No Pardon for Salvador Killers of U.S. Women

The National Guardsmen who raped and killed four American church workers will not be pardoned under a government amnesty program, El Salvador’s Supreme Court ruled in a decision made public Tuesday.

The ruling rejects a request from two of the five convicted killers that they be freed as part of a blanket amnesty sponsored by President Alfredo Cristiani and approved last March by the Legislative Assembly, which is controlled by Cristiani’s right-wing political party.

The Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling that the National Guardsmen who murdered the American church women in 1980 committed a common crime--not a political one--and therefore did not qualify for the amnesty program. The ruling was handed down over the weekend.

Maryknoll nuns Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline nun Dorothy Kazel and lay worker Jean Donovan were shot to death Dec. 2, 1980, after members of the paramilitary National Guard stopped their vehicle at a roadblock. Some of the women were also raped, and their bodies were buried in secret graves.

Guardsmen Jose Roberto Moreno, Francisco Orlando Contreras and three others were convicted in 1984 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. A U.N.-sponsored probe earlier this year of atrocities committed during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war found that the murders were ordered and then covered up by higher-ranking military officers. No officer was ever charged in the case, however.

The murders outraged public opinion worldwide and helped to focus attention on the abysmal state of human rights in El Salvador. Eight months earlier, a death squad had shot and killed Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero as he said Mass.

Shortly after the release of the U.N. report on atrocities, which put most of the blame on state security forces, Cristiani’s government pushed through the amnesty. His administration said the program was necessary to heal the wounds of the war, which ended last year in peace accords brokered by the United Nations.

The amnesty plan created a furor among church officials, human rights groups and the political opposition, who said war criminals ought to be held accountable.

“Crimes like this (the murder of the churchwomen) and others against humanity cannot be amnestied,” Salvadoran human rights activist Maria Julia Hernandez said Tuesday.

Under the amnesty, two army officers convicted in the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter were released from prison after serving a little more than a year for the crimes.

U.S. officials had pressured the Salvadoran government to exempt the case of the churchwomen from the amnesty.