U.S. Aid Would Need to Stop

The case of Jennifer Jean Casolo, a church worker from Connecticut who was recently arrested in El Salvador and charged with aiding leftist guerrillas, rightly commands the world’s attention today. But her case is just one of a growing number of troubling instances in which the right-wing government there seems to be singling out religious workers for harassment, intimidation and even death.

Casolo, who was working for a Texas-based ecumenical religious group, was taken into custody after police said they found a cache of weapons buried in the back yard of her home in San Salvador. She could have put the matter behind her by accepting deportation to the United States, but has chosen to plead innocent and stand trial. Casolo’s fellow religious workers are convinced the government is using her case to discredit them, and with them local clergy who criticize the government’s policies and its human-rights record. Some of Casolo’s friends think she was framed. Normally, such allegations would seem naive or even paranoid. But the way religious workers in El Salvador have been treated recently, the suggestion is reasonable, even if it’s not a proven fact.

Last month’s massacre of six Jesuit priests and two women bystanders renewed the sense of shock felt around the world at the sheer scope of El Salvador’s bloodletting. The murders remain unsolved, and the government has not been able to refute an eyewitness account that uniformed men carried out the killings--a report that fed widespread suspicion that the murders were the work of a right-wing death squad tied to the military or the ruling Arena party.

But there have been many other distressing, if less dramatic, incidents. Dozens of Lutheran and Episcopal church workers have been detained by Salvadoran authorities in recent days and expelled from the country. The practice has become so persistent that nine U.S. religious bodies have charged the government of President Alfredo Cristiani with a “deliberate and calculated campaign to intimidate and harass” them.

If that’s what is happening in El Salvador--and the accumulation of incidents and evidence suggests it may be--it must stop. U.S. taxpayers have enough problems already with supporting a government that may be implicated in the murder of priests, even if such incidents can be explained away as isolated atrocities committed in the chaos of war. But if the campaign against church workers turns out in fact to be official Salvadoran government policy, this would be so intolerable that U.S. aid would need to end at once.