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Reports by Country:
El Salvador



  • Assassination of Archbishop Romero while he was saying Mass

  • El Mozote, where 900 civilians including 131 children hiding in a convent were killed, Salvadoreans who had been trained by Americans at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  • Santa Fe report, influential in several administrations, which taught that Marxist-Leninist forces have infiltrated the religious community with ideas that are less Christian than communist, and that U. S. foreign policy must counter liberation theology.
  • Death Squads.. In early December, State Department political officer Todd Greentree traveled to Miami to discuss right-wing activities with two groups of wealthy Salvadorans. Oliver North, made his notable visit to El Salvador in December 1983, bringing with him a list of officers and civilians involved in death squad activities.

  • Gutman is an attorney who has helped the Chicago CISPES group successfully win court orders against the FBI for illegal actions against CISPES for its work in Chicago and El Salvador.

  • El Salvador - Presente! CISPES: Radical, Pragmatic and Successful. The Heart, Soul and Engine: Salvadorans in the U.S. The Religious Roots of Solidarity.

  • Varelli, Frank, former FBI informer, infiltrated CISPES, 1981. Told to seduce nun who headed CISPES. Gave information about Americans in America to El Salvador National Guard so they could arrange for actions against Americans in U.S. Interview transcript.
  • U.S. Declassified Documents Reveal U.S. Knew About High-Level Military Officer Involved in Churchwomen's Murder. Special Report on El Salvador, Week of June 20-27, 1998 Source: Weekly News Update on the Americas Nicaragua Solidarity Network of NY * 339 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10012 * 212-674-9499 fax: 212-674-9139 * Email to: wnu@igc.apc.org. Material provided by Peace Net: Email to:peacenet-info@igc.apc.org
    • U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has ordered the release of U.S. State Department documents which reveal what many have always suspected about the 1980 murders of four U.S. nuns and a layworker.
    • Since the abduction, rape and killing of Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan took place, the U.S. and Salvadoran governments have insisted that they were carried out by five National Guard soldiers on their own initiative. However, according to the documents, the defense minister at the time of the killings, Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia, later confided to Thomas R. Pickering, then U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, his suspicions that high-level military officers had ordered the murders. Garcia told Pickering, who is now Undersecretary of State of Political Affairs, "There existed an attitude among the National Guard elements that colleagues should be protected," and that a subaltern might have been directly involved in the murders.
    • Garcia said that when the murder became known, he thought of Col. Edgardo Casanova, who was military commander of the zone where the women were abducted, says a State Department cable. Garcia recalled that sometime before the murders something similar had occurred within the area overseen by Casanova, the cable explains.
    • Pickering says in another cable that in a conversation with then- Deputy Defense Minister Col. Rafael Flores Lima, he was told, "Edgardo Casanova had been aware of and possibly ordered the murder of the churchwomen." Apparently Garcia expressed concern about Casanova, and had transferred him to a desk job.
    • The documents also reveal that senior Salvadoran officers organized and directed a cover-up. Sgt. Colindres said that within days of the killings he admitted his role to Maj. Lizandro Zepeda, who was in charge of the initial military investigation. Colindres and at least one other soldier involved in the killings discussed with Zepeda what would be the official version of what happened. Zepeda included this official version in his report, knowing it was false.
    • Despite having received information the clearly implicated high- level Salvadoran military officials as the intellectual authors of the killings, as well as the cover-up, the U.S. authorities chose not to act. At the time of the killings, the U.S. was beginning to give economic and military support to the Salvadoran government to help in its effort to defeat the leftist rebels, the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN). That assistance would eventually run to billions of dollars.
    • Members of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which represents the families of the churchwomen, interviewed some of the National Guardsmen who were convicted of the murders and were sentenced to 30 years in prison. According to an article in the April 3 New York Times, during those interviews, two of the soldiers admitted that they had acted under "orders from above." However, in the light of the possibility of early release, they later recanted later, saying their statements had been twisted.
    • The Laywers Committee had been led to believe there were among the documents "special embassy evidence," cited by U.S. officials and judicial commissions, that proved that the National Gaurdsmen had acted on their own. The evidence turned out to be nothing more than a conversation between their commanding officer, Sgt. Luis Antonio Colindres Aleman, and a higher-ranking officer, which has nothing to do with the murders. R. Scott Greathead, one of the lawyers who interviewed the National Guardsmen in jail, said it was clear that the insistence on this being definitive proof was simply an effort to avoid "irreparable damage to [U.S.] policy [at the time], which was to continue working with the Salvadoran military."
    • U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin said, "We hope that these documents, together with the 25 volumes of material previously declassified, help to respond to some of the questions which are still being asked about the case and in that way alleviates in some way the suffering of the victims' families." He also said the documents could help the Salvadoran authorities get to the bottom of the matter in order to know the truth. It is unlikely that the Salvadoran government will allow the case to be reopened, even with new evidence, since the case was classified as a common crime, not a political killing, and the ten-year statute of limitations on murder has expired.
    • In 1993 a U.N. Truth Commission report found Gen. Garcia and Col. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova had organized and directed the cover-up. Casanova, who in 1980 was the director of the National Guard, is a first cousin and lifelong friend of Edgardo Casanova. Vides Casanova was eventually promoted to general and became defense minister during one of the most violent periods of the war, working closely with U.S. authorites. He is now living in Florida and in 1989 was granted permanent residency, along with his wife and children.
    • According to a report by the Associated Press, on June 24 a judge granted conditional freedom to three of the five soldiers convicted of the murders, based on their good behavior. They are supposed to be released on June 30. However, Salvadoran officials are seeking to overturn the judge's decision.
    • Robert E. White, who was U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador at the time of the killings, said, upon learning of the documents, "I think someone should be called on the carpet for this." He was not referring to Pickering, however. He continued, "What has been released moves toward confirming what most of us have always believed, that this was ordered by higher ups," and was not the initiative the four soldiers and their commanding officer. Thomas Pickering was not available for comment.
    • The documents were released at the request of some members of the U.S. congress and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. State Department officials say the 300 pages will be published and posted on the State Department Web site shortly. (New York Times, NYC, 6/25/98; La Prensa on the Web from AFP, San Pedro Sula, 6/24/98; El Diario de Hoy, San Salvador, 6/26/98)
  • "Government Selective about Which Murders It Will Investigate. Written Jun 27 1998. Source: Weekly News Update on the Americas Nicaragua Solidarity Network of NY * 339 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10012 * 212-674-9499 fax: 212-674-9139 * Email to: wnu@igc.apc.org. Material provided by Peace Net: Email to:peacenet-info@igc.apc.org
    • The Salvadoran government has announced that it will ask the Congress to reopen the case of the killing of four U.S. marines and two civilians by the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN), when it was a guerrilla army.
    • This occurred at the same time that the government has refused to open the case of the 1980 murder of three U.S. nuns and another U.S. religious worker by Salvadoran soldiers, as well as the murder of four Jesuit priests in 1989 by military death squads.
    • On June 21 Salvadoran Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle observed that it is necessary to know the truth about the war crimes which took place during the 1980s and early 1990s. Saenz pointed out that there is a difference between historic truth and legal processes that take a longer time to arrive at the truth.
    • The archbishop said it was important to be clear about the responsibility of the authorities in the killing of the four U.S. women. He commented that it would be interesting if the war crimes were to be investigated in private and only the results were to be made public. (Agencia Informativa Amarc-Pulsar, 6/22/98)


  • The December 1998 Atlantic Monthly has an excellent synopsis of US foreign policy in the El Salvador era, seen from the top. Benjamin Schwarz, "Dirty Hands", is a review of William LeoGrande's latest book, "Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992." Email to Alysia S. Constine




    Virtual Truth Commission: Telling the Truth for a Better America
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    Titles "Virtual Truth Commission" and "Telling the Truth for a Better America" © 1998, Jackson H. Day. All Rights Reserved.
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    Updated December 7, 1998