October 28, 2003
Authentic Americans
US Martyrs Pose Questions for Negroponte
By TONI SOLO
US nuns murdered in El Salvador 4
In 1981, a couple of decades before Rachel Corrie was murdered, the bodies of four women were found in a shallow grave in a rural district not far from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital. They had been raped and shot dead by members of the Salvadoran army on the orders of senior officers. In the context of the time, the atrocity would hardly have merited reporting. But the women were United States citizens. Two were religious sisters of the New York based Maryknoll order, Ita Ford and Maureen Clarke. One was an Ursuline Sister, Dorothy Kazel, the fourth a lay missioner, Jean Donovan. By virtue of their nationality, the story did make the news, just--the back page of the New York Times, to that paper's eternal shame.
Those four women had helped defend Salvadorans from the terror unleashed against their own people by the Salvadoran government with support from the United States administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. They gave their lives working alongside vulnerable people and communities in El Salvador. The murders followed the assassination in 1980 of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. The women's deaths were manipulated by the US government and its ever-pliant news media. The full facts took years to emerge. US ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, falsely accused the women of having supported the Salvadoran armed opposition, the FMLN. In fact, the four women were passionate advocates of non-violence, accompanying the rural villagers they served while caught up in a violent civil war.
Ambassador Kirkpatrick's statements on the case of the four women were to be expected from an unrepentant supporter of the bloodthirsty Argentinian military dictatorship. Her successor at the UN was Vernon Walters, former deputy director of the CIA, co-organiser of the continent wide terrorist blueprint Plan Condor and promoter of Ronald Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua. In 1986 Vernon Walters threw in the face of the UN his government's rejection of the International Court of Justice verdict convicting the US of terrorism against Nicaragua.
Kirkpatrick's and Walters' apologetics for mass murder helped John Negroponte, then US ambassador to Honduras, cover up his support for the systematic forced disappearances used to destroy Honduran civilian opposition to the presence of Contra bases in their country. Thomas Pickering, US ambassador to El Salvador at the time, also gave misleading information on local army and paramilitary murders, probably an essential qualification for his subsequent posting in 1989 as US ambassador to the UN, taking over from Vernon Walters.
Jean Kirkpatrick, Vernon Walters, Thomas Pickering, John Negroponte and other US government representatives sent clear signals that the local military in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were to be allowed a free hand by the United States government to murder tens of thousands of civilians and anyone who spoke out against the slaughter. Perhaps the defining climax to the sickening murder campaign came in 1989 when the Salvadoran army killed six Jesuit academics and two of their domestic staff at the University of Central America in San Salvador. These crimes were made possible because the United States government consistently tried to conceal its institutional role in funding, training and supporting the military and paramilitary perpetrators. The Iran-Contra scandal was the culmination of that sustained program of regional deceit
http://www.counterpunch.org/solo10282003.html
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