A Survivor’s Story : El Salvador: Father Jon de Cortina recounts the still unsolved murders of his Jesuit brethren on mission in U.S.

In an address last Friday to a hastily assembled group of priests and rabbis at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church in Encino, the best-known of the surviving Jesuits of El Salvador provided grim, previously unreported details about the murders that may have changed the course of the war in El Salvador.

Born in Spain, but an El Salvador citizen and resident of that country for most of his adult life, Father Jon de Cortina has become the point man in a dialogue that the Jesuits’ enemies clearly want halted.

Six Jesuits were murdered during the Marxist FMLN guerrilla offensive last November, half of the Jesuit faculty of the tiny University of Central America in San Salvador. Though William Walker, U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, initially suggested they had been slain by the FMLN, Alfredo Cristiani, president of El Salvador, later admitted the Salvadoran army was the principal suspect. An investigation, faulted by many as a cover-up in the making, has been in progress for months.

Speaking to a Times reporter after his address, Cortina--slender, soft-spoken, an intellectual more at ease with precise, even elegant, distinctions than with confrontational rhetoric--says that he expects the killers to go unpunished because El Salvador “is effectively without civilian government.” Two days before the slaughter, he says by way of explanation, a group of army officers had arrived, unannounced, at the Jesuit residence. Such intrusions were nothing new. What was new was that, this time, the intruders had only one question: They wanted to know which priest slept where.

The surviving Jesuits have pieced together a chronology of the murder by talking to neighbors who, though housebound because of the army-imposed curfew, could hear a great deal. None of these people are expected to testify, however, and, Cortina says, the Jesuits do not wish them to do so: The cost could be too great.

The house where the murders occurred, though still habitable, is empty because, for the Jesuits who might move in, “the emotional associations are simply too powerful to endure.” The killers incinerated all the priests’ research archives and audiovisual equipment--with a flamethrower, it is speculated, because “the heat was so intense that it melted glass.” They sprayed the Jesuits’ house and cars with bullets. Some time before leaving, “they put a bullet through the heart of a portrait of Oscar Romero,” the slain archbishop of San Salvador.

Cortina explains that the two women slain that night, the Jesuits’ cook and her daughter, had been taken in, ironically, for safety during the guerrilla offensive. They had not been in residence during the army’s scouting visit two days earlier. According to a soldier who has defected and is now in hiding, Cortina adds, the killers telephoned headquarters about the women and received explicit instructions to kill them.

Where will the investigation lead? “The intellectual authors of this crime will never be punished,” Cortina says, for if they were, “a chain reaction of mutual recriminations would result that could destroy the ruling structure of the country.”

Asked to comment on a proposal by House Democrats to halt one-half of U.S. aid to El Salvador but preserve the remaining half so long as President Bush finds the Salvadoran government is making a good-faith effort to bring the killers to justice, Cortina shrugs. For several years during the previous administration, he recalls, aid was made contingent on then-President Reagan’s certification, every six months, that the Salvadoran government was making good-faith efforts to restrain human-rights abuses by the army. “The certification never failed to come,” he says, but the abuses continued. “Some of the very worst of the massacres were during that period.”

He adds that the Salvadoran army has recently established its own bank. “Neither the U.S. government, I fear, nor the government of El Salvador knows whether the aid money is even staying in the country.”

The slain Jesuits have been replaced, in one sense. Worldwide, more than 200 Jesuits offered to take their places, and half a dozen of the volunteers have now been accepted. A labor of mediation, however, has been hideously disrupted.

The slain men had been prominent in San Salvador, functioning as urbane bridges between the ruling Arena party and the FMLN. Indeed, the cordiality between Ignacio Ellacuria, the slain head of the university, and President Alfredo Cristiani was such that even after the FMLN offensive last November, Cortina says, Ellacuria saw no reason to evacuate his men. He was confident Cristiani could protect them.

Cortina himself, until the slaughter forced him into the role of spokesman, preferred to build another kind of bridge. He is a practicing as well as a teaching engineer, less in his element barnstorming across the United States than piloting a Jeep across the mountain trails of rural Chalatenango. In parts of rural El Salvador, an American priest reports, Cortina’s death-defying manner at the wheel is a minor legend. The priest-engineer was in Chalatenango on El Salvador’s night of the long knives.

Not that he was or is safe in Chalatenango. The Salvadoran army, which would turn the remote, mountainous province into a free-fire zone in its war on the FMLN guerrillas, has seen him frustrate its strategy by leading peasants back from government-imposed exile in Honduras to their abandoned homes and fields. The army was prepared to destroy Chalatenango to save it. Jon de Cortina was not, and his 20-city tour of the United States is in part a fund-raising tour for his embattled campesinos.

A local Salvadoran jokes of Cortina’s 20-city U.S. tour: “He’ll have to go back to El Salvador for a rest!”

“For arrest?” Cortina quips dryly. The question--Cortina as a marked man--has been heavy in the air. Laughter clears the air, at least for a moment. The friend then recalls a Cortina quip on another occasion that may have saved them both from arrest.

“When I’m talking to the army,” Cortina smiles, “I begin every conversation with the assumption that, of course, they are right and I am wrong. And then we go on from there.” The smile, on a cleric with a faint resemblance to Alec Guinness, is one Graham Greene might appreciate, or Robert Stone.

Some of Cortina’s remarks approach fatalism. “We touched the idols of death, and the idols answered back,” he says. He adds: “They haven’t had enough yet.” And yet he claims the radicalism that cost his brethren their lives was not Marxism of any kind but simply radical hope, and he remains radically hopeful.

The intervention of U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar in El Salvador has enhanced the prospect of genuine negotiations, he says. The slaying of the Jesuits may have been inevitable, given the social structure of the country, he says, and the suppression of any serious investigation of the slayings may be consistent with the same structure, and yet he sees a striking benefit: “The church has been trying to make a ‘preferential option’ for the poor, but since these deaths, I think the poor are making a ‘preferential option’ for the church.” Finally, if against all likelihood the killers are brought to justice, “it will be a proof that serious dialogue is beginning.”

Meanwhile, the spokesman-in-spite-of-himself, the engineer with the steady gaze and the thin smile, is on his way back to El Salvador, back to Chalatenango. There is a half-built bridge waiting there. He wants to finish it.