Mennonite Weekly Review

Julia Elba Ramos was not a great cook, but she was becoming a better one as part of her housekeeping job at the University of Central America. In November 1989, she had just learned how to bake cakes, and was saving money to buy her own electric oven.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

Celina Mariset Ramos, her 16-year-old daughter, had just finished her first year of high school. On Nov. 16, 1989, she was staying with her mother at the university because her parents thought she would be safer on the campus, given the battles on the streets of San Salvador. A few weeks earlier, she had told a classmate that she hated violence so much that she would never again kill even an insect.

Amando Lopez had a penchant for low-budget martial arts movies from Hong Kong and would often fall asleep in his easy chair watching them. He worked every weekend among the residents of the Soyapango slum outside San Salvador.

According to a former student, Tim McMahon, Juan Ramon Moreno was the single most boring teacher he had ever had. In November 1989, he had just set up a state-of-the-art library in a center named after Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated 10 years earlier.

Segundo Montes had a big red beard, and the nickname “Zeus.” The first week of November 1989, he was in Washington, D.C., where he had provided documentation and advice to members of Congress regarding Salvadoran refugee issues. During his D.C. visit, the organization CARECEN, which helped Central American refugees obtain asylum, presented him with an award in the halls of Congress for defending Salvadoran human rights.

Ignacio Martin Baro was the Vice President of UCA, an internationally-renowned pioneer in the field of social psychology, and pastor of Jayaque, a rural municipality.

Joaquin Lopez y Lopez had in November 1989 recently been diagnosed with cancer. One of the founders of UCA, he also started Fe y Alegria, a network of 13 schools that served 8,000 impoverished Salvadoran children, as well as two clinics that served 50,000 people.

The primary target of the Atlacatl Battalion that night was Ignacio Ellacuría. The other men and women died because these assassins — trained with U.S. tax dollars at the School of the Americas, or SOA — had orders to leave no witnesses.

Since the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 (also committed by SOA graduates), Father Ellacuría had been El Salvador’s most outspoken defender of the poor, condemning atrocities by all armed groups in the country.

Ellacuría was advocating for a negotiated end to the Salvadoran war when he was killed with his Jesuit brothers, housekeeper and her daughter on Nov. 16, 1989.

Most people involved with Central American solidarity work took note, last month, of the 20th anniversary of these murders, but the mainstream media found Sarah Palin’s book tour far more interesting.

I tell the martyrs’ stories here, because even in solidarity circles they are often mentioned in passing as “the six Jesuits and their housekeeper” when people list atrocities committed in El Salvador during the 1970s and ’80s. I wanted to learn and give them back their names.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.