The Gipper, inspiring freedom

When I hear someone laud Ronald Reagan's commitment to freedom around the world, I think back to the four American churchwomen who were murdered by the Salvadoran national guard in 1980. Ronald Reagan, defender of liberty, had just won the election and his administration sprang to action. Let's hear the story from Robert White, U.S. ambassador to El Salvador during this period (published in Commonweal, December 2000):

Immediately following the 1980 U.S. election, members of the Reagan transition team traveled to El Salvador and spoke to key figures in the Salvadoran power structure, reassuring them that on inauguration day, January 20, 1981, military aid would flow again, free of the human-rights conditions imposed by the Carter administration. The Salvadoran military understood this as a go-ahead signal and unleashed a torrent of violence. Hundreds of ordinary Salvadorans were killed, and for the first time American citizens were targeted.

In the short period of ten weeks between the U.S. election in November and the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, in addition to the American missionary women, the Salvadoran security forces killed Marcial Serrano, a Salvadoran priest; destroyed the Catholic radio station WSAX; tortured and assassinated seven leaders of the moderate, nonviolent Democratic Revolutionary Front; killed freelance American journalist John Sullivan; and assassinated the director of the government's land reform agency, Jose Rodolfo Viera, and two American advisers from the American Institute of Free Labor Development, Michael Harmmer and Mark Pearlman.

Notwithstanding my numerous reports to the State Department making it clear that the Salvadoran military killed the churchwomen and that Garcia, Vides Casanova, and other members of the military high command were stonewalling the investigation, I received a telephone call in mid-January from the department's acting assistant secretary for interAmerican affairs, John Bushnell, saying that Secretary of State-designate Alexander Haig wanted me to file a report assuring him that the Salvadoran military were "making progress on the nuns' case." After a barbed conversation with Bushnell, I wrote a telegram that said, "I will have no part of any cover-up. All the evidence we have, and it has been reported fully, is that the Salvadoran government has made no serious effort to investigate the killings of the murdered American churchwomen."

In late January, Haig, now secretary of state, told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, "I would like to suggest to you that some of the investigations would lead me to believe that perhaps the vehicle that the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of gunfire." This was what the Salvadoran officers had been waiting to hear - a high-ranking U.S. official who would publicly take their side even if it meant misrepresenting the facts. This confirmed what had already been communicated during the election campaign and transition period. The Salvadoran military knew that there were no "investigative reports" to justify Haig's statement. Embassy cables, photographs, and eyewitnesses unanimously testified to the gangland-style executions of the churchwomen. Haig was putting into practice the guidelines set down in a January 24, 1981 meeting of Reagan's National Security Council:

"Our support for the [Salvadoran] government has been highly conditional with military assistance expressly turned on and off to press the military to control violence from within itself and from the Right and to meet specific concerns such as the investigation of the murders of the four American churchwomen. This has strained our relationship with the all-important military leadership and raised doubts as to the firmness and reliability of our commitment to support the government. Such doubts urgently need to be resolved."

Translated into plain English this meant that regardless of how many civilians the Salvadoran securitv forces killed, U.S. military aid would not be affected, but would flow in ever-increasing amounts.