Trust and Betrayal
by Diane Joy Schmidt

Thirty-eight years ago this Sunday, on the night of Dec. 2, 1980, four American Catholic missionaries, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, and lay worker Jean Donovan, who were working with the poor in El Salvador, were taken in a planned kidnapping from the airport there and beaten, raped and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers. This tragedy finally pierced America’s consciousness.

Since the 1800’s El Salvador had been run like a feudal aristocracy; subsistence farmers were pushed off their lands to make way for coffee plantations that they then had to work on as impoverished peons. The landowners, who made up an oligarchy known as the Fourteen Families, worked hand in glove with the church and the military. They brutally crushed revolts and any attempts at land reforms. Those who helped the poor were labeled communists.

After the American churchwomen were killed, our U.S. Secretary of State General Alexander Haig, under President Ronald Reagan, tried to paint them as pistol-packing nuns who might have tried to run a road block. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to stop backing the oligarchy. Twelve more years of civil war followed. It took Haig twelve years to finally admit that what he said about the nuns was a lie. Today El Salvador is controlled by gangs. The farce

that we told ourselves for years, that we could help the country evolve into a civil democracy, was too little too late. Those in power never had any intention of giving up anything.

The question is, did we learn anything from the deaths of these martyred women? I always thought that what would save the United States from civil war was that we have a strong middle class, and that we believe in the rule of law. Also, that there is a wide range of opinion, of diversity of thought. But now the middle class is seeing its gains slipping away. And when people become fearful, they become polarized and they become violent. And the rule of law is more brazenly now compromised by politics, by those who stand to gain from weakened rules.

We have a president, for now, in the White House who wants to deny the scientific realities of climate change simply because it’s inconvenient, because oil money still makes the world go round. He simply doesn’t care whether or not the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia gave the orders to kill a Saudi citizen and Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, to dismember him with bone saws, and likely dissolve his remains in a vat of acid. The decisions this president makes are recidivist, decisions that are criminal, that are making us a weaker country.

Were the churchwomen’s deaths in vain? Have we betrayed their memory? We are going down the same path in this country that led to civil war in El Salvador. Betrayal takes many forms.
Earth herself must feel betrayed by its trust in us, her children.

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Trust and Betrayal, by Diane Joy Schmidt
Spiritual Perspectives, Gallup Independent 12/1/18
Tenth Anniversary of  first Spiritual Perspectives column, Dec. 2008.
Award: 2019 New Mexico Press Women, 3rd Place, Editorial/Opinion published in printed newspaper, for Gallup Independent.

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