Slain Priests Had Ties to Harvard

When suspected right-wing commandos backed by the U.S. killed six Jesuit priests in El Salvador last month, international attention was riveted on that war-torn land, which has been buffeted by 10 years of civil conflict and a recent guerilla offensive.

Almost obscured amid the uproar--and the later discovery of Soviet-made arm shipments to the region--were the very real connections between Harvard University and two of the slain men.

In interviews this week with officials at Harvard, and in the U.S. and El Salvador, a picture has evolved that links the University to Jesuits Segundo Montes and Ignacio Martin-Baro. The pair, who were highly placed scholars within the embattled Jesuit academy Universidad Centroamericana Jose Simeon Canas in San Salvador (UCA), worked at promoting their cause within Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA) and a Harvard-based international scholars program.

Martin-Baro, 47, was an annual speaker at the Divinity School and last spoke this January. Montes, 56, was a researcher who wrote a University report in 1985 studying non-violent resistance to state-sponsored terror.

The deaths of the priests have further set back the struggling Central American peace process.

A Pivotal Moment

The November 16 slayings of the previously untouchable Jesuits, their live-in cook and her daughter came at a pivotal time for the region, which had been nearing an international settlement mediated by Costa Rican leader Oscar Arias.

Coming five days into a fierce offensive by leftist Salvadoran rebels which has reached the wealthiest areas of San Salvador, public sentiment had begun to swing to the rightist government under Alfredo Cristiani. Many saw the offensive, which killed hundreds of civilians and rebels, as a last-ditch effort to provoke outrages by a government closely identified in the past with the severest death squads in Latin America.

The slayings indicated the success of the rebel strategy. Only the near simultaneous discovery of Soviet-built arms aboard a crashed Cuban helicopter in the area deflected worldwide outrage. U.S. backed officials decried Cuban-intervention in the region, and peace plans were postponed.

In response, Jesuit clergy throughout Central America have issued an ultimatum to the Salvadoran government to bring the killers to justice or else face being held responsible for the deaths. So far those ultimatums have passed quietly.

The Jesuits have also criticized the State Department for allegedly intimidating a key witness of the murders into failing six lie detector tests in the U.S. The witness, who was brought to the U.S. after Jesuits said she faced retribution in El Salvador, has claimed she saw 30 armed soldiers in camouflage torture and kill the victims.

The Salvadoran government has issued a $250,000 reward for the killer.

'Dedicated to Peace and Justice'

"They were men that were dedicated to their struggle for peace and justice," said Father David Hollenbach of the Weston School of Theology, an associated school of Harvard University. "That was not easy. They were threatened with death."

Hollenbach, a Jesuit closely acquainted with Montes and Martin-Baro, issued his remarks at one of dozens of vigils and remembrance ceremonies held in recent weeks at Boston College, Holy Cross, Fairfield University and at Catholic churches around Harvard Square and Central Square.

What has been most shocking to acquaintances of the victims is that they were not politicians, but academics. But the forces behind the massacre reveal a brutal history in Salvadoran politics that frequently leads to academic repression.

Hollenbach, speaking at St. Paul's Rectory on 34 Mt. Auburn St., echoed the former Salvadoran right-wing slogan, "If a patriot, kill a priest."

At Harvard, the two priests worked with the CFIA and the Harvard-based Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities (LASPAU).

Montes was commissioned in 1985 to write a report titled "Non-violent resistance against Salvadoran regimes using Institutionalized Terror in the period 1972-1987" for the CFIA's Program on Nonviolent Sanctions.

"He basically was doing an inventory of methods of non-violent struggle as they are manifested in an extremely hostile environment," says Christopher Kruegler, associate program director for the Program on Nonviolent sanctions. "There's some irony in the fact that he was studying the phenomenon which ultimately claimed his life."

Martin-Baro participated in the LASPAU-administered Fulbright Academic Exchange Program, which helps train foreign university professors at U.S. institutions. Martin-Baro earned his doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago. Upon return to his teaching and administrative post at UCA, Martin-Baro became the regional LASPAU coordinator.

"He quickly became the academic vice rector and was our main contact there when we reopened the program in 1984," says Ned D. Strong, a director of LASPAU. "He was [also] the contact with all academic exchange with the embassy and UCA."

Former director of LASPAU John Mullaney remembers Martin-Baro's enthusiasm for LASPAU. "When Padre Nacho came here he said that he admired LASPAU and the Fulbright Exchange as the best foreign policy program of the United States in El Salvador."

"He loved children," continues Mullaney, who now works at Harvard's Institute for International Development. "You could just see his whole face change. 'What are we doing to them?' he would say and shake his head."

"But he also loved his faculty, particularly his younger ones. It was like they were all on this mission together. It was palpable. He was so enthusiastic," Mullaney says.

"I think he had the unique ability of making people fall in love with his ideas. And that was what made him such an attractive, engaging person. He would come up to you and embrace you."

Associates say Montes was a more reserved person. "The Jesuits have a phrase that would describe him--'contemplative in action.' He was a very spiritual man as well as an academic," Mullaney says. "But he was always out in the fields getting his hands dirty with the displaced people, the migrant populations. He was a very attractive and magnanimous person."

Political Targets

Although their friends fiercely affirm that none of the priests were politicians, the nature of their academic studies and UCA's prominent efforts to bring about a negotiated settlement to the Salvadoran war made them highly political targets of the Salvadoran right wing.

"Because of the war, I think some of the more extreme right-wing supporters targeted people who were visible and outspoken about a peaceful solution to the war," says Pablo Mateu-Llort, a United Nations advisor working in El Salvador. "Definitely those priests were more outspoken supporters of dialogue."

"Since they directed academic centers they had huge publicity," Mateu-Llort continues. "They advocated a negotiated solution to the crisis. That gave them a lot of publicity, the type of publicity only politicians get."

The Jesuits also controlled two prestigious, academic, often anti-government publications: Estudio Centralamericana [ECA], a sociological journal, and La Boletin, an economics publication.

Under its editor-in-chief, Martin-Baro, ECA often published figures and analyses at odds with U.S. and Salvadoran government figures, Mullaney says.

"People in the U.S. embassy always disagreed with their analyses and the results of their analyses, calling them leftist or marxist," he says. "The figures that they would use on the number of people actually killed by the military or by death squads were always higher than those reported by the United States military and the United States embassy."

More Accurate Figures

"However, the university usually had sources that were in the field or on the parish level--in the community health clinics, together with the Green Cross [the Salvadoran equivalent of the Red Cross]. But it was always later proven that the figures reported by the UCA were always accurate," says Mullaney.

La Boletin also often found itself working against U.S. and government interests.

"La Boletin was doing economic analyses showing the guerrillas were succeeding with their strategy of destroying the economic infrastructure of the country," says Mullaney. "This put UCA, by telling the truth, at odds with people from the international banking community. The military was upset because it [contradicted] the efforts they were putting into propaganda."

Power Struggle on the Right

These factors have fueled the widely-held beliefs that the military or right-wing death squads were responsible for the priests' assassinations.

Harvey G. Cox, Thomas professor of Divinity School professor and close friend of Martin-Baro speculates that the massacre may have been part of a larger power struggle.

"It was an internal struggle between the military and the [rightist] Arena Party. This could very well have been a way for the right wing to show their rivals in the party 'Who's in charge,'" Cox says.

Right-wing violence directed against academic institutions has historical roots within El Salvador. The formerly prominent state-run Universidad Nacional de El Salvador (UNES) was devastated in 1979 by the army and was shut down from 1981 and 1984. Although since reopened, it has never been able to regain the international prominence it once commanded.

"They pay the professors a minimal salary, there are no books, no laboratories," said Strong, speaking of UNES.

But UCA and the Society of Jesus seem ready to press on with the fallen priests' work.

"Yes, they intend to continue," said Rev. Paul C. Kenney, Jesuit press officer for the New England province. "I would say that it is going to be more than business as usual. There has been a challenge to stop the intellectual opposition to the destruction in El Salvador."

"The new authorities of the university have publicly announced their profound sense of loss for those who were killed," says Werner Romero, a professor of philosophy at UCA. "However, the university authorities state that the UCA will continue to hold true to the same ideological stance of those killed. The university will continue its line of support for academic freedom, which is freedom of research, freedom of speech in defense of the poor majority of this country."

"The helicopters come at night and shoot projectiles that sound like trains passing overhead ending with explosions," he says, "But we continue to teach."