Salvador Killers of 4 U.S. Women Likely to Go Free

In a disturbing twist to one of the most publicized, controversial cases linked with the long and costly U.S. involvement in Central America’s civil wars, five soldiers convicted of killing four American religious women in 1980 will be freed from prison any day now, judicial sources said Wednesday.

The soldiers are eligible for parole under the provisions of a Salvadoran penal code, which took effect Monday, that lets prisoners with good conduct be released after completing half their sentences.

“It is just a formality,” a judicial source said of the paperwork that must be processed before the convicted killers are released.

The men have served 17 years of their 30-year sentences and are considered model prisoners, making their release practically certain, legal and judicial sources say. They were convicted in 1984 but received credit for time served since their arrest in 1981. “They want their freedom,” said Delmy de Zuniga, the public defender assigned to two of the soldiers.

They do not deserve it, critics replied Wednesday.

“This sends a message that impunity continues and that the institutions of the state are symbolic, promotional or empty and that the truth does not exist,” Henry Campos, a law professor at the University of Central America, said of the pending early release of the five men.

The four soldiers and a subsergeant were convicted of abducting and murdering Ita Ford, Maura Clark, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan as they left the international airport in El Salvador on Dec. 2, 1980. The victims “were taken to an isolated place and killed with shots at short range,” a United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission found in 1993.

While an estimated 70,000 Salvadorans died and hundreds of thousands were made refugees by this nation’s 12-year civil war, and these killings occurred at a time when human rights violations were rampant here, the murders of the four religious women became the focus of the U.S. debate about American involvement in Central America.

Those opposed to then-President Reagan’s policy of active, extensive U.S. engagement in Central America, especially in El Salvador, blamed what they said was an autocratic, corrupt regime for the killings and said they showed why the United States should not support the civilian-military government then in power.

But the Reagan administration, which would pour an estimated $3 billion into its campaign here, rejected that view and said the murders demonstrated the endemic violence, which it blamed on communism and said threatened hemispheric peace.

The case has long sparked bitter debate as to whether the killings were ordered by high Salvadoran military officials.

Religious groups then were active in documenting human rights abuses. Ford and Clark, who were nuns, worked in the poor, remote province of Chalatenango, which then was a war zone.

U.S. and Salvadoran authorities have insisted that the men acted on their own in killing the American women.

But the Truth Commission concluded that the soldiers had been following orders.

No one of higher rank, however, has been arrested in the case.

The commission also found that high-ranking military officers knew that the soldiers were ordered to commit the murders and engaged in a cover-up. One such officer identified in the report is Col. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, the former head of the National Guard, who now lives in Florida.

Recently, four of the soldiers told a New York-based human rights group that Luis Antonio Colindres Aleman, the subsergeant, had told them that the killings were ordered by superiors. Colindres Aleman has repeatedly refused to discuss the case.

“They want out, and in exchange, they are threatening to talk,” said Campos, the law professor.

Such statements have led to calls to reopen the case. But Salvadoran Atty. Gen. Manuel Cordova said that the statute of limitations has run out and that he will not initiate further prosecutions in the murders.

In his Sunday homily, San Salvador Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle called for reopening an investigation because “the world has the right to know the historic truth.”

“Whether [this] should be done by the judicial system, whether the statute of limitations has run out or amnesty takes effect is a technical legal problem,” he said, “that does not diminish in the least the need for a historic investigation.”

As for public defender Zuniga, she said she plans to petition for her clients’ release before the end of the month.

Diego Aleman of The Times’ San Salvador Bureau contributed to this report.