Beautiful Horizons

Failing to See the Big Picture

I'm thrilled to see Bishop Oscar Romero receiving the attention and respect he deserves on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. I'm especially gratified to see at long last, the government of El Salvador sharing in that recognition.

Unfortunately, the likes of Bishop Romero are getting harder to find in the Roman Catholic Church. I write this as a regular mass-attending Roman Catholic and am simply disgusted by the Vatican's response to the continually unfolding scandals that are spreading across Europe, to the point where the official response is to smear the media reporting on the matter or this bit of tu quoque nonsense:

Earlier in the week, New York's archbishop, Timothy Dolan, used his blog to dismiss the New York Times' reports and defend the pontiff's record by arguing that authorities outside the church also are culpable. Stories about sexual abuse by priests were "fair" if "unending," he wrote. But he condemned the media for portraying child sexual abuse "as a tragedy unique to the church alone. That, of course, is malarkey."

Sadly, this latest everybody-is-responsible-so-nobody-is-to-blame defense is of a piece with a little-noticed section of Benedict's letter to the Irish church in which he seemed to blame the crisis, in part, on "new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society."

Let me dumb this down for the hierarchy at the Vatican: you are hemorrhaging members of your flock. You are desperate to recruit new priests. Without parishioners, you have no church. You're men first and right now, you appear to be a bunch of weak man busily covering your glutei to protect yourselves. Shame on you.

Slowly and Steadily Justice Marches On

Spain once again appears to be the court of last resort for justice against perpetrators of crimes against humanity and those who seek to cover them up:

Rights groups asked a Spanish court on Thursday to indict a former president of El Salvador and 14 ex-officials over the massacre of six Jesuit priests and two others during the Central American country's 1980-92 civil war.

The two groups — the Spanish Association for Human Rights and California's Center for Justice and Accountability — filed the lawsuit accusing former Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani Burkard of covering up the 1989 killing of the Jesuits, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter.

The lawsuit also seeks charges against the country's former defense minister, Rafael Humberto Lario, saying he was present at the meeting at which the massacre was ordered, the groups said.

This was an exceptionally vile crime. The rector of the University of Central America and five of his colleagues, some of whom, like him, were born in Spain as well as their housekeeper and her teenage daughter were murdered after having been tortured. Some of the soldiers involved in the massacre were trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia.

Cristiani for his part was a longtime member of the ARENA party, the rightwing party founded by the truly odious, friend of Jesse Helms, Roberto D'Aubuisson, who he succeeded as party head. D'Aubuisson was behind the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and numerous other atrocities.

And what were these priest killed for? For having the temerity to say enough to the violence and suffering that had permeated their society at the time:

Ignacio Martin-Baro, another slain Jesuit, spoke at the time about the chilling effect of the long-running Salvadoran civil war.

"We have become used to violence," Martin-Baro said. "We have become used to living in a very dangerous world. We have learned to live, accepting death, extraordinary abnormal death into our lives."

As the article notes, the net effect of this will probably be for Cristiani to be forced to stay in El Salvador for fear of arrest should he travel abroad. It will also mark him as a pariah. It's imperfect justice, but it's better than no justice.

Sunday Happy Ending Post

Read this from the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Given the Reagan administration's policy of denying asylum applications to those fleeing the regimes he supported in Central America, there is little doubt in my mind that Dale Maharidge's uncharacteristic act as a journalist saved lives. In addition, he helped a young woman become a productive US citizen.

I wish that would make some of the knees stop jerking.

Stealing Babies

Read this article in Thursday's New York Times and try to keep your eyes dry.

Now read Mark Kleiman's excellent comments on the same article and try to keep your rage at the continued hagiography of Ronald Reagan in check.

Passing of a Brave Woman

Rufina Amaya, the sole survivor and, consequently, the sole witness to the El Mozote Massacre, died last Tuesday from a stroke at the age of 64. There's very little more than I can say about this horrific incident that I haven't already said, but here's how badly Ms. Amaya suffered:

Mass murder began the next morning. People were pulled from their beds before sunrise and divided into three groups. Men were beheaded; some women were raped. The first child killed was tossed in the air and bayoneted.

Mrs. Amaya said at the time in an interview with The Times that she heard her son scream: “Mama, they’re killing me. They’ve killed my sister. They’re going to kill me.”

She escaped when she realized nobody was directly watching her. She quickly huddled among pine and crabapple trees behind her house.

Her husband, Domingo Claros, a 29-year-old woodcutter, was killed; so were her son Cristino, 9, and her daughters María Dolores, 5; María Lilian, 3, and María Isabel, 8 months.

Having gained a notoriety she never wanted, I hope that now she may get a measure of peace.

Horrifying

How hideous was the civil war in El Salvador? How horrendously brutal were the government players? This brutal:

Jose Wilfredo Salgado says he collected baby skulls as trophies in the 1980s, when he fought as a government soldier in El Salvador's civil war. They worked well as candleholders, he recalls, and better as good-luck charms.

In the most barbaric chapters of a conflict that cost more than 75,000 lives, he enthusiastically embraced the scorched-earth tactics of his army bosses, even massacres of children, the elderly, the sick — entire villages. It was all in the name of beating back communism, Salgado, now the mayor of San Miguel, said he remembers being told.

As the article goes on to say, the war was a grand and horrific waste of lives, money and resources:

"We soldiers were tricked — they told us the threat was communism," Salgado said "But I look back and realize those were not communists out there that we were fighting — we were just poor country people killing poor country people."

Salgado said he once thought that the guerrillas dreamed of communism, but now that those same men are his colleagues in business and politics, he is learning that they wanted what he wanted: prosperity, a chance to move up in the world, freedom from repression.

The country is still racked by violence, still scarred by corruption. For some the question remains: Was it all worth it?

"We gave our blood, we killed our friends and, in the end, things are still bad," said Salgado. "Look at all this poverty, and look how the wealth is concentrated in just a few hands."

In addition, 25-34% of the population lives outside of the country. Still believe US policy there was a "fabulous achievement," Elliott Abrams?

El Mozote - 25 Years Later

Rufina could not see the children; she could only hear their cries as the soldiers waded into them, slashing some with their machetes, crushing the skulls of others with the butts of their rifles. Many others -- the youngest children, most below      the age of twelve -- the soldiers herded from the house of Alfredo Márquez across the street to the sacristy, pushing them, crying and screaming, into the dark tiny room.  There the soldiers raised their M16s and emptied their magazines into the roomful of children.

Not all the children of El Mozote died at the sacristy. A young man now known as Chepe Mozote told me that when the townspeople were forced to assemble on the plaza that evening he and his little brother had been left behind in their house, on the outskirts of the hamlet, near the school. By the next morning, Chepe had heard plenty of shooting; his mother had not returned. "About six o'clock, around ten soldiers in camouflage uniforms came to the house," Chepe says. "They asked me where my mother was. I told them she had gone to the plaza the night before. I asked them if I could see my mother, and they said I couldn't but I should come with them to the playing field" -- near the school. "They said when we got there they would explain where my mother was."

Carrying his little brother, Chepe went with the soldiers and walked along with them as they searched house to house. "We found maybe fifteen kids," he says, "and then they took us all to the playing field. On the way, I heard shooting and I saw some dead bodies, maybe five old people." When they reached  the playing field, "there were maybe thirty children," he says. "The soldiers were putting ropes on the trees. I was seven years old, and I didn't really understand what was happening until I saw one of the soldiers take a kid he had been carrying -- the kid was maybe three  years old -- throw him in the air, and stab him with a bayonet.

"They slit some of the kids' throats, and many they hanged from the tree. All of us were crying now, but we were their prisoners -- there was nothing we could do. The soldiers kept telling us, 'You are guerrillas and this is justice. This is justice.' Finally, there were only three of us left. I watched them hang my brother. He was two years old. I could see I was going to be killed soon, and I thought it would be better to die running, so I ran. I slipped through the soldiers and dived into the bushes. They fired into the bushes, but none of their bullets hit me."

Lying amid the maguey that night, Rufina Amaya heard the chorus of screams dwindle to a few voices, and those grew weaker and weaker and finally ceased. She heard the officers order that fire be put to the house of Alfredo Márquez and the church and the sacristy, and from the maguey she saw the flames rise and then she heard faint cries start up again inside the buildings and the short bursts of gunfire finishing off a few wounded, who had been forced by the flames to reveal that they were still alive.

Soon the only sounds were those which trickled down from the hills -- laughter, intermittent screams, a few shots. On La Cruz, soldiers were raping the young girls who were left. On El Chingo and El Pinalito, other soldiers busied themselves making camp. Down in the hamlet, a few troops walked about here and there, patrolling. Not far from the still burning house of Israel Márquez, two soldiers halted suddenly, and one of them pointed to the patch of maguey. He lowered his rifle and fired, and after a moment his companion fired, too. In the patch of brush, the stream of bullets sent a dark-green rain of maguey shreds fluttering to the earth.  Then the soldiers charged forward and began poking among the weeds.

- from The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner.

Today marks twenty-five years that more than 733 men, women and children were savagely murdered by Salvadoran troops in a massacre that the Reagan administration, the Wall Street Journal and the New York  Times tried to deny ever took place. A good description of the backlash can be found here.

Bones do not lie, however, and in 1992 an Argentine forensic team began excavations on the site of the village once known as El Mozote, accounting for the remains of at least 200 victims. May they all rest in peace.

A. M. Rosenthal and Raymond Bonner

With all the warm and fuzzy comments about A. M. Rosenthal making the rounds, I'm glad to see that Jack Shafer has stripped away some of the myths.

Rosentahl's treatment of Raymond Bonner regarding Bonner's reporting of the El Mozote Massacre. was beneath contempt. Mark Danner's account of this is worth reading here. I've never seen any reason to believe that Rosenthal's removal of Bonner from El Slavador was anything less than Rosenthal's disdain for Bonner's reporting of the events; reporting which turned out to be absolutely true.

As for Rosenthal, I've never seen anything in which he acknowledged that Bonner was right. Of course the real beauty of coming up with a patently false reason for what Rosenthal did to Bonner  means that you don't have to acknowledge that you were wrong.

Apparently that was the kind of man Rosenthal was. Rest in peace.

A Small Measure of Justice

Another torturer being made to answer for his crimes:

A federal jury in Memphis yesterday found a former military colonel from El Salvador responsible for crimes against humanity during that country's civil war in the 1980's and ordered him to pay $6 million in damages.

The nine-member jury found that the colonel, Nicolás Carranza, had "command responsibility" for the torture of a Salvadoran who was forced to confess falsely to killing an American military adviser, Lt. Cmdr. Albert Schaufelberger, in 1983.

Colonel Carranza was the vice minister of defense, El Salvador's second-highest military commander, from 1979 to 1981, and in 1983 he was head of the Treasury Police, the most notoriously violent of the country's security forces. 

I always find it amazing when these ex-military people make claims or insinuations that they did not exert control over their subordinates:

Mr. Carranza, 72, testified that he served under the minister of defense and had no independent authority to order torture or killings. He said he made many efforts to train and discipline the forces under his control. "I tried to do my best," he said.

Her goes on to say that the "only stain" on his career was his colloboration with the CIA. As opposed to his inability to exert command control over his subordinates, assuming that his rather self-serving defense is anything other than pernicious nonsense.

The case was brought by the Center for Justice and Accountability. Go check them out; they're doing great work.

Romero - A Remembrance

The Heretik has a touching post about Oscar Romero, a man the likes of whom we need today.