Massacre 20 Years Later

On November 16, 1989, an elite unit of the Salvadoran military entered the gates of the Jesuit-run Central American University in San Salvador. When they left, six priests lay dead, along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter.

I reported on the murders that year, for the local Wisconsin community radio station, WORT. The killings took place at a time when the capital city was in the midst of the largest offensive to date in El Salvador's decade-old civil war -- and the U.S. government was supplying about "supplying over $550 million dollars per year in aid to the Salvadoran government -- about one quarter of it directly to the Salvadoran military." The city was totally militarized, with an army base not far from the Jesuit university campus itself, but in spite of this, attempts were being made to blame the killings on the FMLN rebels -- a sign was even planted near the bodies claiming that the priests were executed by the guerrillas as spies.

During the war years, many Church leaders who were proponents of Liberation Theology were targeted by the right-wing forces for taking a stand on the side of the poor. Most famous of these was Archbishop Oscar Romero, killed March 24, 1980 while celebrating mass in San Salvador. Members of the Jesuit order in particular were considered by the military and the ruling party to be the intellectual leaders of the guerrilla movement -- which was, in fact, an army of Salvadoran peasants. Of the 26 soldiers cited in a 1993 United Nations report as having participated in these massacres, 19 were graduates of the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia.

Since its founding, the SOA has trained more than 60,000 soldiers and police officers from a variety of Latin American countries, many of whom were later accused of torture and other human rights violations. Activists, and several members of Congress, have worked to try and defund the school, seen by many as a relic of the Cold War, but the doors remain open at an annual cost of about $7.5 million taxpayer dollars. Since 1990, protests at the SOA have taken place every year at the time of the anniversary of the murder of the the six Jesuit priests and the women who supported them. Their deaths are symbolic of the more than 75,000 Salvadorans killed during the war between 1980 and 1992.

This past weekend, I stood in the rose garden of the same university campus where the Jesuits were killed. The roses, originally six red and two yellow, were planted to commemorate the murders -- killings that led Maryknoll priest Father Roy Bourgeois to found the peace group School of the Americas Watch (www.soaw.org). This coming weekend, on November 22nd, more than ten thousand people are expected to march in protest outside the gates of WHINSEC, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, as the SOA has been renamed, to mark the 20th anniversary of the murders.

The killings in San Salvador may ring familiar to Americans who recall that era, but documents that were released a few years later revealed a level of complicity within the U.S. that has been largely ignored in the press. When the murders of the Jesuit priests were falsely blamed on FMLN rebels, the U.S. Embassy helped perpetuate the lie through numerous "off-the-record" assertions. Here in the United States, Reed Irvine, founder of the rightwing media watch group called "Accuracy in Media," was trumpeting the message that "these guerrillas like killing priests." In an appearance that November in Madison, WI, Irvine cited the report of two investigators that had viewed the bodies -- Dr. Robert Kirschner and forensic anthropologist Dr. Clyde Snow, both well known for their investigative work on remains from massacres. Irvine claimed that Kirschner and Snow believed the bodies had been shot, but not mutilated. I immediately contacted both men and interviewed them. It turned out that by the time they had been allowed to view the bodies, they were already scrubbed and placed in a morgue.