No one escapes
At “In All Things,” the America magazine blog, Jim Keane notes the passing this week of another notorious figure:
Rene Emilio Ponce, blamed for slaying of priests, dies at 64
Reporting from San Salvador and Mexico City— Rene Emilio Ponce, the once-powerful army general blamed for one of the most egregious atrocities in El Salvador’s civil war, the killing of six Roman Catholic priests, has died. He was 64.
Ponce died Monday at the Military Hospital in San Salvador, the capital, after being admitted last week in critical condition with heart trouble, El Salvador’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.
Ponce served as defense minister and army chief of staff in the last half of the Cold War-era conflict that ended in 1992, becoming one of the U.S.-backed government’s most important military strategists.
A United Nations truth commission after the war determined that Ponce had ordered the assassination of the country’s leading Jesuit priest, Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the Jesuit-run University of Central America. Ellacuria, suspected by the army of supporting leftist guerrillas, was slain on Nov. 16, 1989, along with five other priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter because the orders instructed that no witnesses be left behind, the commission said.
The LA Times obit notes that “For most of the bitter, 12-year war, in which more than 75,000 people were killed in Central America’s smallest country, Ponce enjoyed the support of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations even though — declassified diplomatic cables later revealed — U.S. officials were aware of his abysmal human rights record.”
This too, should not be passed over in silence.
David, thanks for calling our attention to this human rights criminal.
Political assassination is filthy. Our country would do well to eschew it in all its forms. I suppose that’s not likely, though.
Despite its legalistic and unemotional narrative, the 1993 Report of the U.N. Truth Commission on El Salvador makes for chilling reading.
http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/salvador/informes/truth.html
The events surrrounding the murders of the UCA Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter begin at page 45. (The Report also details the assassinations of Archbishop Romero and the four American Churchwomen.) The Truth Commission concluded that Ponce gave the order to kill Father Ellacuria and to leave no witnesses. However, only two lower level military officers were convicted of the murders. They received 30-year sentences.
Perhaps most remarkable to me, from a Christian perspective at least, is that the Society of Jesus asked, in light of the Salvadoran government’s failure to bring Ponce and the planners of the killings to justice, that the two convicted military officers be pardoned, a request that the Truth Commission seconded.
Why so much attention to the deaths of six priests? What about the more than 74,994 other murdered people, many doubtless killed by the communists? The US supported some killers and Cuba supported others. There was an amnesty, no doubt to avoid involving all sides in endless recriminations. Remember your dead, but remember the others, too, and remember that neither side was blameless.
Mr. Smith’s comment is not only insensitive, bu tunappreciative of the work done among the por with no voice.
But to some ideologues, their needs have to be minimized. So we gloss over the events to “move on.” Our ideas of justice get so mangled in politics.
Thanks to Bill Collier for his post!
Bob (11:06), I’m not at all unappreciative of the work done for the poor anywhere, by anyone. Certainly not here. But perhaps – just perhaps, because I don’t know – one of these priests was gambling with seven other lives by choosing sides in a civil war. If so, and if he knew what would happen as a result, I’d like to think he’d have pulled back.
And I’m completely serious about those seventy-five thousand other victims of political violence. Why wax indignant over just eight? Because they’re family? Fair enough, but aren’t all the rest family, too? We’re one species on a very small planet.
As for “justice”, I suspect that that word is usually a euphemism for “vengeance”.