[This piece was originally written in 2014 to commemorate the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders in El Salvador. This edited version incorporates new material
and updates the original text.]
On November 16,
1989,
eight people were murdered on the grounds of the José Simeón Cañas
University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador.
Six of the victims were Jesuit priests who
taught at the university and who were vocal advocates for a negotiated
settlement of the country’s civil war.
The two other victims were the cook for the priest’s dormitory and her
daughter.
[1] These murders shocked a country that had seen
plenty of bloodshed up to that point.
The 1993 United
Nations Security Council report submitted by the Commission on the Truth for El
Salvador claimed that, “between 1980 and 1991, the Republic of El Salvador […]
was engulfed in a war” which ultimately claimed upwards of 75,000 lives,
traumatized an entire society, destroyed roads, highways, bridges, churches,
schools, hospitals, homes, and families.
“In its cruelty violence leaves everyone defenceless.”[2]
Looking back, I
remember being unsure about who was doing what to whom, and where. Central America was in crisis throughout the
1960s, 70s, and 80s, when civil wars in Guatemala (1960-1996), Nicaragua
(twice, first in 1978-1979 and again from 1981-1990), and El Salvador attracted
a variety of foreign involvement, in the form of money, arms, and
advisors. Coup d’états, repressions, and
counter-coups marked the era. Human
rights were abused with impunity. People
disappeared, villages were destroyed, and villagers massacred. Both sides committed gross atrocities against
the other.
In El Salvador, the United States backed the
government. The Soviet Union, Cuba,
and other Soviet bloc countries supported the Frente Farabundo Marti para la
Liberación Nacional (FMLN), an alliance of five insurgent groups. The fighting was “particularly merciless” on
the civilian population.[3] The details are far more complicated than a
brief synopsis can provide, but in the end, neither side could dislodge the
other, and as the Cold War dwindled, so too did foreign political interest and
financial aid to El Salvador, eventually leading to an end to the fighting and
a subsequent peace accord, signed in Mexico City on January 16, 1992.[4]
This conflict
highlights the nature of power – who has it, who wants it, and who gets stuck
in the middle. But war doesn’t happen
overnight. Even the seemingly
spontaneous Rwandan genocide in 1994 was planned. War is, as von Clausewitz said, “a continuation
of policy by other means,”[5] a
political act, as it certainly seemed to be in the El Salvador of the Cold War
era.
The roots to this
latest conflict go back to the sixteenth century when Spain conquered Central
America. El Salvador only became an
independent republic in 1838. Before
then, the Spaniards and, after independence, Salvadorans of European descent
had created a vast gap between rich and poor.
The Salvadoran economy was based on agriculture, mostly around two
singular crops: first, indigo, for which demand evaporated with the
introduction of chemical dyes, followed by coffee in the 1800s.[6] By 1880, coffee had become the dominant export
crop and would figure prominently as a funding source in the civil wars to
come.[7]
The Center for Justice
and Accountability says indigenous peoples and mestizos[8] made up
95 percent of the population but were reduced to virtual serfdom while a small
minority of wealthy landholders called the “Fourteen Families” ruled through a
long series of military dictatorships throughout the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. “It is along these fault lines – between peasant and
planter, European and native – that cycles
of violence have erupted throughout El Salvador’s troubled history.”[9]
In January 1932,
Augustin Farabundo Marti, a labor leader, led a peasant revolt against the
ruling dictatorship and the “Fourteen Families.” The response was immediate and massive. It is remembered today as La Matanza, the slaughter that took
30,000 lives, mostly those of indigenous people.[10] Thus began a perpetual struggle between the
various right-wing military dictatorships and their left-wing guerilla
opponents. Caught in the middle, Salvadoran
society in general and particularly the peasant population were vulnerable to
depredations from both sides, more so from the right-wing.
Europe between
Hitler and Stalin, from the 1920s to the end of the Second World War, and even a
little beyond, experienced similar murders, where millions of people were
murdered simply for who they were and where they happened to be living at the time.
We need to know these
long and complicated histories in order to see our current world in all its
complexity and tragedy and as clearly and completely as possible. In response, one might ask, where was God? For every murder, for every disappearance, was
God present to the victims? How could
God allow such a long-playing tragedy such as what befell El Salvador, Guatemala,
and Nicaragua, Poland and Ukraine?
In the immediate
aftermath of the December, 2004 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Sumatra
and most of the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean as far away as Sri Lanka,
David B. Hart wrote that, when we are confronted by “the sheer savage
immensity” of wide-spread suffering, we are permitted only to hate death,
waste, and “the imbecile forces of chance.”[11] The hidden hand of God does not send the
destruction of natural causes our way as a form of testing or punishment. Instead, we can see that God is in our
collective positive response to tragedy, in our compassion, and in our charity.
In the wake of the
2012 Sandy Hook shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, John Podhoretz wrote that
evil is “an effort to destroy the common good by making good appear powerless,
ineffectual, weak.”[12] Evil is all of that and more. Evil isn’t just a thing that sits there as if
it were waiting for the next bus. Evil
is something we choose to do. We can
resist evil. We can choose not to do it.
What happened on
November 16, 1989 in El Salvador was not by natural causes. The men who murdered six priests and two
women that night chose to do evil.
Worse, they were commanded to, and they did not question the
command. We can say, then, that the
murderers and their commanders were evil.
Such evil is still on the loose around the world today in conflicts
small and large.
We are called to
remember what happened on November 16, 1989 and elsewhere in Central America at
that time because, as Father Joseph O’Hare wrote, “for us to forget [the slain
priests] or to decide that the costs of justice are too high for us to pay
would be to betray not only their memory but our faith that this is God’s world
and that God is the Lord of justice.”[13] In the same way, we are called to also remember
if not stand with the slain in Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria, and with all those
trapped in a war zone; anywhere that neighbors strike at neighbors or wherever
people have died at the hands of oppression.
It is a long list.
At the Communion
table, Christians recall the words of Jesus Christ, who said, “Do this in
remembrance of me.” Jesus is calling us
to remember, first, that we meet in peaceful fellowship that cuts across social,
political, and economic boundaries.
Secondly, in sharing that meal, we build up God’s beloved community, the
kingdom of heaven, here on earth. Reconciliation
and perhaps understanding occur at the Lord’s Table. What we do there is the exact opposite of
what we do when we are at war.
Jon Sobrino reminds
us of “God’s eternal question,” which is this: “What have you done to your
brother or sister,”[14] to
which we would add, “or not done for them?”
Here is Sobrino again with what we hope is the last word that might
speak for all time to man’s inhumanity to mankind: “In a world of darkness with
a heart of stone it is possible to live with light and with a heart of flesh,
and that it is possible to experience in one’s own life the blessing and joy of
the beatitudes.”[15]
[1] Rev.
Stan G. Duncan , “Introduction: The Crime” in Companions of Jesus: The
Jesuit Martyrs of El Salvador [Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 1990],
xi-xxviii.
[3] Mark
Vasallo, “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: General Considerations and a
Critical Comparison of the Commissions of Chile
and El Salvador,” The University of Miami Inter-American Law Review,
Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), 168.
[5] Karl von
Clausewitz, War, Politics, and Power: Selections from On War, and I
Believe and Profess, ed. and tran. Edward M. Collins [Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1962], 83.
[7] Donald
E. Jacobson and David B. Ehrenthal, "Chapter 3: The Economy" in
A Country Study: El Salvador, Library of
Congress Call Number F1483.B55 1990,
http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/svtoc.html,
accessed 17 October 2014.
[8] A person
of combined European and Native American descent.
[9]
“Background on El Salvador.” Emphasis
added.
[11] David
B. Hart, “Tremors of Doubt,”
The Wall Street Journal (31 December 2004).
[13] Father
Joseph O’Hare, S.J., “Six Slain Jesuits” in Companions of Jesus: The Jesuit
Martyrs of El Salvador,
176.
