Robert E. White was the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador at the time that Jean Donovan, Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke, and Ita Ford were murdered. He was persistent in pushing for the investigation of their deaths and has been an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in Central America for the last decade.
White was president of the Commission on United States-Latin American Relations, a self-described "activist think tank" and a project of the International Center for Development Policy in Washington, DC, when this article appeared. He was interviewed at the center by Joyce Hollyday.
-- The Editors
Sojourners: When did you begin serving as U.S. ambassador in El Salvador?
Robert White: I was a career foreign service officer. I had been ambassador to Paraguay. I was supposed to arrive in El Salvador in November or December of 1979. Thanks to Sen. Jesse Helms -- who created a split vote on my nomination -- my arrival was delayed. I got down there in late February 1980.
Sojourners: When did you first meet Jean, Dorothy, Maura, and Ita?
White: Shortly after I arrived, I received a telegram from Jean Donovan inviting me to visit them in La Libertad. I responded that I was glad to know of their existence and that I would be down as soon as I could figure out what this embassy was all about and what was happening. But, as you can imagine, things were extremely difficult those first few months.
There was a Thanksgiving service at which I had been invited to speak, and I met them afterward. And then I did visit them in La Libertad shortly after that. I invited them to come to the house the next time they were in San Salvador.
Jean and Dorothy and [U.S. missionary] Paul Schindler did come. They stayed overnight and then [Jean and Dorothy] left and went to the airport to pick up Ita and Maura -- and of course were killed on their return.
Sojourners: How did you hear about their deaths?
White: I received a call from Paul Schindler saying that they were missing, that he was very worried. There was a report that there was a white van by the side of the road, and he was going to investigate. And I immediately called the [Salvadoran] minister of defense and said, "I'm reporting to you this disappearance of four American women, and I'm extremely upset about it."
And he said, "Were they wearing habits?" And my heart sank. That was a sure tip-off that he already knew about it, and that they were already making up their defense.
Sojourners: And when did you get confirmation that the bodies had been found?
White: When Paul Schindler called me again and told me that the white van had been burned, I felt at that point that there was very little hope that they would be found alive.
There were some Canadians who had been in the car behind the four women as they had emerged from the airport. They were, in a sense, witnesses that the military had to take responsibility, because they had been behind the van, had seen the military stop them and get in. So they felt they were in extreme danger. And as there was no Canadian ambassador there, I felt some obligation to protect them.
So I went to their hotel, and they wanted to leave desperately. So I said I'd take them to the airport. I received a message over the car radio from [my deputy] Mark Dion, saying that they had just gotten the word that the bodies of the four women had been buried in Santiago Nonualco.
The place was not far from the airport, maybe 45 minutes. So I went over there and was present when they unearthed the bodies. It was very difficult. It's a terrible thing ... people you were with just a couple of days before ...
The important thing at that point was to find out all we could, because the military had come and staked out the area, with guns pointing all around. The assistant justice of the peace said, "Look, this happens all the time around here. They use this place to throw the bodies away." He had been forced to sign burial orders all the time. He had signed the exhumation order also.
I put him in the car and took him back to the embassy. He dictated a long, long statement. I put two of the best officers there, and they just went over and over and over it with him. He was put under "protective custody," and we checked in on him every day. That was a crucial thing to do, because if we hadn't done that, he would have disappeared.
Sojourners: Can you describe the situation in the country that provided the context for the murders of the four women and how it felt to be there as U.S. ambassador?
White: To be involved in a war is always terrible. I knew from the day I arrived, and I said publicly, that the danger to this government came much more from the extreme Right than the extreme Left. And what made the revolutionaries possible and credible were the outrageous actions of the military.
The way I conceived U.S. policy was that we had an obligation to reject for the first time the solutions of the extreme Right. It's an uncomfortable position, because you are left, in effect, with very few allies. The extreme Left already hates you because you are an official United States representative; and the extreme Right looks upon you as a traitor, because, after all, our traditional role has been to back them. And there really isn't a sufficient number of sensible centrist and left-of-center people -- or right-of-center, for that matter -- to work effectively with.
Sojourners: After Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president of the United States, your stay in El Salvador ended rather abruptly, didn't it?
White: Yes, no question. There were three basic planks of foreign policy that I put into effect in El Salvador: first, a true and emphatic emphasis on human rights as the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy; second, the backing of land reform and other reforms; and third, a backing of negotiations.
When the Reagan administration came in, [then-Secretary of State] Alexander Haig announced publicly that counterterrorism would take the place of human rights as a priority in United States foreign policy. Second, reforms were pushed down into the bureaucracy and were basically never heard of again; they plodded along but lost all momentum. And third, military victory replaced negotiations as an objective of U.S. policy.
The revolutionaries in those days were doing as unacceptable things as the military. They kidnapped people and killed them. But over the last decade, the revolutionaries have shown their capacity to evolve, to become more moderate. And the military has shown its almost total intransigence. They've gotten worse. I think the Reagan administration bears a good share of the blame for this.
Sojourners: Can you say more about the time right after the deaths of the women, about the investigation of their murders and the reinstatement of military aid having been tied to certification of progress in that investigation?
White: The Carter administration reacted to the murders immediately and emotionally. They interrupted national programs on television, which I was a little surprised by, to say that a special team was being sent down to investigate. The investigation itself, insofar as the United States had something to do with it, was reasonably well done.
But the FBI agent in charge was quite categorical about saying, "Look, the [Salvadoran] military is not helping us; in fact, they are placing roadblocks in the way of this investigation." And I spoke out publicly on this several times.
Then when the Reagan administration came in, there was a completely different U.S. tack. The State Department called me up and said, "We've got a problem." They explained that they were "prisoners" of the Carter administration policy that no aid could go through unless there was progress in the investigation. And I said I could understand that the department had a problem, but I didn't have any problem at all; because my job was to report what was going on, and there wasn't any progress.
They said, "Well, maybe you don't have to certify that there's progress; maybe you could just say that the investigation is moving forward, or something."
And I said, "Look, this is too serious a matter to play games with. If you people want to start military assistance, then you have to go over and convince the Congress it's the right thing to do. But don't expect me to lie about it."
I'm certain that's when the decision was made to get rid of me. That was around the end of January 1981. I got called up to see the secretary of state, to spend an hour with Alexander Haig. He told me what a wonderful job I had done, what great reports I had written -- but that they were going to make a change.
Soon after that he made his statement [about the four women running a roadblock and a possible exchange of gunfire]. It was the most outrageous thing he could have said. There was absolutely no evidence whatsoever.
But this is where the United States gets into trouble -- when policy becomes a kind of semireligious ideological objective. And when you have an ideological objective, then the facts are irrelevant. You have to shape the facts. And what happened throughout the Reagan administration was the foreign service became totally useless, because nobody read their reports, nobody based policy on any kind of fact.
Under Reagan you didn't have a policy in Central America. What you had was fanaticism, an ideology, a drive. There was no discussion. The objective was to overthrow the Sandinista government [in Nicaragua] and wipe out the Salvadoran guerrillas. And it didn't matter what the facts were, everything was devoted to that end. Laws were broken, as in the Iran-contra affair; people like [then-Costa Rican President] Oscar Arias were considered enemies of the United States.
[Leader of the extreme-right ARENA party Roberto] D'Abuisson should be a symbol of everything that is "Darth Vader-ish" about El Salvador. The Carter administration isolated him, made him a pariah. He was absolutely powerless in El Salvador. He had to leave for Guatemala; there was a warrant out for his arrest. And what happened? Sen. Jesse Helms "rehabilitates" him, and all of a sudden he's breaking bread with the secretary of state and being invited to receptions by the United States ambassador.
I talked with a Salvadoran colonel, maybe a year and a half ago, close to the end of the Reagan administration. "President Reagan has a special place for us; he protects us," the colonel told me.
And I said, "How do you figure that?"
He said, "Well, look, you're not really seriously telling me that that woman in the Philippines [Corazon Aquino] got rid of Marcos. That was the United States, because he had become an embarrassment. And you're not really seriously telling us that a few priests in Haiti got rid of the Duvaliers. That was again the United States. And we've done far worse things than either the Philippine military or the Haitian military, and yet we're still receiving assistance. We're in a sort of special cadre of Washington's, to do what has to be done."
Sojourners: What is your opinion of the trial and sentencing of members of the Salvadoran military for the murders of the four women?
White: The idea that those enlisted men made that decision by themselves is ridiculous. You can't say it's been proved, because there is no judicial system, but then-Lt. Col. Casanova has been identified, to my satisfaction, as the man who gave the order. He was the zone commander. I don't think these were killings that were planned in the way that the killings of the FDR [opposition Democratic Revolutionary Front] men on Thanksgiving Day 1980 were. And in one way it becomes even more serious, because the idea that three nuns and a lay worker from the United States can be killed simply because of the atmosphere the military has created -- it's truly a sick society that has been created in El Salvador.
Sojourners: What hope do you have for peace coming to El Salvador at this point?
White: Basically, the Salvadoran civil war is considered to be some sort of unfortunate hangover that hasn't quite sorted itself out yet. I think that U.S. assistance will go down substantially. The morale of the [Salvadoran] government will fall lower and lower, the split between the military and the civilians will increase, and gradually the population will shift to the opposition. Thanks to the Reagan policies, there's now basically nothing between the FMLN [the guerrillas] and ARENA [the right-wing political party].
I'm not excluding the possibility that peace negotiations will make progress, but I doubt that they will -- because thus far the United States has refused to do anything to head in the military. Until Washington gets tough with the Salvadoran military, it is going to continue the way it has, because it's immensely profitable.
The biggest savings and loan in El Salvador is the Social Institute of the Armed Forces, capitalizing on more than $100 million bled out of your pockets and my pockets. Not only do the Salvadoran army officers steal money individually, they are building up an institution so powerful and so rich that no democracy can ever control it.
The United States has not been willing to pay a sufficient price to end the war. And that's a truly unfortunate thing, because we could end it -- and by ending it, begin the rebuilding process. The price is doing to the Salvadoran military what we did to the contras -- simply cutting them off. The only other solution, absent a truly tough change on the part of the United States, is that the Salvadoran revolutionaries have to inflict some substantial defeats on the Salvadoran military, and I think they'll do that.
Sojourners: What do you think the four church women would have to say about the situation today? What is their legacy to us as we commemorate the 10th anniversary of their deaths?
White: I think it is painfully apparent to all of us who follow events in the Third World, and in particular in Central America, that while thousands of Salvadorans die, the only time you get attention to this dealing of death day in and day out is when Americans die. And I suppose there's nothing that Maura and Ita and Jean and Dorothy would be more opposed to than the idea that somehow American lives are worth more than the lives of the Salvadorans. Somehow this country has got to learn that to kill people to no purpose as we have been doing for the last 10 years in Central America is truly an outrage.
They, of course, have paid the worst price. But we've paid heavily -- in world prestige and in our own society. The U.S. government has moved to cover up outrageous things. You have to have some criteria -- not as high as the criteria perhaps of Sojourners magazine -- but you have to have some moral criteria or things really do fall apart.
We have spent ourselves, and damaged our political institutions at home, in this sort of holy war against communism. We took on misadventures in Central America. What we have done in Indonesia is now coming to light, and what we've been doing in Afghanistan through Pakistan, and in Angola -- all these different places.
We have paid the price in that we no longer identify in any way with the poor of the world -- they're the enemy to us. And that is exactly the opposite of the way the United States should look at things.
Certainly the deaths of Maura and Jean and Ita and Dorothy had a lot of meaning for a lot of people. They moved a lot of us to take a stronger stand against government policy. And I think that example will live a very, very long time. I certainly hope it does.
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