The bitter search for justice

Jeremy McDermott on the tragic case of four murdered US nuns
AN ORDER OF nuns has expressed "great disappointment" at a verdict last Friday, clearing two former Salvadoran generals of the 1980 rape and murders of four American churchwomen.
The Sisters of Mary knoll, New York, said the verdict marked a "temporary setback" in the 20-year quest to establish who was responsible for the brutal murders.
The federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, had heard how on December 2, 1980, Sisters Ita Ford, 40, Maura Clarke, 49, and Dorothy Kazel, 40 and lay missionary Jean Donovan, 27, were on their way to San Salvador's airport to pick up more nuns to help them in their work with the poor of El Salvador.
Around them raged the civil war, and they were
looked on with suspicion by the military government for their espousal of the causes of El Salvador's oppressed and dispossessed; causes associated with leftwing rebels.
Their vehicle was stopped at a military checkpoint. The women were dragged from the van, forced to the ground, raped and then shot.
Under the 1992 United States Torture Victim Protection Act, superior officers can be liable for their subordinates' extrajudicial violence if they ordered, tolerated or failed to prevent the actions or failed to punish the perpetrators.
The families of the murdered decided to interrupt the leisurely retirement in Florida of two senior figures from the Salvadoran military government at the time. General Vides Casanova, 62, was chief of the National Guard in 1980. Five of his guardsmen where convicted of the rape and murder of the nuns. General Jose Guillermo Garcia, 67, was the Minister of Defence. Both were tried.
One of the guardsmen previously convicted of the grisly crime, Daniel Canales, insisted that the order came from the top. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, but released in 1998. "If there had not been an order from above, we would never have been involved in something so stupid," Canales told local newspapers.
The man who gave the orders at the scene, Lt Luis Antonio Colindres, has denied there were orders from superior officers.
The generals' defence lawyer, Kurt Klaus, told the jury that evidence would show the generals had no control over squads terrorising Salvadoran civilians during the early 1980s, and couldn't be blamed for the women's deaths.
But the families' lawsuit contended that they couldn't have acted without the generals' direction or consent.
Klaus implied that the guardsmen might have had base motives. "Even in El Salvador in 1980, people were victims of crimes all the time, and they were not always political," he said.
The case in Miami had offered hope that another atrocity committed against the Church in El Salvador would be properly investigated and the intellectual authors brought to justice. This was the case of the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.
The priests, all professors at the University of Central America here. were slain on November 16, 1989, in the midst of an offensive on the capital by leftist Marxist guerrillas. The official investigation did not touch anyone above the rank of colonel. Two officers and four soldiers were convicted and served time in prison until released under a 1993 amnesty.
But Salvadoran attorney general Belisario Artiga is looking far higher up the chain of command for guilty parties.
"We are asking [the court] for permission to investigate as masterminds former President Alfredo Cristiani and high-ranking military officers in the murder of the Jesuit priests," Mr Artiga told reporters.
But many think the top echelons in El Salvador protected themselves far too well to be prosecuted, and that the spirits of those murdered will have to find peace in the next world, as there will be none here.