Homeland Security Ate My Speech by Ariel Dorfman

Author:Ariel Dorfman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2017-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

14.

THE TRUTH THAT MADE HER FREE

Early on the morning of Dec. 3, 1980, a farmer on a remote road in El Salvador spotted four bodies lying in a ditch. It was a sight that had become inexcusably normal, even unexceptional, in that small “breathtakingly poor” Central American country in the throes of a civil war and a guerrilla insurrection. That year alone, over 8,000 men, women and children had been slaughtered, most of them by the government’s armed forces and paramilitary death squads.

Once the corpses were identified, however, it turned out that there was indeed something exceptional about these particular victims. Not that all four were women, not that two had been raped, not that the perpetrators did not care to hide their crime. What made this into an international scandal was that the women happened to be United States citizens rather than “ordinary” Salvadorans, and that three of them, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Maura Clarke, were Catholic nuns (the fourth, Jean Donovan, was a lay volunteer doing missionary work).

Eileen Markey’s A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura, just published at the end of this terrible 2016, is not an investigation into the killing itself, like Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder, a masterly book that delved into the web of intrigue and deception surrounding the 1998 homicide of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala. But what Markey accomplishes is something equally valuable: to painstakingly map out the path that brought one of the nuns, Maura Clarke, who was nearly 50 years old, almost inevitably to that ditch in a foreign land.

Tracing Maura’s roots to a patriotic Bronx childhood suffused with religious imagery and brimming with stories about her immigrant father’s dedication to the cause of Irish independence, the author explains why the Maryknoll order was a natural home for someone who cared so lovingly for others and wanted to alleviate their pain. Markey also explores Maura’s own doubts about her worthiness for such a vocation. The story, a bit ponderous at the beginning, at least for this nonreligious reviewer, picks up once Maura arrives in Nicaragua in 1959 and gets involved with the needs and hopes of her parishioners. It then accelerates even more dramatically once the community she had come to worship as the living embodiment of Jesus joined the Sandinista insurgency destined to topple the corrupt and tyrannical Somoza regime. The final chapters chart Maura’s experience in El Salvador after she answered, not without some trepidation, the call by Archbishop Romero (himself assassinated during Mass a few months before her own death) for Maryknoll sisters to assist the church at a moment when its children, the peasants, and the squatters of his country, were being persecuted in ways reminiscent of early Christians under the Roman Empire.

Her final months of activism—ferrying refugees out of conflict zones, offering sanctuary to survivors of massacres, transporting food and medical supplies to faraway and wounded communities, documenting atrocities in case prosecution might someday be viable—resonated with me personally. At the

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