New America Media, Commentary, Mary Jo McConahay*
SAN SALVADOR — Twenty years ago, three colleagues and I were the first reporters on the scene of the murders here of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, a turning point in the civil war that cost 75,000 other Salvadoran lives. As gatherings the world over commemorate the special anniversary, I remember details of that morning I do not want to forget.
«They’ve killed Ellacuria,» said the young priest in the hotel parking lot.
He had rushed over to tell reporters, he said, and we were the first he met.
We reserved belief. The death of Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of San Salvador’s Jesuit university and a world-renowned theologian, had been announced more than once during the civil war. We jumped into a jeep anyway.
At the university side gate, we knocked on a black iron door. From across the street, a soldier in a guardhouse kept watch. Guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) had been trying for six days to take over the capital. The army was fighting back with all the U.S.-supplied arms and aircraft it had. At this hour of morning, just after curfew lifted, you didn’t know what lay behind any closed door.
Inside, on the grass, we saw four bundles covered with white sheets stained with what looked like blood.
«Come with me,» said José María Tojeira, the Jesuits’ Central America provincial. My colleagues, radio reporters, were already striding with their mics toward two clerics, one elderly and one very young, who stood gazing at the bundles. I followed Tojeira.
«Come, look,» he said as we stepped inside the residence.
A man lay lifeless in the hall. A priest, I supposed, but not Ellacuria. A smear of crimson streaked the floor. Tojeira stood by an open door to one of the rooms. He didn’t speak, but tilted his head for me to look inside. A narrow room with a small bed and books, one fallen on the floor, next to a man’s body, some blood. Not like knife wounds, likely bullets. I wrote in my reporter’s notebook furiously, sloppily, tethering myself to the pages. Each time, Tojeira waited.
«Now we will go,» he said.
Instead of returning to the garden, however, we descended a short flight of outdoor steps. A door stood ajar. I asked myself what more might be possible.
The body of a woman lay over that of a girl. The woman’s remains faced the door, as if she had stood in front of the girl at the last moment. I could hardly breathe. My own daughter was three at the time.
By the time Tojeira and I ascended to the garden once more, news photographers had arrived.
«Father, you have to take the covers off the bodies,» I said.
Tojeira looked alarmed for a moment, then decisive.
«Promise me that these pictures, all this, will reach the Jesuits, will be known,» he said.
I felt a jolt. Tojeira’s words told me he was uncertain whether he would live through the day. Jesuits, most notably Ellacuria, had had the ear of both sides in the civil war, from President Alfredo Cristiani of the right-wing ARENA party, to leftist FMLN commanders. The scholar-priests pushed for a negotiated, non-military solution. To radical rightists, this was intolerable. A call for «Death to Jesuits» had surfaced, along with threats to others in the atmosphere of war.
I knew the photographers. I promised Tojeira. The sheets came off.
There was Ellacuria, still in his bathrobe, looking up, as if he had faced his killer.
There was Ignacio Martin-Baro, the psychologist I had first met in San Francisco years before, whe
