Aftermath of Four Brutal Murders

By Thomas A. Sancton

The government stonewalls a U.S. investigation

Soldiers wielding automatic rifles patrolled the dusty plaza outside as 14 priests celebrated a requiem Mass in the village church of Chalatenango, El Salvador. Local children, black-veiled peasant women and silver-haired men filled the pews alongside relatives of the deceased. Inside the coffins lay the bodies of two New York nuns, Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke. Along with another U.S. nun, Sister Dorothy Kazel, and a lay worker, Jean Donovan, they had been murdered by right-wing terrorists who regarded their relief activities among the poor as "Communist work."

Even before all the victims had been buried, a three-man U.S. team headed by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William D. Rogers arrived in the strife-torn Central American country to investigate charges that government security forces had taken part in the killings. U.S. economic and military aid, totaling $25 million, was suspended until the matter could be clarified.

While the Rogers mission found nothing to implicate the high military command, there was what the State Department called "circumstantial evidence of possible security force involvement." Among other things, TIME has learned, the still secret U.S. report notes that Salvadoran National Police Chief Carlos Lopez Nuila neglected to put out an "all points alert" after the U.S. embassy told him that the four women were missing. Furthermore, Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia, an influential right-wing member of the government, promised but failed to order an alert even though he was specifically requested to do so by an aide to U.S. Ambassador Robert White.

The day after the murders, according to the report, a priest near the village of Santa Rita Almendros was told by several peasants that they had been ordered by some National Police and local civil guardsmen to bury the bodies of four American women. Informed of this through the office of San Salvador's acting Archbishop Rivera y Damas, Ambassador White drove to the village about 30 miles east of the capital. There the bodies of the victims were found in an unmarked grave.

El Salvador's government seemed curiously unwilling to assist in the investigation. No ballistics tests could be performed, for example, because military doctors refused to recover the bullets or perform autopsies; they claimed not to have the proper surgical face masks. The U.S. team was not allowed to interview potential murder witnesses, including the local justice of the peace, who signed a hasty burial permit and presumably had information about the killings.

Four FBI agents arrived in San Salvador last week to launch a more thorough investigation. After days of stonewalling, the Salvadoran government belatedly named a "high-level civilian and military commission" to "find the guilty people and punish them." But the three military members of the new four-man commission included two close friends of Defense Minister Garcia and a first cousin of Police Chief Lopez Nuila.

Washington's ability to influence the Salvadorans has been hampered by the Carter Administration's lameduck status. Rightists throughout Latin America apparently expect the incoming Reagan government to reverse Carter's human rights policy and aid their fight against leftist rebels. Signals from the Reagan camp have done little to discourage such hopes. A Reagan transition team report, leaked to the press two weeks ago, named White as one of several U.S. envoys who would be replaced because they had acted improperly as "social reformers."

White, 54, a career diplomat, angrily charged the Reagan forces with undercutting his efforts to encourage peaceful reform. Said he: "When civil war breaks out in this country, I hope they get their chance to serve." U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Lawrence Pezzulo similarly accused the Reagan team last week of adding to political tensions.

Meanwhile, the most liberal member of El Salvador's five-man ruling junta, Colonel Adolfo Arnoldo Majano, was removed last week after a 300-to-4 no-confidence vote by his own military officers. Majano had led the coup against Dictator Carlos Humberto Romero in October 1979. He was also an architect of the junta's ambitious land-reform and banking-nationalization programs, which made him a bitter enemy of the right.

After Majano's sacking, leaders of the military and the Christian Democrat Party held round-the-clock negotiating sessions to reshuffle the government. At week's end Christian Democrat Leader Jose Napoleon Duarte emerged as a civilian President, while Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutierrez was made vice president and commander in chief of the armed forces. The existing junta will now act simply as a legislative body. Duarte, a prominent liberal, has been a key moderating force in the junta. Gutierrez has a reputation as a hard-lining conservative.

Whatever course the new government may take, it stands little chance of ending the political violence that has left nearly 9,000 people dead this year. But the Salvadorans at least made peace last week with neighboring Honduras, eleven years after their brief but bloody "soccer war" (so called because its immediate cause was a riotous football match between the two national teams). In a sort of prelude to the official treaty signing, the two national teams met on the soccer field twice last month and, diplomatically enough, traded 2-1 victories. Most Salvadorans seemed to welcome the games and the treaty as symbols of the peace they crave at home, so far in vain.

--By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by James Willwerth/San Salvador

With reporting by James Willwerth/San Salvador

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