Slain churchwomen live in campaign for justice
Families on a 20-year pursuit of truth
BY ELINOR J. BRECHER
To the jury, they are one-dimensional images: smiling faces in old black-and-white snapshots, or bloated corpses in the khaki-colored dirt. To a group of intensely focused men and women in the gallery, they remain whole people 20 years after their horrific deaths: martyred sisters, aunts and friends in El Salvador's bloody, 12-year civil war.
They were Sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clarke and Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan, four American churchwomen abducted, raped and murdered by five Salvadoran National Guardsmen on Dec. 2, 1980. The women's families are suing the guardsmen's commanders, former Salvadoran Defense Minister José Guillermo García, 67, and former National Guard Director Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, 62, both retired in Florida. They have pursued the two men all the way to a Palm Beach County federal courtroom, where the ex-generals sit impassively until it's time to take the stand and defend themselves.
The suit, based on the 1992 United States Torture Victim Protection Act, alleges that under the ``theory of command'' principle, superior officers can be liable for their subordinates' extrajudicial violence if they ordered, tolerated or failed to prevent the actions and/or failed to punish the perpetrators.
By the time the war ended in 1992, the four women had joined 75,000 people who lost their lives in El Salvador, most to right-wing death squads and marauding military men.
At the time the four women were murdered, Ford, 40, and Clarke, 49, were nuns from the Maryknoll Order based in Maryknoll, N.Y. Kazel, 40, was an Ursuline from Cleveland. Donovan, 27, had worked for a major accounting firm before heading to El Salvador in 1979 under Maryknoll auspices.
They were friends as well as co-workers, seeking refuge in their relationships, which helped each cope with stress, loneliness and fear.
FIVE-YEAR DUTY
Kazel arrived in El Salvador for a five-year assignment in 1974, after working with Indians in Arizona. Dorothy Chapon Kazel, married to the nun's brother, Jim, wrote a book about her sister-in-law called Alleluia Woman (Resource Publications, 1989), describing her as ``no starry-eyed romanticist [but] well aware of the evil and injustice permeating almost every facet of Salvadoran life. But she was a woman of hope and faith.'' Trained as a teacher, Kazel was engaged to be married when she felt ``called'' to the religious life, and she joined the Ursuline Order in 1960.
By the time security forces shot the liberation theologist Archbishop Oscar Romero in March 1980 in San Salvador, life had become hellish in the cities and countryside for anyone trying to help peasants struggling against repression. That included church workers as well as labor and human-rights activists.
Brooklyn-born Ita Ford, a Maryknoll nun since 1971, joined a refugee center in the Chalatenango parish church in early 1980, after 11 years in Chile, where she ministered to refugees and orphans.
Her name appeared on a ``death list'' the day before she was killed. Her brother, New York trial lawyer Bill Ford, 64, spearheaded the lawsuit, filed last year with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. He attends the trial daily, sometimes with one of his six children.
DEPORTATION SOUGHT
Though the civil suit asks for at least $1 million in damages, Ford neither expects to get paid nor cares; he wants the American government to kick the former generals out of the United States.
He said that he and two committee lawyers visited the ex-generals at their homes in 1998, ``because we wanted to find out if they would tell us what they knew. . . . The meetings were correct and formal. . . . I guess they thought we'd be impressed by all the religious statuary.''
At his Plantation home, García ``denied he had anything to do with it,'' Ford said. So did Vides Casanova, who lives near Daytona Beach. Ford and the other families were accustomed to denials -- not just from Salvadorans, but from U.S. officials.
`RAISING HELL'
``It became clear during a meeting the families had with then-Secretary of State [Edmund] Muskie and [Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs William] Bowdler,'' days after the women died, Ford recalls. ``They were defending the military and asking us to be patient. . . . I realized I'd get no cooperation from the State Department without raising hell.'' That's what he and relatives of the other women have done for 20 years. ``We are in this courtroom because of the hard work of a lot of people,'' Ford said. ``This case is not just about four churchwomen; it's about 75,000 others.''
Ita Ford worked closely with Maura Clarke. A Maryknoll nun since 1953, Clarke hailed from Long Island and worked in Nicaragua, where she survived the earthquake of 1972.
AIDING THE POOR
She was a social activist who helped the poor resist water-fee increases in Managua. Her name appeared on the Salvadoran death list with Ita Ford's. Her brother, Jim Clarke, attends the trial most days with her sister, Julia Clarke Keogh, and his wife, Carole. The retired aircraft engineer, 67, remembers how his parents ``were fearful and anxious'' about Maura's move, ``but it's what she wanted to do.''
Mike Donovan represents his sister, Jean. Often during graphic testimony, the Palm Beach Gardens certified public accountant and Rotary International District 6930 governor stares at the floor.
Jean Donovan worked for the accounting firm Arthur Andersen before entering a life of service. She was bubbly yet deeply devout. She went to El Salvador in 1979.
Donovan and Kazel dined with Cleveland missionary the Rev. Paul Schindler at U.S. Ambassador Robert White's home in San Salvador on Dec. 1, 1980. The next day, the women fetched two Maryknoll nuns, who were returning from a conference in Managua, at the airport.
One of them, Sister Madeline Dorsey, 82, testified that Ford and Clarke had to catch a later flight. Donovan and Kazel insisted on returning to the airport to get the others.
Dorsey asked them not to, because six opposition leaders had just been murdered, and the roads were crawling with soldiers.
They went anyway.
According to a long-held version of events, National Guardsmen accosted the four women on the airport road, where church personnel found their burned-out van the following day.
Schindler insists security forces abducted them at the airport. He said that eyewitnesses too scared to identify themselves have told him that.
``After they raped them,'' Schindler said, the guardsmen ``had no choice but to kill them.''
Dorsey, Schindler and White got word on Dec. 4 that the women's bodies had been found in shallow graves near the hamlet of San Pedro Nonualco. The peasants who found them dumped by the road buried them, careful to replace their slacks -- backward, in one case.
In 1984, a Salvadoran jury convicted five former National Guardsmen of the murders. In 1998, four of them told lawyers for the human rights committee that they had acted on orders from superiors.
EX-GENERAL TESTIFIES
Last week, García took the stand. He was asked whether he knew that his security forces were slaughtering masses of innocent people long before they killed the women.
Well, he said, he knew there had been ``abuses.''
Could he have investigated, to prevent further abuses?
García sat silently in the witness box, then pursed his lips.
``Prevention. This is a very delicate thing,'' he said. ``Many times, there are things you cannot prevent that would have occurred in major conflicts in the world.''
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Tuesday October 24 8:33 PM ET
Slain U.S. Churchwomen's Relatives Take Stand
By Marianne Armshaw
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (Reuters) - Twenty years after four U.S. churchwomen were murdered by the El Salvadoran military, their families finally had their day in court on Tuesday.
Attorneys for the families rested their case against two former Salvadoran military leaders they say bear ultimate responsibility for the 1980 deaths after the four plaintiff family members testified in a West Palm Beach federal courtroom in the morning.
``For 20 years we've been trying to find out what happened to these good women,'' Bill Ford, brother of nun Ita Ford, testified. ``I want a judgement that says these men are liable for what happened to my sister.'' While five soldiers were convicted in the killings in El Salvador, the families long believed that the soldiers' superiors were involved. They sought justice in the United States, filing a wrongful death civil lawsuit under U.S. law against the two generals who had retired and moved to Florida around 1989.
The relatives sued ex-generals Jose Guillermo Garcia, 67, and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, 62, for the December 1980 kidnapping, rape and murder of Maryknoll nuns Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline nun Dorothy Kazel and lay volunteer Jean Donovan. The four were American missionaries in El Salvador. The case is expected to go to the jury on Monday. Garcia served as El Salvador's minister of defense from 1979 to 1983 and Vides Casanova headed the country's notoriously brutal National Guard during that time, then succeeded Garcia as head of the military. The civil lawsuit was brought under the Torture Victim Protection Act, a U.S. statute that allows victims and their families to seek damages from those who bear ``command responsibility'' for the criminal acts of their subordinates.
El Salvador's civil war began in the late 1970s and ended in 1992. An estimated 75,000 people died in the conflict.
BRUTALITY DETAILED
Attorneys for the families produced witnesses and reports from a series of international bodies detailing the brutality of the military and security forces during the war: rural units terrorized the countryside with virtual impunity, killing civilians, kidnapping suspected leftist sympathizers, torturing, raping and generally brutalizing the populace. Ford and his co-plaintiffs Julia Clarke Keogh, James Kazel and Michael Donovan took the stand to detail the families' anguished 20-year search for answers about what happened to the women, who ordered the killings and whether there was a cover-up.
In 1998, four of the guards convicted in the killings, now freed from jail, said they had acted on orders from unnamed superiors. The families of the murdered women seek financial damages, but say they do not care about the money.
``We'll probably never see a penny, and that's fine. We want to take the guilty verdict to the Justice Department and try to get these men deported,'' Donovan said outside the courtroom. ''Murderers should not be allowed to retire to Florida.''
Defense attorney Kurt Klaus began his case in the afternoon, telling jurors that the Salvadoran oligarchy -- a small class of super-rich plantation owners -- funded death squads ``to buy terrorism, torture and fear.''
``I don't know if we will ever find out who is responsible for the deaths of these women,'' Klaus said. ``People are victims of crime all the time. Even in El Salvador, not every murder was political.''
Garcia testified that the human rights abuses attributed to the Salvadoran military under his command were actually the work of ``infiltrators'' and ex-soldiers thrown out of the country's security forces.
Klaus questioned him at length about his personal history, even projected a copy of Garcia's resume on the huge, high-tech video screen used to display documents for jury members.
It detailed Garcia's successful rise from military school cadet to general and included a series of awards for outstanding service. Absent was any mention of Garcia's 1962 enrollment in a counterinsurgency course at the controversial School of the Americas, a U.S. military school at Fort Benning, Georgia.
On one issue both sides of the case agree: the U.S.-funded Salvadoran military was ``out of control'', an opinion shared by the State Department under both the Carter and Reagan administrations.
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