Saturday, July 27, 2024

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt six)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

Having heard Juan tell his story in public, Roberts knew he would make an ideal plaintiff, but she felt ambivalent as his friend. “Litigation can be horrible,” she said. It could dredge up old traumas, provoke threats, and invite unflattering press. There were two cases in development. Vides Casanova and García were the defendants in both. Juan would serve as a plaintiff in the second. The first was being filed on behalf of the four American churchwomen raped and murdered on December 2, 1980. The brother of one of the victims, Bill Ford, was adamant that his sister would have wanted her case to include Salvadoran victims. In 1998, Ford had convinced attorneys at the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights to travel to El Salvador to interview four National Guardsmen who’d been arrested and imprisoned for the crime. From that trip, the lawyers had learned the whereabouts of Vides Casanova and García. At least a thousand war criminals from all over the world were living in the US at the time, including many Salvadoran military officers. On war refugee bumped into his torturer on a public bus in the Bay Area. The man who had killed Óscar Romero sold used cars in Modesto, California. A colonel implicated in the assassination of the Jesuit priests in 1989 had a job at a candy factory outside Boston.



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