Salvadorans Free 2 Killers of American Nuns

Sparking new controversy in one of the most publicized cases in the prolonged, costly U.S. involvement in Central America’s civil wars, Salvadoran authorities on Tuesday authorized the parole of three of the five soldiers convicted of killing four American religious women in 1980.

Luis Antonio Colindres, the sub-segeant who first confessed to the slayings, and Jose Roberto Moreno Canjura walked free after serving 17 years of their 30-year murder sentences.

A warden at another prison refused to release Daniel Canales--who has said repeatedly that the soldiers were ordered by superiors to kill the women--until today. “I do not know why he has taken this attitude,” the prisoner’s wife, Vidaura, said of the warden.

The former soldiers are paroled under a new penal code that allows prisoners with good-conduct records to be released after completing half their sentences. The other two former guardsmen caused trouble in prison and were ineligible for parole.

Reports that the prisoners were due for release had renewed debate over the case in both the United States and El Salvador. Prosecutors here tried to keep the men in prison, pursuing appeals for three months. Judicial employees, including the judge who presided in the case, personally delivered the parole orders to the prisons where the men have been held.

“We would be very disappointed by the release of these men,” said U.S. State Department spokesman Lee McClenny as the parole orders were being delivered. “The murders occurred almost 18 years ago, but time has not diminished the brutality of the acts or the trauma they have caused.”

Ita Ford, Maura Clark and Dorothy Kazel--all nuns--and lay worker Jean Donovan were abducted as they left El Salvador’s international airport on Dec. 2, 1980. They were “taken to an isolated place and killed with shots at short range,” a U.N.-sponsored commission found in 1993.

Religious groups were among the few organizations active in documenting human rights abuses, and Clark and Ford worked in the poor, isolated province of Chalatenango, which was a war zone.

The slayings, which occurred at the beginning of the 12-year civil war, became the focus of the debate about U.S. cooperation with a military that routinely violated human rights. For those who later opposed President Reagan’s policy of active involvement in El Salvador, the killings proved that the corrupt civilian-military regime then in power either would not or could not control the armed forces.

Opponents also accused U.S. officials of not delving deeply enough into whether high-ranking officers were behind the killings so they could cover up the brutality that U.S. tax dollars were supporting. Even after the slayings, the U.S. went on to pour an estimated $3 billion into a war that cost more than 70,000 lives and drove one in five Salvadorans--1 million people--into exile, many to Southern California.

Six years after the war ended with a peace agreement, the slayings and the roles of U.S. and Salvadoran officials in investigating them have remained controversial. The 1993 U.N. report concluded that higher-ups had ordered the slayings, then plotted to cover up their involvement. The report accuses Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, a colonel at the time of the slayings, of directing the cover-up. He went on to become a general and a defense minister who worked closely with U.S. authorities. He moved to Florida at the end of the war and still lives there.

State Department reports declassified last month stated that as early as 1985, El Salvador’s then-defense minister had told Thomas R. Pickering, at the time U.S. ambassador here, that he suspected high military officials were involved. Still, U.S. officials continued to insist that the soldiers acted on their own in committing the killings.

While lawyers for the women’s families and the Roman Catholic Church legal office here have insisted that enough evidence exists to reopen the case, Salvadoran prosecutors say that the statute of limitations expired seven years ago and that the case will remain closed. Church officials were on a spiritual retreat Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.