c. 1998 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) As Jim Kazel says, “The worst gets worse.”
The worst is the Dec. 2, 1980, murder in El Salvador of Kazel’s sister Dorothy, an Ursuline nun who was 41 when she died. Murdered with her were her friend Jean Donovan, 27, a Catholic lay worker, and Maryknoll nuns Ita Ford, 40, and Maura Clarke, 49.
The women were leaving Comalapa International Airport outside San Salvador when they were stopped at a military checkpoint. They were abducted, driven into the hills, raped and shot to death. Their bodies were dumped by the side of the road and later hastily buried in a shallow, unmarked grave.
To this day, the families of the murdered missionaries remain haunted by feelings that they still don’t know what really happened. Worse, they think their own government has hampered the search for the truth.
The families recently learned that three of five Salvadoran national guardsmen convicted of the killings have been released from jail after serving only 14 years of their 30-year sentence, thanks to a new law aimed at easing the overcrowded Salvadoran prison system.
They also found out that two retired Salvadoran generals identified as key participants in a cover-up to protect the killers have been quietly granted residence in the United States and now are living comfortably in Florida. One of them received political asylum, which stunned family members and human rights activists.
The killings occurred at a sensitive time for the U.S. government, which had just launched a $7 billion, decade-long military-aid offensive to prevent leftist guerrillas from taking control of El Salvador.
The slaying of the churchwomen jeopardized that aid, sparking debate over why U.S. tax dollars were being spent to support a government capable of such an atrocity.
Mary Rose Oakar, then a Democratic representative from Ohio and a friend of the Kazel family, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., introduced legislation in Congress to stop military aid unless the Salvadoran government solved the murders.
FBI agents were assigned to help with the investigation and agency lab work led to a sergeant in the National Guard, Luis Antonio Colindres Aleman, and another guardsman, Jose Roberto Moreno Canjura.
In early 1982, two more guardsmen were arrested. One of them, Franco Orlando Contreras Recinos, said to be a born-again Christian, confessed to his role in the murders and implicated four other guardsmen, including Colindres Aleman and Canjura.
All five were charged with aggravated murder.
The U.S. and Salvadoran governments both contended the killers acted alone. But the families and their lawyers felt the women had been targeted, citing death threats Ford and Clarke had received as well as a radio transmission intercepted the day of the murders which contained the lines: “They did not arrive on that flight. Shall we wait for the next flight?”
Retired U.S. District Court Judge Harold Tyler, sent to El Salvador to prepare an independent assessment of the murder investigation, concluded that the five former guardsmen had acted on their own initiative. Tyler said his conclusion was supported by “special Embassy evidence, which unfortunately we are unable to reveal without endangering lives.”
Tyler’s report did suggest a cover-up, though, finding that “the first reaction of the Salvadoran authorities to the murder was, tragically, to conceal the perpetrators from justice.”
Tyler reported that it was “quite possible” that Col. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, then head of the National Guard and later a general and minister of defense, “was aware of, and for a time acquiesced in, the cover-up.”
In 1984, the five guardsmen were convicted of the murders and sentenced. Their trial was the first and only time that members of the Salvadoran security forces have been prosecuted for killing civilians.
In 1993, a U.N. Truth Commission report concluded that the five guardsmen had “carried out orders of a superior” in executing the four churchwomen. The commission report failed to identify who that superior was, but it again named Vides Casanova as well as another former defense minister, Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia, as participants in an official cover-up of the murders.
By then, Vides Casanova and Garcia had both quietly retired to Florida, where their presence outrages Scott Greathead of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, who has represented the churchwomen’s families since 1981.
“These are guys who have been implicated in protecting the murderers of four U.S. citizens,” Greathead said. “And there’s no question that the government knew that.”
An Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman said “there is absolutely no indication either Garcia or Vides Casanova were provided with any preferential considerations.” He refused further comment, citing the Privacy Act.
Garcia, who was El Salvador’s minister of defense and public security from October 1979 to April 1983 and retired with the rank of brigadier-general, lives in a $124,000 house in a nondescript, middle-class neighborhood outside Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
He is 65 years old and married with five grown children. He drives a $20,000 1997 minivan and carries himself with the confidence of a man who has commanded thousands.
His eyes are flat and hard as stone. A short, tough guy, he speaks rapid-fire Spanish. He’s polite but impatient.
Garcia said he was granted political asylum here in 1991 during the Bush administration. He was afraid to stay in El Salvador because there were people there who wanted him dead.
“If this guy got political asylum,” Greathead said, “I’m astonished. People who were targeted by the death squads couldn’t get it and he does?”
Garcia said he receives a pension from the Salvadoran government. He repeatedly denies any involvement in the murders of the churchwomen or the subsequent cover-up.
“I respect the opinion of the families and the Truth Commission,” Garcia said, “but they are in error. We pray for them to find peace and to act in a Christian manner.”
He described himself as a good Catholic, active in his local parish. His living room is filled with religious icons and Bibles. A photograph on the wall shows him in full military regalia meeting Pope John Paul II.
“I am deeply religious since I was a child,” Garcia said. “I am a man of principle. When I was minister of defense, I didn’t align myself with the left or the right. My duty was always to God, my family and the people.”
Garcia is adamant that the guardsmen acted alone and that, despite what the families may say, his conscience is clear.
He said the women were killed “because the guardsmen believed they were aiding the guerrillas.”
“I leave everything to God,” Garcia said.
The man who succeeded him as minister of defense lives several hundred miles to the north in the tiny, tree-lined town of Palm Coast, outside Daytona Beach.
Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova said he moved here in 1989 and was granted residency based on his marriage to a woman whose parents are U.S. citizens.
He lives in a $140,000 house on the Intracoastal Waterway with his wife and seven children who range in age from 10 to 18. He drives a $30,000 1997 Cadillac DeVille. He has a pool, a boat and a shrine to the Virgin Mary in his yard.
At 60, Vides Casanova is thin-lipped and heavyset. He, too, receives a pension from the Salvadoran government but adds that his wife’s family has money.
He sparks with nervous energy, the words pouring out of him in a steady stream of Spanish.
“My wife wanted us to come here for the children,” he said. “I think it was best to leave and dedicate the last years of my life to my children.”
Vides Casanova, like Garcia, maintains his innocence.
“The devil, they think I’m the devil,” he says of the families. “I accept all the criticisms not because they are true, but because I understand the pain of the families.”
He heatedly denies organizing and directing a cover-up of the killings, as both the Tyler and the U.N. Truth Commission reports allege.
“Since the beginning I have been cooperative,” Vides Casanova said. “At no time was I trying to cover anything up.”
He produces photographs of meetings with Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle and George Bush. He has Reagan’s autograph, and two Legion of Merit commendation awards from the U.S. Department of Defense.
He looks forward to Judgment Day. “That is when the families will repent for falsely accusing me.”
Until then, Vides Casanova takes time every day to say two Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. Then he prays for the murdered American churchwomen.
Do Vides Casanova and Garcia speak _ or even know _ the truth?
Ita Ford’s brother Bill, a Wall Street lawyer, would like to see them subpoenaed by Congress. “Put them under oath,” he said. “Ask them what they know; compel them to testify.”
If that is a political impossibility, then Pamela Keogh, the niece of Maryknoll nun Maura Clarke, recommends a second course of action.
“Get them out of here,” she said.
Jim Kazel votes for that.
“Our government is rewarding them to allow them to come here,” he said. “Deport them and make them have a miserable life somewhere else.”
His mother, 87-year-old Malvina Kazel, thinks they should be in jail.
“I can’t understand how they can live with themselves,” she said. “You wonder about people like that.”
(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
Earlier this year, Greathead traveled to El Salvador and interviewed four of the guardsmen in prison. It was the first time the guardsmen had spoken about the murders.
They said their immediate superior, Sgt. Colindres Aleman, told them he had orders to kill the women. Colindres Aleman did not tell his men who issued that order, however, and he refused to talk to Greathead.
Garcia becomes angry when asked about the guardsmen’s allegations that they were following orders when they committed the murders.
“The logical question is why now, after nearly 18 years, are they saying these things?” Garcia said. “Why should we believe them after they committed this barbaric, horrendous crime?”
A couple of months after his trip, Greathead got word that Colindres Aleman and two other guardsmen were being released because of a new law to ease overcrowding.
El Salvador’s attorney general refused a Lawyers Committee request that he take a statement from Colindres Aleman as a condition of his release, Greathead said. “He offered no explanation, but I’m certain there’s no percentage in it for him. Colindres Aleman obviously has information that would put important people at risk.”
About the same time, the State Department finally released the “special Embassy evidence” that Harold Tyler had cited as proof the five guardsmen acted on their own initiative.
“The evidence proves nothing of the sort. There’s no concession from Colindres Aleman that he acted on his own,” Greathead said.
(END OPTIONAL TRIM)
Tyler still defends his report that there is no proof that the murderers were acting on orders. But he was taken aback by the news that Vides Casanova and Garcia now live in Florida.
“I hope they thought about it a bit,” Tyler said of the INS decision to give the two men residency. “We thought Vides Casanova was covering up, and we didn’t think Garcia was all that splendid either.”
IR END EVANS
