On November 17, 1989, I was in Thailand at a meeting of Jesuit Refugee Service workers. There I heard of the death of six Jesuits, their cook and her daughter. Jon Sobrino, the Jesuit theologian from El Salvador, was due to visit us in the evening. He came, and we celebrated Mass with him for his friends and colleagues.
I remember that on the front page of a Bangkok newspaper was a photograph of the murder scene. Jon looked at it and said, almost in surprise, ‘That is my room... my typewriter...my bible. A Jesuit visitor had come to stay a few days, was offered his room, and died there.
Elba Ramos cooked meals at the Jesuit community. Celia was her sixteen year old daughter. The Jesuits, Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Barro, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Joaquín López y López and Amado López, taught at the University and its associated institutes. It was a time of civil war, and the University and Jesuits were identified by the Government with the armed resistance. The crime that led directly to their death was their advocacy of a negotiated settlement to a war that the Government thought it could win unconditionally.
The roots of the civil war lay in the Government’s seizure and selling of communal land earlier in the century. It was accompanied by the massacre of the Indigenous population. A few families owned most of the country’s wealth and exploited the rural population. The Catholic Church as an institution was associated with the better-off.
The Second Vatican Council committed the Catholic Church to take seriously its mission to preach the Gospel to the poor. Many priests in Latin America began to reflect with their congregations on what the Gospel meant in their situation. They began to ask why they were exploited, and how they could act to shape a more just society. In El Salvador this local organising led to conflict and to a violent response. As part of the Government’s counter-insurgency tactics catechists and villagers were murdered. Theologically conservative priests like Jesuit Rutilio Grande and Archbishop Oscar Romero saw what was happening to their people, called it for what it was, and were themselves killed.
Before the killings the Jesuits were advised to hide from the death squads. They decided it would be safe to stay at the University because it was surrounded by the army. But the decision to kill them, taken at a high level of government, was entrusted to an elite army squadron. The soldiers made their way into the house, shot all the Jesuits and finally Elba and Celia Ramos. They tried clumsily to make it appear a rebel attack. Fr Ellacuría’s brains were scattered on the grass, a gesture of contempt for his ideas and an unwitting tribute to their power.
The murders caused international outrage and focused attention on the atrocities sanctioned by the Government. Enquiry followed enquiry, and the Government of El Salvador came under increasing pressure to seek a negotiated settlement. The Salvadorean defence minister later described the decision to kill the Jesuits as the most stupid thing the Government had done.
Two years later I spent six months in El Salvador reading in the library abutting the house where the Jesuits were killed, and visiting communities of rural people who had returned after fleeing to neighbouring countries from the Salvadorean army. The cost to the Jesuits there was palpable: they had lost six of their friends and their most talented colleagues, but were determined that they would continue their work. Grieving had to be put on hold.
The whole country seemed to be a memorial to the dead Jesuits. One community was named Segundo Montes. In another I was handed a liturgical Stole to wear with some reverence, and told that Ignacio Martín-Barro used to wear it. Bullet holes were still to be seen in the doors and walls of the Jesuit library.
One of the consequences of any civil war is the explosion of guns in the population. So it was in El Salvador, where most of the guns for both sides came from the United States, some on-sold by corrupt army officers to the rebels. So after the war ended many unemployed young men on both sides, trained only to kill, earned their living by the gun. Freed from a cause and from military discipline they were the seeds of a violent future.
My most moving memory of El Salvador was of a week spent in the community of Ita Maura – named after Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke who had been raped and murdered by the military. I was there to celebrate the Eucharist for the Community’s tenth anniversary. In preparation I gathered a list of relatives who had been killed in the war so they could be remembered in the Service. A woman, then living alone, had lost seven children. She listed each of them. Some were catechists and so had been targeted by the military. Others had been killed trying to flee, many at the River Lempa. Then she mentioned her youngest son, Juan Luis. Tears came into her eyes as she whispered, ‘And I had such hope in him’.
In the garden of the house where the Jesuits died there is a garden with eight rose bushes. The six Jesuits are inseparable in death from Celia and Elba Ramos, Juan Luis and his brothers and all the ordinary Salvadoreans whom they served. In their deaths they helped keep hope alive.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.