An Answer to Massacre

The brutal murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador was an appalling and needless act of violence. Just as appalling is the crude, contemptuous message the killings send: A decade after similar outrages spawned a bloody civil war, the lives of innocents still mean little to the extremists who have turned El Salvador into a slaughter house.

An estimated 70,000 persons have been killed in the last 10 years in El Salvador, the vast majority of them civilians. Some were caught in cross-fires as the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government and rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front struggled for primacy in a war that remains a stalemate. But thousands more have been victims of methodical terror campaigns by political death squads. While the FMLN has used death-squad tactics at times, El Salvador’s tyrannical oligarchy and fiercely nationalistic military have employed them most often. The massacre of the Jesuits bears the mark of a military operation.

The killings occurred late at night in a middle-class district in San Salvador where only military units can safely move about because of a strictly enforced curfew. The dormitory where the victims lived, and the University of Central America (UCA) where they worked, had been surrounded by soldiers during the last few days of heavy fighting in the capital city. The murders were carried out by about 30 men, according to witnesses, dressed in uniforms and using the kind of high-powered rifles routinely issued by the military. FMLN guerrillas rarely move about in large groups, wear no uniforms and use older weapons. Most chilling of all, the killings followed the broadcast of anonymous death threats over government-controlled radio stations against persons suspected of sympathizing with the FMLN, including priests at UCA.

The far right in El Salvador has long regarded Jesuits, as well as other Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy, as suspect. While few have openly aligned themselves with the FMLN, most espouse a theology of liberation that leads them to work with El Salvador’s many poor people, and that makes them seem threatening to some oligarchs. But while Jesuits and other scholars at UCA made no secret of their belief that social change is needed in El Salvador, their academic research was careful and balanced. They would criticize the Marxist pretensions of the FMLN, or its prolonged war strategy, as straightforwardly as they would fault the human-rights record of El Salvador’s armed forces and the buccaneer capitalism of the country’s oligarchy. Political analysts the world over respect the research conducted at UCA for its rational explanations of the issues at the root of El Salvador’s turmoil. So the death of UCA’s rector and the others represents a victory for the most barbaric factions in El Salvador.

The Bush Administration must use all of the political, legal and moral leverage it can to make sure this extremist triumph is not consolidated. U.S. Ambassador William Walker has denounced the killings in strong terms, and offered U.S. protection to persons who cooperate with the investigation. But a firmer stance is needed, backed up by a threat to withdraw millions of dollars in U.S. aid if there is not enough cooperation from the Salvadoran government.

There are risks in such a strategy. Some elements of the Salvadoran right would prefer an end to U.S. aid, believing they could then carry out the blood bath that they believe would end the war once and for all. But for years now American officials have argued that U.S. training and aid is helping professionalize what was once a corrupt and brutal military caste. Now is the time to demand repayment for that aid by insisting that the professionals in El Salvador’s military do all they can to track down and persecute the priests’ killers.

All of the outrages that have been perpetrated in El Salvador since 1979 have not led to the conviction of so much as one military officer for human-rights violations. Unless the Salvadoran military shows a genuine willingness to purge itself this time, the effectiveness of U.S. military aid to El Salvador will be called into question and Congress would be justified in ending it.