Headline News
USF to commemorate 20th anniversary of El Salvador’s Jesuits Massacre
November 11th, 2009
By Rick DelVecchio
A Nov. 16 conference and Mass at St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the murders of six Jesuit priests and their cook and daughter during the civil war in El Salvador.
Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes announced in early November that the priests would receive the National Order of Jose Matias Delgado awards, the country’s highest honor, on Nov. 16, the 20th anniversary of the killings. Funes said the awards would be presented as a “public act of atonement” for mistakes by past governments.
The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, approved a resolution honoring “these eight spiritual, courageous and generous priests, educators and laywomen” and urging “the people of the United States, academic institutions and religious congregations to participate in local, national and international” commemorations of the anniversary.
Events were scheduled in November at the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States, and at other sites around the world.
USF’s Stand 4 Conference, sponsored by the University Ministry, will open at 10:30 a.m. with a Mass celebrated by USF President Father Stephen Privett, SJ. Jesuit Father Kevin Burke, the university’s academic dean and acting president of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, will give the keynote address at 12:30 p.m.
Three one-hour workshops, on lobbying and advocacy, civil rights and litigation, are scheduled for 1:45 p.m.
A representative from The Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good will teach strategies for advocacy and effective lobbying techniques.
Ana Perez of the Salvadoran exile and refugee group CARACEN will hold a session about the group’s support for Salvadorans affected by the unrest both then and now. One of the effects is El Salvador’s gang violence, which Kique Bazan, USF’s associate director of the University Ministry, sees as a legacy of the civil war.
“There have always been gangs in El Salvador,” he said. “The violence of gangs is because of the civil war and because of the trauma these families lived. In the U.S. they joined the gangs because they didn’t find the structures to be who they were.”
Lindsay Bourne, a legal fellow at the Center for Justice and Accountablility, will discuss pending legal action against the perpetrators of the atrocity so notorious it has its own historical title: the Jesuits Massacre. A year ago, the center and the Spanish Association for Human Rights jointly filed a criminal case in Madrid against 14 former Salvadoran military officials, who were formally charged the following January with crimes against humanity and state terrorism. The judge in the case reserved the right to indict former Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani later in the investigation.
The day will close at 6 with a candlelight vigil. The vigil will begin in the church and move up the steps of Lone Mountain to the university’s permanent memorial for one of the slain Jesuits, Father Ignacio Martín-Baró. There, the marchers will hammer a white cross in the ground for each of the eight victims.
The victims were shot on the morning of Nov. 16, 1989, by armed men who burst into the Jesuit residence at the University of Central America. The Jesuits had been under threat because of their work to promote social justice and give voice to the most vulnerable Salvadorans caught in an internal conflict that would kill 75,000 and displace hundreds of thousands.
The suit in the Spanish court blames a U.S-trained counter-insurgency unit, the Atalactl Battalion, for carrying out the killings. That unit also is accused of having a major role in the massacre of hundreds of innocent people in December 1981 in the village of El Mozote during an operation against a rebel camp and training center.
High military officials ordered the assassination of the UCA rector, Father Ignacio Ellacuría Bescoetxea, an outspoken critic of the war, and the elimination of all witnesses, according to the suit. They covered up the crime to make it appear as if it were the work of rebels.
“Why are the Jesuit martyrs still relevant today?” asked Jesuit Father Donal Godfrey, executive director of the University Ministry. “For the students here, 20 years is a long time. Why would something that happened before they were born be relevant today? Because the saints outlive the Gospel and they have a vision of the Gospel as real today as it was then.”
Father Godfrey was studying for the priesthood in Ireland when the atrocity happened. He recalls the impact the event had on him personally and politically throughout Ireland, where a permanent memorial was placed in a Dublin garden.
“It’s been part of my vocation ever since,” Father Godfrey said.
Father Privett worked with refugees in El Salvador for nine months in 1988. At that point El Salvador’s military-backed government, supported by the United States, was eight years into its fight with militias that had risen up against the ruling oligarchy to demand a more just government. Caught in the conflict were thousands of innocent campesinos.
“For the first time I was working in a developing country where the U.S. influence was entirely negative,” Father Privett recalled, adding that two-thirds of the world looks like El Salvador. “When I returned to university I returned with a much greater sense of responsibility to the poor.”
Father Privett sees the atrocity against the Jesuits as one part of a much larger tragedy.
“They are six of about 75,000,” he said. “It’s noteworthy that when the people suffered, the priests suffered. They did not absolve themselves from the struggle for justice and dignity.” Father Privett said the Jesuits’ perseverance in their academic work despite threats to silence them – their residence was bombed 18 times – shows what a university can do in a very difficult context.
“These are academics who devoted their considerable knowledge base and skill set to do the research and collect the data, and that told the truth about the situation El Salvador,” he said. “The truth was that the enemy was poverty and repression, not communism. They also revealed the tragedy of American foreign policy at that time, the havoc that was wreaked by uninformed people.”
The Jesuits viewed their mission not as partisan but as trying to find the truth.
“The truth was difficult for the elite in El Salvador, and it was virtually impossible for the American administration to hear, but they kept at it,” Father Privett said. “They’re very important to us as Jesuits, as university people and just as human beings.
“We need to keep telling the story,” he said. “We need to keep them in our memory so they can shape who we are.”
To attend one of the workshops, contact Paul McWilliams at pmcwilliams@usf.ca.edu.
Details of the case against the alleged killers are available at www.cja.org/cases/jesuits.shtml.
From November 13, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
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