Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [55]
Archbishop Oscar Arnolfo Romero, murdered in El Salvador on
March 24, 1980:
“Archbishop Romero was killed by a sniper who got out of a red car, apparently stood just inside the door of the Chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital, fired a single shot at the prelate and fled. The bullet struck the archbishop in the heart, according to a doctor at the hospital where the prelate was taken” (Mar. 25, 1980). Note: There was no arrest or trial.
María Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, secretary of the Mutual Support Group,
murdered in Guatemala on April 4, 1985:
“The body of the secretary of the Support Group for Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala was found Friday in a ravine nine miles south of Guatemala City, according to a spokesman for the group. The bodies of her brother and young son were also in the car” (Apr. 7, 1985, p. 5).* Note: There was no arrest or trial.
Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kasel, and Maura Clarke, four
American women murdered in El Salvador, December 4, 1980:
(1) Account at the finding of the bodies: “Witnesses who found the grave said it was about five feet deep. One woman had been shot in the face, another in the breast. Two of the women were found with their blood-stained underpants around their ankles” (Dec. 5, 1980).*
(2) Account at the trial of the murderers: No description was given, although medical testimony was presented to the court; see text.
* For details that were not presented in this account, see the accompanying text.
The murder of one of the seventy-two, Father Rutilio Grande, was an important landmark in the escalation of violence in El Salvador and in its effect on the newly appointed conservative archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero. Rutilio Grande was a Jesuit, the pastor of Aguilares, and a progressive who helped organize peasants in self-help groups. He was strongly opposed by the local landlords, police, and military commanders, but he was a national figure in the Salvadoran church and was a friend of the archbishop. Rutilio Grande was shot to death, along with a teenager and a seventy-two-year-old peasant, while on his way to Mass on March 12, 1977. According to a church autopsy, the bullets that riddled the priest were of the same caliber as the Manzer guns used by the police. “By ‘coincidence,’ all telephone communications in the area were cut off within an hour of the triple assassination. Police patrols normally active in the region mysteriously disappeared.”13 Archbishop Romero wrote to the president of El Salvador, Arturo Armando Molina, urging a thorough investigation, which was promised. A week later, the church having established that it was probably police bullets that had killed the three victims, Romero wrote a harsher letter to Molina, noting the absence of a promised official report and pointing out that comments, “many of them unfavorable to your government,” have been made. With continued inaction, Romero threatened to refuse church participation in any official government event unless the murders were investigated and the killers brought to justice. Romero’s biographer writes:
Six weeks later, the lawyer chosen by Romero to follow the case reported “an embarrassing and clear indifference toward the investigation on the part of state organizations.” A suspect ordered arrested by a judge was living unconcernedly in El Paisnal, and no one had ordered the bodies exhumed and examined. The bullets are still in the graves.14
Rutilio Grande’s murder followed a series of forcible expulsions of foreign clergy by the Molina government and several earlier murders of church personnel. Romero and the clergy deliberated at great length on their course of action in response to this escalation of the violence against them. They tried to get out their messages of concern, but many were not heard because of newspaper censorship. They finally decided to take dramatic action: temporary school closings,