Assassination of a Saint by Eisenbrandt Matt

Author:Eisenbrandt, Matt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520286795
Publisher: University of California Press

SAN SALVADOR—FEBRUARY 2004

As dusk falls, María Julia Hernández, the longtime head of the human rights office for the archdiocese, drives Nico van Aelstyn to an unknown church. They enter a side room, and a woman is there waiting. Dressed in neat, clean clothes with dark, precisely fixed hair, she appears to be a typical middle-aged San Salvador woman. But Nico knows her background is far from normal. She worked for Roberto D’Aubuisson’s ARENA party in its early years, and she secretly testified to the Truth Commission about the financing of the death squads.

Nico begins the interview slowly, easing into the difficult topics. Nico’s Spanish is limited, but Hernández has insisted that only he—our lead lawyer—can conduct this interview. Despite her own struggles with English, Hernández acts as interpreter. Nico pulls out a copy of the statement the woman gave to the Truth Commission around 1992. The document is long and detailed, sometimes reflecting her direct quotes and other times paraphrasing her evidence. It starts simply, saying she was invited in September 1981 to participate in a new political party, ARENA, and she became close with many of the founders. “I was a trusted person inside the party,” she says in the statement. “I was tasked with writing letters for Roberto D’Aubuisson, who trusted me a lot and held me in high esteem.”5 The document lists many people involved in the early days of ARENA, but the portions that interest us concern the ones involved in violence. She says that D’Aubuisson headed the death squad known as the Maximiliano Hernández Martínez Brigade, which we know was named after the general whose soldiers massacred thousands of campesinos in the 1932 Matanza. Among the brigade’s members, she adds, was “Toño” Cornejo, a close D’Aubuisson associate who, we have just found out, lives in Miami.6

“There was a group of army officers who formed part of the death squads,” she says, “and although they were not formally affiliated with ARENA nor did they frequent the party headquarters, in conversations with any of the ARENA founders or members of the security team, they spoke of their support and participation.” The list is long but includes Colonel Nicolás Carranza, the defendant in our Tennessee lawsuit. It also includes Álvaro Saravia and his coconspirator in Romero’s murder, Eduardo Ávila.

“Those who financed all this,” the woman said, included Billy Sol, one of our lead suspects. Among others involved in death squad activity, she lists a one-time Sol colleague, Eduardo Lemus O’Byrne.7 We know that Saravia told the Truth Commission that Lemus O’Byrne hosted a meeting with D’Aubuisson the day after Romero’s assassination and may have provided money to pay the assassin.8 The ARENA witness relates a different, chilling story. “Another time,” she says, “I asked [a D’Aubuisson bodyguard] about the rumor that at Quality Meat, owned by the Lemus O’Byrne family, they used power saws to murder people who later appeared chopped up in trash dumps in San Salvador. . . . [The bodyguard], laughing and joking, told me,

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