El Salvador Church Workers Face Daily Peril

Their lives are in daily peril, these men and women of various religious orders who work among the poor and disenfranchised on the fringes of El Salvador’s 10-year civil war.

They are viewed as subversives, at best, by the military Establishment and the conservative government.

To the extremists of the far-right, they are mortal enemies.

“Our only sin is opting for the poor, serving the poor, helping poor communities,” Lutheran Bishop Medardo Gomez said in January upon his return to El Salvador. Gomez, whose church works extensively with refugees and in shantytowns, left the country in November as a huge guerrilla offensive by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front convulsed the capital.

Gomez, whose offices have been bombed twice during the last 18 months, received repeated death threats before his flight. The rightist government of President Alfredo Cristiani deplored the threats. But it also said it could not guarantee Gomez’s safety.

El Salvador, the size of Massachusetts with 5 million inhabitants, is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Protestant denominations have established congregations in recent decades, and some churches--including the Lutheran, Baptist and Episcopal--administer programs on behalf of victims of the civil war.

The world was shocked on Nov. 16 by the massacre of six Jesuit priests and educators--the leadership of the prestigious Central American University and the nucleus of El Salvador’s intellectual life. The priests’ cook and her 15-year-old daughter also were slain.

Cristiani announced in January that government soldiers committed the murders, perhaps the most heinous politically motivated crime of a civil war infamous for its heinous political crimes. He identified four officers, including a colonel, and five soldiers as the alleged culprits. Eight of the nine were charged with premeditated murder and jailed. One, a soldier, is a fugitive.

“It is claimed that what happened was that a small group of members of the armed forces have stained the honor of the military institution,” Msgr. Gregorio Rosa Chavez, auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, said in a recent interview. “We find that difficult to accept.

“We do not think these are isolated cases of people who stray from the path of an institution. Rather, we think they are the product of a way of thinking, an education that views as subversive the work of people like the slain Jesuits, the work of church people committed to helping resolve the problems of the poor, work on behalf of human rights.

“This education, in the final analysis, teaches that we are the enemy,” he said.

The far-right considers the Jesuits to be Marxist ideologues. Throughout the civil war, the Jesuits at Central American University have maintained that the conflict arose from gross social injustice and that only by addressing its causes could it be resolved. This angered the armed forces and the elite, who contended that the revolution was the result of international communist expansion.

The slaying of the Jesuits was not the first murderous attack on a voice from the church.

A sniper killed Catholic Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero as he said Mass on March 24, 1980, the day after he issued an impassioned plea to army troops to disobey orders to kidnap, torture or summarily execute suspected leftists.

The Christian Democratic government that handed power to Cristiani last June said it had proof that top figures in Arena, Cristiani’s party, plotted the murder. But the case became terminally bogged down in a judiciary notorious for its inefficiency.

Prosecution of Romero’s killers is considered highly unlikely.

On Dec. 2, 1980, national guardsmen kidnaped and killed three U.S. nuns and a lay woman church worker. Five soldiers were convicted of the murders, but officers implicated in the crime were never prosecuted. The convicted guardsmen said they had been told the women were involved in subversive activity.

All four women helped people displaced by the war. Two of them, Sister Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan, worked with an orphanage 10 miles south of San Salvador.

The orphanage--the Oscar Arnulfo Romero Community--is home to 154 boys and girls whose parents were killed in the war. It represents in microcosm the often strained relations between the government and armed forces, on one side, and a church that considers its mission more than purely pastoral.

The Rev. Ken Myers, a diocesan priest and native of Norwalk, Ohio, founded the center in August, 1980.

The project began “with a dozen real sick orphan children from the refugee centers,” he said in an interview in his office at the orphanage, just outside the small town of Zaragoza. “Within four months we had a hundred, and were beyond the capacity of the couple buildings we had in the parish.”

With money from the San Salvador archdiocese and donations from the United States, the church bought land to augment a donation of several acres by the district’s biggest landowners. The community now covers 90 acres and has a dairy, a chicken coop that produces 2,400 eggs a day, corn, bean and vegetable fields and workshops for carpentry, welding, tailoring and sewing.

The school comprises grades one through nine and is the best in the area. Besides the orphans, about 650 children from Zaragoza and surrounding villages attend, paying a minimal and flexible tuition.

A clinic staffed by a full-time nurse--a nun from the Houston-based Sisters of the Immaculate Word--treats about 40 poor area residents a day. The number rises to about 60 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when a physician is present.

The orphanage has been the object of official suspicion since its founding, Myers said.

“Just the name, Romero, makes it suspicious for some people,” he said. Army search parties have entered the grounds several times, though the commanding officers have been generally polite and the installations have never been ransacked, the priest said.

He told how in 1982, an army colonel telephoned him and said authorities had received reports that Myers had 500 teen-agers, all boys, at the orphanage. The colonel implied it was a guerrilla training camp.

“We had about 150 kids, boys and girls, and nobody over 12,” Myers said.

In December, the driver of an orphanage pickup truck taking medicine to the countryside was detained for four days on suspicion of abetting the rebels. For two weeks after the incident, soldiers checked vehicles entering and leaving the compound.

The Catholic Establishment in El Salvador is subject to the ideological debate and division that has affected the church in Latin America since the evolution of a “theology of liberation” in the 1960s. The doctrine champions the poor and oppressed and has placed its exponents in direct confrontation with the privileged and powerful in countries where widespread poverty coexists with the opulence of a tiny minority.

Seventeen priests and dozens of lay workers identified with liberation theology have been slain in El Salvador since 1977.

Rosa Chavez and his boss, Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas, are outspoken critics of what they see as repression and injustice, though they likewise strongly condemn abuses by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

Government and military officers refer to the two bishops in private as, at best, “naive pawns” of leftist rebels or, at worst, outright communist militants.

Msgr. Romeo Tobar Astorga, bishop of Zacatecoluca and head of the Salvadoran Bishops Conference, is the most visible representative of the conservative, virulently anti-socialist sector of the Salvadoran church.

Late last year, in the wake of the guerrilla offensive, Rivera Damas and Rosa Chavez denounced what they perceived to be official persecution of church workers. Several churches and church dependencies had been raided by troops, and dozens of church workers were arrested under state-of-siege emergency powers and about 20 foreigners working with church-related organizations were expelled.

Rebutting Rivera Damas, Tobar Astorga spoke on the government and armed forces radio network, which all stations were obliged to carry. “There is no persecution of the church,” he said. “The problem is that there are people who use the church as a cover for subversive activities.”

Last year, the armed forces press office included the Catholic Legal Aid office in a list of what it considers guerrilla front groups.

It accused the office of saturating the U.S. Congress and the North American public with criticism and false human rights violations by the Salvadoran army in an effort to provoke a cutoff of U.S. aid.

Washington provides El Salvador more than $1 million a day in economic and military assistance. U.S. military analysts say the liberation front would have won the civil war by the mid-1980s were it not for U.S. aid.

One of the major church-state rubs has resulted from support provided by religious groups for the repatriation from Honduran camps of more than 10,000 Salvadoran refugees since October, 1987. The refugees fled their homes in the north after scorched-earth army sweeps and aerial bombardments in the early 1980s.

The government contends that the Honduran camps were little more than recruiting and resting places for the guerrilla forces.

On Feb. 1, Vice President Francisco Merino visited Leanguera, in the war-torn northeast, where more than 3,000 refugees have returned in recent weeks under the auspices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and with the aid of Catholic and Protestant relief organizations.

Merino sat down at a rustic table in an adobe house--one of the few structures not a bamboo pole and plastic shack--across from representatives of the refugees. He said the visit was a step toward overcoming mutual suspicion between the government and church-supported returnees.

“El Salvador is different today from the way it was nine years ago,” he said. “I’m here to express our goodwill. You may doubt our intentions, and we may still have doubts about yours, but with better communication, we can progress beyond that.”