Richard A. Sokerka
Thirty-five years ago, on Dec. 2, 1980, Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay volunteer Jean Donovan were murdered in El Salvador where they were living and working with refugees of the country’s civil war.
From Nov. 28 to Dec. 5, a delegation of 100 women and community leaders, including Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth in Convent Station, traveled to El Salvador to the site where the four women were murdered to mark the 35th anniversary of their deaths. But they did more than that on this trip, they asked for justice on behalf of these churchwomen who were brutally killed.
The U.N. Truth Commission, established in 1992 to investigate cases of political violence during the civil war, concluded that then-Col. Eugenio Vides Casanova, director of the National Guard, knew that a unit from his command had carried out the assassinations and facilitated the concealment of the facts, which hampered the investigation. In 1984, four guardsmen were found guilty of the killings and convicted to 30 years in prison, but those who planned the murders and gave the orders have never been brought to justice.
In 2002, a Florida jury found Casanova, who had been granted residence in the United States, responsible in a federal civil case for the torture of Salvadorans. In April 2015, Casanova was deported to El Salvador for participating and assisting the torture and assassination of thousands of victims, including the four churchwomen.
However, nothing is being done in El Salvador because a Salvadoran amnesty law, passed in 1992, is protecting those responsible for the murders of the churchwomen and many other victims.
Those in the delegation have pledged to work to see that the amnesty law is repealed.
Then, and only then will justice prevail.