We missed David Gonzalez’s , For Helper of Immigrants, a Tale of Loss and Destiny, when it appeared in the Times on New Year’s Eve. Gen-Xers may not know that in early December of 1980, four women associated with the Maryknoll order were raped and murdered by Salvadoran government forces. President Carter ordered that all transfer of military goods to Salvador, only to quietly reverse the order on the morning of President Reagan’s inauguration.
There’s much more to it than that, of course. Years of less-than-honest responses to the women’s families and their religious order, and the public, about the killings, including the indictment of four low-level soldiers -but no efforts to see with whom – above the level of enlisted personnel – responsility resided. This was true of most instances of misconduct by the American-subsidized and sponsored government, and incidents like the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, earlier in 1980. As an example, the Salvadoran judicial system was deep uninterested in pursuing the case.
Three New York lawyers, one of them the brother of a Maryknoll nun who was killed here two years ago, learned firsthand today that El Salvador’s legal system is not like the one they are used to.
The purpose of the visit of William P. Ford, one of the lawyers, was to make a formal declaration that he had been personally injured by the death of his sister, Ita Ford, a Roman Catholic nun who was killed with two other nuns and a fourth churchwomen near here on Dec. 2, 1980.
Mr. Ford’s lawyers, Michael H. Posner and R. Scott Greathead of the Lawyers Committee for Internatioal Human Rights, said they had been told almost accidentally this weekend that such a statement was necessary.
”We were talking to one of the prosecutors and asking throwaway questions,” Mr. Posner recalled, ”and he said, ‘Oh, by the way, we need a statement from one of the family members.’ ”
The case has made little progress since five national guardsmen were charged with murder last November in this town 35 miles southeast of the capital. At that time, the judge here appointed defense attorneys – some weeks after the legally prescribed three-day period – but did not put the appointments in writing.
This was discovered only after the attorneys for the guardsmen appealed the charges. The appeals judge in the neighboring province of San Vicente ruled that without the paperwork, the defendants did not officially have lawyers, so he sent the case back here. The original judge must now take the action he was to have taken in November.
Richard J. Meislin, Special To The New York Times, “U.S. Lawyers Taste Salvador’s System,” published: January 12, 1983.
But we digress. Back to David Gonzalez’s , For Helper of Immigrants, a Tale of Loss and Destiny.
It was August when Ruth Ford realized her resistance was no match for a nun’s persistence. For weeks, Sister Mary Burns had been after her to take over the Maura Clarke-Ita Ford Center in Brooklyn, where immigrant women learn English, finish high school and develop job skills. Ms. Ford was looking for a job in journalism, but Sister Mary wanted her to lead the center she had founded in 1993.
The Clarke-Ford Center teaches community organizing, ESL, citizenship application, and maintains an industrial kitchen principally for use by start-ups and product development. And a whole bunch of other stuff.
And they need help doing all of this: volunteers, donors, customers for their culinary and clothing poeucs.
