Jesuit massacre: Anniversary in El Salvador is a 'cleansing moment'
Jesuit massacre: Anniversary in El Salvador is a 'cleansing moment'
By Margaret Russell
Special to the Mercury News
This week, several Santa Clara University colleagues and I traveled to El Salvador to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter. Their murders were planned at the highest levels of El Salvador's military leadership during a decade of civil war in which they received massive United States military and economic aid. The priests, all associated with the University of Central America in San Salvador, were known for their outspoken commitment to the poor and disenfranchised of El Salvador.
Their assassinations on Nov. 16, 1989, shocked the world yet were hardly the first in a bloody decade of human rights violations. Although this is my first time in El Salvador, the names of the dead are familiar to me because they are inscribed on student-made white crosses planted in the garden outside of the Mission at Santa Clara: Ignacio Martin Baro, Ignacio Ellacuria, Armando Lopez, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramon Moreno, Julia Elba Ramos, Celina Mariceth Ramos.
Along with the murders of Salvadoran Jesuit Rutilio Grande in 1977, Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 and thousands of others, the deaths of these eight people linger in historical memory as a reminder of our country's deep involvement in the injustices of the war in El Salvador.
As a scholar of U.S. constitutional law and civil rights -- as well as a child of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s -- I view the opportunity to remember these martyrs as a kind of "cleansing moment" in the struggle for social justice . "Cleansing moments" is a phrase used by Myrlie Evers, widow of assassinated U.S. civil rights leader Medgar Evers, to describe the transcendent power of both historical memory and legal redress in reopening past human rights cases not only to identify perpetrators, but also to recognize and heal the societal wounds inflicted by human rights abuses. In the U.S., this has meant revisiting and sometimes prosecuting U.S. civil rights murders of the mid-19th century-- a daunting task given the structure of U.S. law.
Internationally, however, there are other models for reopening and prosecuting long-dormant human rights cases, including the Jesuit community murders that occurred 25 years ago in San Salvador. For example, the Center for Justice and Accountability, based in San Francisco, is pursuing the Jesuit massacre case through legal proceedings in Spain, which has both a "universal jurisdiction" law and a recognition of international human rights law in its domestic cases. In addition, there is a concrete tie between the victims and Spain because several of the Jesuit priests were Spanish citizens. Accordingly, in 2008 the center filed a lawsuit in Spain against the known high-level perpetrators of the murders, and proceedings are ongoing.
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http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_26933721/jesuit-massacre-anniversary-el-salvador-is-cleansing-moment
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