Guardsmen found guilty

Press, 26 May 1984, Page 11

Guardsmen found guilty

NZPA-Reuter San Salvador A guilty verdict against five former National Guardsmen charged with the murder of four American churchwomen was expected to ease the way for more United States military aid to embattled El Salvador, diplomatic and political sources said today. The killings of the four Catholic missionaries in December, 1980. outraged public opinion in the United States and a long delay in bringing suspects to trial contributed to a hold-up in aid to the country’s Army, which is locked in a 4 1 /z > year war with Left-wing guerrillas. Sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clark, and Dorothy Kazel, and a lay worker, Jean Donovan, were killed on December 2, 1980. The prosecution said that the five Guardsmen had abducted the women on their way into San Salvador, the capital, from the international airport and killed them, suspecting they were subversives. Their bullet-riddled

bodies, some showing signs of sexual abuse, were discovered two days later in shallow graves near the central Salvadorean town of Zacatecoluca — where the trial was held. Although eight Americans have been killed in El Salvador’s strife, and thousands more Salvadoreans have been killed in equally brutal fashion by death squads, none made such an impact in the United States as the death of the missionaries, who had no apparent connections with politics. No-one has been brought to trial for the other killings although two former National Guard corporals have been charged with the killings, in January, 1981, of Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman, two unionists, and their Salvadorean contact, Jose Rodolfo Viera. Two of the missionaries were members of the United States-based Maryknoll Sisters and at the time of the killings a statement from the order said that all the evidence pointed to deliberate assassination by the

National Guard or Government forces. When yesterday’s verdict was announced, a Maryknoll observer at the trial, Sister Helene O’Sullivan, said that this was “only the first phase. We will now pursue investigations of a cover-up and high involvement.” The verdict, coupled with pledges made in Washington this week by El Salvador’s President-elect, Jose Napoleon Duarte, that he would curb the death squads, was bound to please the United States Congress, which had conditioned aid to El Salvador on an improvement in human rights, the sources said. Mr Duarte, who will take over as President on June 2 (New Zealand time), told reporters in Washington that he had asked military commanders to transfer Colonel Nicolas Carranza, head of the Salvadorean Treasury Police, one of three security forces. Colonel Carranza was included in a group of several senior Salvadorean military officials whom the United States Embassy in San Sal-

vador had wanted removed from the country because of alleged links with the death squads. When the killings of the missionaries were revealed, the outgoing American President, Jimmy Carter, ordered an immediate suspension of all military and financial aid to El Salvador. But before he handed over to Mr Reagan in January, 1981, the embargo was lifted in the face of a threat of an all-out insurgent offensive against El Salvador’s fragile civilian-military Government. Three years of investigation into the killings followed, with the help of United States Federal Bureau of Investigation agents specially sent to advise Salvadorean authorities. In spite of the arrest of the five Guardsmen in November, 1982, their trial was delayed partly by El Salvador’s ponderous legal system, but complaints in the United States said that the Salvadorean inquiry had been ineffective and halfhearted.