The Assasination of the Nuns

On December 2, 1980 at the beginning of the civil war in El Salvador the nuns Ita Ford, Maura Clarke and Dorothy Kazel and the secular missionary Jean Donovan were raped and murdered by five members of the National Guard. All four belonged to the orders of Maryknoll Sisters and Ursulinas Sisters.

In 1984, the five Nacional Gurad members were sentenced in El Salvador to 30 years for the crime. Three of them were released four years later. The rape and murder of the nuns by hired assassins of the military forced the U.S. to suspend its military aid to the Salvadoran government… for one month.

The Committee of Lawyers for Human Rights in New York began a lawsuit in 2000 against two Salvadoran generals accused of ordering the assassination of the American nuns. The accused generals are Eugenio Vildes Casanova and Jose Guillermo Garcia. When the massacre took place, the former was head of the National Guard, and the later the Minister of Defense. Both live in Florida.

The generals were declared innocent of any responsibility in the kidnapping, rape and assassination of the nuns in a Federal Court in Florida. Two years later, in another case, they were sentenced by the same court to pay 54.6 million dollars to three victims who were tortured during the civil war in El Salvador.