DEATH & LIES IN EL SALVADOR: Robert White's journey from dutiful Foreign Service officer to dutiful critic of American foreign policy.
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
DEATH & LIES IN EL SALVADOR The ambassador's tale Margaret O'Brien Steinfels By the time Ambassador Robert White was posted to El Salvador in 1980, he knew full well that politics could be...
...And the idea that I'm some sort of martyr—well, I'm not...
...He also remembers White going to Communion surrounded by bodyguards...
...He said, 'God will protect us.' I asked, 'What if he is only protecting you?'" "So, we joked about that," recalls White, but he had a serious purpose in visiting Romero...
...Journalist Anne Nelson (now director of international programs at the Columbia School of Journalism), who covered El Salvador in 1980 and intermittently through the decade, remembers the bodies on the streets, the nights full of gunfire, and journalists working under death threats...
...He pursued any avenue that would provide a dialogue with the opposition...
...They were totally committed to helping poor people...
...The election of Ronald Reagan a month earlier, on November 4,1980, brought a dramatic shift in events...
...It required systematic misrepresentation to the U.S...
...He describes his transition from foreign-policy supporter to foreign-policy critic as an evolution and not a conversion...
...Throughout his tenure, the ambassador had to resist Pentagon pressure, especially from the Southern Command in Panama, to send military advisors...
...Working with the poor, no less than the dress code, marked them as troublemakers...
...I thought [Cardinal Joseph] Ratzinger had a point when he said that the poor of the Gospels do not equate to the masses of Marx...
...They wanted to say in El Salvador, this is what we could have done in Vietnam, had we not been saddled by reporters, by columnists—all those liberals...
...On the morning of December 3,1980, when U.S...
...If you want to work things out you have to talk about it...
...Talking one way and acting another is, White argues, what ultimately undermines national security...
...Yet even among progressives, White saw contrasting, and sometimes contradictory, tendencies...
...policy had always opposed the left...
...Reagan's election was greeted with noisy enthusiasm among Salvador's oligarchs...
...In the fall of 1979, White was named ambassador to El Salvador, which on October 15 had installed a five-man junta headed by a progressive young military officer, Colonel Adolfo Majano...
...It was a tough problem, but not insoluble...
...The oligarchy and the military (D'Aubuisson again the lead man) had eliminated a forceful proponent of reform in El Salvador...
...That summer, Sally Guttmacher, now professor of health studies at New York University, led a group of U.S...
...That evening I asked, 'Can you talk about this?' He said, 'No, I cannot.' And, you know, he has never talked about it to me...
...I think I got off into a little flight of fancy...
...In fact, to his mind the rightwing oligarchs constituted the greatest obstacle to the emergence of a centrist government and its effective control of the police and military—an assessment White offered frequently, loudly, and publicly, especially to conservative gatherings...
...But Castro's effort to export the Cuban revolution was a challenge to what White describes as the "colonial office atmosphere" of the U.S...
...He joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he began to write and speak out against Reagan's policy in El Salvador and in Central America...
...Commonweal 15 October 26,2001 Mrs...
...From 1963 to 1976, White did what the best Foreign Service officers do: built relationships with local leaders, observed the intellectual and political tendencies of opposition figures, reported his findings regularly to the State Department...
...You can't be angry at them...
...News accounts of White's modus operandi portray a man who spoke forthrightly and on the record to journalists about the political situation and who pressed the U.S...
...The end of the road Mary Ann and Bob White had met Dorothy Kazel and Donovan at an American Thanksgiving service in San Salvador on November 20...
...On arriving at her new home, MaryAnn White recalls opening the door to the garden and being shoved back against the wall by a security man who warned her, "Your neighbors would like to kill you...
...Even though military dictator General Carlos Romero was gone, Salvadorans continued to live in a state of terror...
...You have to tell the truth within institutions...
...And so he tried to convince Haig...
...The nuns were in El Salvador "because they had a vocation," he now explains...
...A memory for names, faces, conversations, and policy details is among the prized attributes of the effective diplomat...
...When [Secretary of State] Cyrus Vance or [his deputy] Warren Christopher went to the Hill, one of the human-rights-friendly senators or congressmen would ask, 'Can you point to a single place where the human-rights policy has made a difference?' They would all say, 'Paraguay.'" And indeed, that policy in White's hands unsettled the regime: he saved the lives of several political activists, helped to preserve a precarious labor movement by diplomatic interventions, and exposed the fact that the Nazi war criminal, Joseph Mengele, held Paraguayan citizenship...
...case, with unflagging energy, to the military, the oligarchy, the politicians, and the guerrillas...
...White's performance in Paraguay earned him the approval of the State Department and the ire of Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C...
...policymakers...
...That may actually have been the memory that changed him...
...More than that, he is a witness to the hubris of American power abroad when it forsakes the ideas and principles that contain it at home...
...A certain "quotient of idealism" led him to apply to the Foreign Service...
...She wasn't buying it...
...The women did not wear religious habits...
...The critical year Nineteen eighty was a pivotal year for El Salvador...
...White, listening from the sidelines, heard the man next to her say of her husband, "If I had a gun, I'd kill him...
...In an interview published in the Progressive (September 1981) after his dismissal, White summed up his outlook, "Look, I am—or at least I was—a disciplined Foreign Service officer...
...Because CIA records from this period remain classified, there are many unanswered questions about how much this intransigence was sustained, and even legitimated, by the CIA's involvement with the Salvadoran police and military...
...Still, his flight of fancy captures the powerful crosscurrents that beset U.S...
...My message was, 'We should work together.'" Was that possible or even likely...
...foreign policy...
...President Mohammed Najibullah warned the Americans that the country could become another Iran, if the fundamentalist forces being armed by Washington came to power...
...Garcia asked White the same question later in the day...
...Meanwhile, as if on cue, the Salvadoran right had delivered a series of blows designed to cripple the human-rights policy and to force a return to the familiar anti-Communist Commonweal 18 October 26,2001 script...
...Though the Nicaraguan Jesuits were instrumental in the Sandinista revolution, that didn't worry White, "as long as they were people committed to Nicaragua...
...You can do a lot of terrible things...
...White believed "that the progressive church had a very important role to play in stabilizing El Salvador, moving it toward a reform that would blunt revolution...
...foreign policy...
...We became fast friends...
...In mid-May, White and his deputy, Mark Dion, were besieged for two days by rightists sympathetic to Major D'Aubuisson, who was temporarily jailed for conspiring to overthrow the government...
...The military and the oligarchy refused to accept that a resolution of El Salvador's problems lay in political and economic reforms and not in gunning down every critic of the status quo...
...foreign policy as White began his career...
...DEATH & LIES IN EL SALVADOR The ambassador's tale Margaret O'Brien Steinfels By the time Ambassador Robert White was posted to El Salvador in 1980, he knew full well that politics could be a deadly affair...
...But, he adds, many people were killed and in horrible ways in El Salvador...
...For the time being, White continued as a Foreign Service officer in Washington, sharing a basement office with outgoing Secretary of State Edmund Muskie...
...The real challenge was international...
...White's predecessor as ambassador did not think it could be done—and fearing for his life, asked to be relieved of his post...
...foreign policy in the form of citizen diplomacy...
...There was this perpetual conflict between Vance and Brzezinski on everything/' including the priorities the United States should have in Latin America: democratic reform or support of military regimes in the name of anticommunism...
...His light blue eyes are hooded as he remembers the ins and outs of his diplomatic posts in Nicaragua and at the Organization of American States, in Paraguay and El Salvador, and runins with Washington powerhouses Jesse Helms and Henry Kissinger...
...Finally on December 7,1980, Colonel Alfredo Majano, the head of the junta, was forced out and replaced by Napoleon Duarte, an ambiguous figure who had been fairly elected president in 1972 but robbed of his victory by the military...
...As soon as Secretary of State Alexander Haig took office at the end of January 1981, he announced, "international terrorism will take the place of human rights," as the priority of U.S...
...Nonetheless, he seems to retain all of the instincts of a sturdy pre-conciliar faith...
...He also objected adamantly to the State Department's claim that progress was being made in the investigation of the deaths of the four churchwomen...
...Haiti: in 1987, White served as an election observer in Haiti's first free election in thirty years...
...She challenged Bob directly, 'How can you be working for these schmucks with this policy?' And he replied, 'Look, you have to be practical...
...Some nine thousand other Salvadorans—peasants, union organizers, political leaders, anyone considered a subversive by men like D'Aubuisson—were murdered in the course of 1980...
...unlike the State Department, the agency has not responded to Freedom of Information requests for documents...
...There was a need to take a stand against communism...
...The deaths of the churchwomen figure in that evolution, but in White's view not as directly as others (even his wife) believe...
...Twenty years later, White still believes that "had we had a united policy in Washington to achieve a peaceful solution to El Salvador's problems in 1980-81, it could have been done...
...he is quoted in news accounts saying, "This time the bastards won't get away with it....The bastards won't get away with it...
...Over the course of the next year, the civilian composition of the junta would go from a coalition of center-left representatives including a businessman and a social democrat to a coalition of center-right representatives with Christian Democrat Napoleon Duarte, made president in December 1980...
...Institutions cannot function on lies...
...Then you had the extreme right represented by the [Robert] D'Aubuisson crew, who would just kill anybody"—and did...
...Quigley now distances himself from the comparison: "I made some criticisms that I would take out [of the article] today...
...The research and writing of this article were funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc...
...The embassy and the ambassador's residence came under siege by right and left alike...
...The ambassador arrived in an armored limousine accompanied by an advance car and a chase car...
...His ability to stay on message shows up in transcripts of radio and TV broadcasts...
...Consul Patricia Lasbury in San Salvador phoned Chief of Police Lopez Nuila to report three nuns and a layworker missing, she was asked whether the nuns were in habits...
...White, eager to put his "quotient of idealism" to work, saw the Alliance as "a framework on the side of progress toward democracy...
...On November 27, six leaders of the moderate-left FDR were seized at a meeting in a Jesuit high school...
...The police clubbed members of the entourage, including Laino and White...
...policy shifted with Jimmy Carter's election in 1976...
...To be yanked like that, without a new assignment in hand, violated established Foreign Service procedures...
...But in El Salvador the extremes were extreme indeed...
...two right-wing coup efforts were turned back, and opposition party leaders (FDR) continued to talk...
...After serving in Hong Kong and Ottawa, in 1963 the Whites and their five children (ages five months to seven years) were posted to Ecuador...
...The junta's efforts to curb abuses by the military were met with denial by Defense Minister Garcia...
...From a cold-war liberal he has become a liberal internationalist with an abiding commitment to diplomacy as a means of bringing change and a deep skepticism about military power as a tool of foreign policy...
...Though White fired the CIA station chief on arriving in El Salvador, he felt he was always having to circumvent the agency's ubiquitous meddling...
...This intransigence led over several months to the resignations of the junta's moderate civilians...
...a few days later Zamora was seized at home by a death squad and shot a dozen times in the face...
...D'Aubuisson in protest parked her Mercedes across the exit of the driveway...
...But after December 4, when he witnessed the disinterment of four American women murdered by Salvadoran soldiers, his life would never be the same...
...The nuncios lived in a world where any kind of social conflict disturbed what they see as that tripartite order of the rich, the military, and the church working together...
...There were a lot of the [American] business community associated with the Salvadoran military and oligarchy who were very unhappy at this kind of an ambassador...
...Photos taken two days after the killings show White, fists clenched at his side, turning from the shallow grave...
...They drew some correct and understandable conclusions about the need for change from their experience working with the poor and with refugees...
...now began to underwrite with increasing amounts of military aid...
...White watched these and other tensions develop in his several posts, not simply as a Foreign Service officer, but as a Catholic able to read the ins and outs of church politics and to find in the clergy a rich source of information and insight...
...Some Americans priests "were sort of knocked out" by that combination, though most "weren't intellectually up" for the kind of analysis it required...
...The Southern Hemisphere did not normally attract ambitious young Foreign Service officers...
...But White's other goal, stemming the human-rights abuses, proved elusive...
...At age seventy-five, White skillfully deploys that asset in recalling the past as well as offering a quick analysis of current U.S...
...Then, just days before leaving office, Carter approved, over White's objections, $5 million in lethal military aid, including automatic rifles and combat helicopters...
...There was a need for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, which were enlightened and adequate responses to the challenge...
...Today she speculates that she mistook White's concern for their safety (the U.S...
...As we were leaving, [National Security Adviser] Zbigniew Brzezinski said, 'Do you want troops down there?' 'No,' I said, 'I think really that's the last thing I want...
...Guttmacher was suspicious...
...Kazel, an Ursuline sister, and Donovan, a laywoman, were picking up a group of Maryknollers, including Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, the next day...
...The one thing that I felt," White says, "and I think it was due to my Catholic upbringing, was that you had to have some fidelity to truth, to fact, and that lying is destructive...
...In contrast, White considered himself to be in El Salvador pursuing an ambiguous and difficult political strategy that involved working with a government compromised by its ties to the military...
...The four churchwomen were raped and murdered on December 2. On January 4, the head of Salvador's land-reform program and two American colleagues, with links to the American labor movement and the CIA, were gunned down...
...MaryAnn White remembers that one of the first things her husband did in a new country was to make contact with the political opposition by attending their meetings, teaching at the local university, and playing tennis with them...
...envoys to be removed from their posts, including White in El Salvador and Lawrence Pezzullo in Nicaragua, was leaked to the press...
...Melrose was overwhelmingly Protestant, which, White quips, kept you Catholic...
...Commonweal 13 October 26,2001 The Carter interregnum U.S...
...A man who once confined his opinions to cables and diplomatic pouches soon became the master of the op-ed Commonweal 19 October 26, 2001 piece and the dissenting public speech...
...White saw this process at work in the late sixties and seventies in Honduras (1965-68), Nicaragua (1970-72), and Colombia (1972-75) where, he observes, he "served in practically nothing but dictatorships...
...he has blasphemed against the idols of the state...
...I felt compelled for ethical reasons to dissent from the policy as it developed...
...rather, the aid appeared to be an endorsement of the military and death-squad violence...
...The GI Bill, the ticket of many Catholic veterans to higher education, sent him to Saint Michael's in Winooski, Vermont, in 1948...
...White did not understand himself to be, in Quigley's metaphor, "a Caesar strutting on the stage...
...These contending views had consequences for everyone, including American missionaries...
...The Catholic Church in El Salvador, as in virtually every Latin American country, had traditionally been the ally of the rich and powerful...
...Who was lying...
...that, despite the guerrillas' call to arms in January '81, there was little chance of a revolutionary takeover...
...The decision to testify could not have been easy for White, who saw himself as an insider...
...military intervention, was forced from the State Department in 1981...
...He was both aggressive and courageous, refusing to isolate himself in the embassy...
...Cuba: over the last decade, White, with distinguished delegations of former diplomats and military officers, has visited the island in an effort to encourage a post-Castro transition to democracy and to urge the United States to ease economic sanctions...
...He also recalls in lively detail a strong mother, a tight-knit family, a good parish with able priests, and a friend, David Rice, who shared a love of reading and a penchant for debating the truths of Catholicism...
...policy than setting up this opposition between the free press and its version of what was happening and the actual policy," a policy shrouded in lies and secrecy that played itself out during the eighties in the duplicity of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Elliott Abrams...
...White rejects any grand explanations for his last-ditch stands in favor of the Carter policy, even as Carter was abandoning it, or his refusal to accede to a Reagan administration coverup in the deaths of the four churchwomen...
...Citizen diplomat White's departure from the State Department did not, however, end his foreign-policy work...
...When I was in college many of us were under the delusion that most of the domestic problems of the United States were well on their way to solution...
...But now when the missionaries and clergy were turning the people on to their rights as human beings, that was something quite difficult for them to cope with...
...He could be described as a cold-war liberal given a reality check in Latin America...
...As far as I am concerned," he told Juan de Onis of the New York Times (January 22,1982) "there is no reason to believe that the government of El Salvador is conducting a serious investigation...
...On their arrival, Ambassador White immediately invited the group to the embassy, which Guttmacher remembers looked like a fortress, its interior "a maze of halls and locked doors like a prison...
...Sometime over the course of the next six months, the civilian members of the junta and Colonel Majano will have to insist on the ouster of those in the army and security forces who permit and encourage torturing and killing innocent civilians in a brutal effort to end political action...
...No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God...
...Meanwhile, Mrs...
...The decisive step came, White insists, when "people asked me to lie about the facts...
...The Carter administration and its policy of leveraging human rights with military aid was also unraveling...
...Would it fall to a left-wing guerrilla movement as Nicaragua did in July 1979...
...Were they great political analysts...
...what need have we of further witnesses...
...Everybody hated [President Alfredo] Stroessner," he recalls...
...This was the assessment he made in a report that month to Washington: "If the systematic viCommonweal 14 October 26,2001 olation of human rights in the countryside does not cease, all the agrarian and banking reforms in the world will not help...
...I was truly offended at that—Caranzza had the worst record on human rights...
...Colombia: over the last several years, White and his colleagues at CIP have provided in briefings, articles, and their own newsletter a steady and critical analysis of U.S...
...Despite what he describes as a "spotty high-school record," he threw himself into the study of history, from the Greeks and Romans to the twentieth century...
...Subsequent revelations and declassified State Department documents show not only that there was no serious investigation but that a cover-up by the Salvadoran military had been under way from the beginning...
...The group was confronted by Korean police who seized and placed Jung under house arrest...
...South Korea: in 1985, White, with the knowledge of the State Department, led a delegation of prominent Americans that returned Kim Dae Jung, South Korea's current president and Nobel Prize winner, from exile in the United States...
...Even today White still argues what he implicitly said to Jean Donovan: "Historically, the only way things have ever gotten done in [U.S.] foreign policy was from the inside, working for change...
...The leverage argument didn't convince them...
...Members of the embassy staff joined them and the Whites for dinner...
...In March, at a welcoming party given by the local American association, Mrs...
...That's not something that's really accepted in the Foreign Service...
...After we had talked for half an hour, the archbishop said, 'Well, ambassador, why don't you just come ride with me.' He's got this Volkswagen...
...Their mutilated bodies were found the next day...
...Congress and the American public by the Reagan administration concerning the atrocities of the Salvadoran military, which the U.S...
...Add to that a Catholic sense of limits to dissembling and lying—even for one's country...
...policy in Colombia, including military aid and the wholesale use of pesticides to curb the drug trade...
...Guttmacher's suspicions of White proved unfounded, but they were not, given the state of the country, implausible...
...Jean was ebullient and had a great sense of humor, very sure of what she was doing...
...I think they were drawing on their experience...
...This made life difficult and dangerous, even in the upscale neighborhood of the ambassador's residence...
...White believes that he held that respect until he became an active critic of Reagan's policy in El Salvador...
...If, unlike Romero, White did not want military aid cut, that was because he considered it his chief diplomatic tool in the struggle to support the moderates and curb the military...
...government...
...I knew Gustavo Gutierez [of Peru], who was an impressive man...
...In April, MaryAnn White's embassy office (she was evacuation coordinator) was shelled twice by a guerrilla faction with Chinese rockets...
...You had Cayetano Carpio of the FPL (Popular Liberation Forces), a total fanatic," whom White compared to Cambodia's "Pol Pot left...
...In the Salvadoran military lexicon "good" nuns wore habits, "bad" nuns did not...
...Not to recognize that Russia, the Soviet Union, was a threat to the United States seemed to me to be nourishing illusions," he says...
...On Thursday (December 4), their bodies were discovered and Robert White, despite his counsel to Donovan, was an angry man...
...The ambassador saw their differences lying largely in their distinctive roles and purposes...
...instead, it created a far broader portfolio...
...Finally, on February 21,1980, the Foreign Relations Committee on a vote of 10-2 sent the nomination to the Senate floor...
...Congressional critics of the new Reagan policy wanted White's assessment on the public record...
...Fostering that center meant that White talked with everyone who would talk: members of the FDR (Revolutionary Democratic Front), Majano, the Christian Democrats, thenColonel Garcia (the defense minister), the Jesuits at the UCA (University of Central America)—all had a willing conversation partner...
...And finally, I was more of an activist than a scholar...
...White and Pezzullo entered vigorous protests against this effort to undermine their positions and U.S...
...I tried to tell Haig, you're not going to do it, not with the tools available to you, not with the forces available to you...
...After graduation in 1952, he studied in England on a Fulbright, returning a year later to attend the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts...
...In El Salvador itself, more than nine thousand people were killed in the year he arrived...
...The fault line in White's own role became clear in the events that quickly followed that friendly dinner...
...White had breakfast upstairs with Kazel and Donovan, their overnight guests...
...In February 1980, D'Aubuisson accused Mario Zamora, the solicitor general, of links to a guerrilla group...
...publichealth workers to El Salvador to investigate charges that Salvadoran doctors and nurses were killed for treating the wounded, and that the military entered hospitals, seizing patients along with doctors and nurses...
...Or could it, as the Carter administration hoped, evolve through this junta in a moderate and democratic direction...
...White didn't necessarily agree with the criticism of U.S...
...Nelson declares in retrospect, "White had an impossible job...
...parties and gun bursts celebrated the man who would save them not only from revolution but from reform and from Robert White as well...
...That witness appears to be rooted in a sophisticated sense of patriotism and a religious and ethical understanding of the limits to what one may say or do for one's country...
...Even today, two decades later, the CIA's activities in that time and place remain obscure...
...D'Aubuisson protests...
...Other clergy he found more challenging and troubling...
...They invited the two to dinner on December 1 and to stay the night...
...Reagan's conservative allies and appointees conjured up the threat of Soviet subversion with El Salvador and Nicaragua on the front lines...
...It proved to be an effective recruiting device for younger career officers who normally would have preferred cold-war hot spots in Europe and Asia...
...The military and the oligarchs had "a whole idea of the church as pie in the sky," as essentially concerned with the world to come, observes White...
...Much as White shared Romero's analysis, he was uneasy at the archbishop's call: "It seemed to me unlikely that it would have much positive effect and that it had a huge capacity for a negative effect...
...Death threats and demonstrations followed...
...White in action At Sunday Mass, March 16,1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero read from a letter he had written to President Carter urging Commonweal 16 October 26,2001 him to end all military aid to El Salvador...
...White, along with many of his Foreign Service colleagues, "kept sending back reports advocating less identification with military dictators and more encouragement of democratic forces, who were not necessarily enemies of the United States, but actually drew their inspiration from our leaders and from our institutions...
...The deaths had a profound impact...
...The extreme right will keep on trying to convince the conservative officers to return to their natural alliance with the rich...
...Other Americans were also at Archbishop Romero's Mass on March 23...
...in 1993, White served as an advisor to the democratically elected and exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the Governors Island Agreement that returned Aristide to Haiti...
...By the following morning (Wednesday), Kazel and Donovan, along with Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, were dead and hastily and secretly buried...
...Under the Torture Victim Protection Act, the two were charged in an unsuccessful civil suit with command responsibility for the abduction, rape, and murder of the four American churchwomen...
...The ambassador recalls with some amusement that Mrs...
...So persistent were these differences that by the end of the Carter administration, the foreign-policy apparatus was derisively referred to by friend and foe alike as the fudge factory...
...In White's view the sermon struck "at the heart of the Salvadoran social order where the military, in effect, garrisons an unjust society, and takes out either through intimidation or death anybody who is a serious dissenter...
...Two of the women, Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy Kazel, had spent the night of December 1 as the guests of Mary Ann and Robert White at the embassy...
...He was born September 21,1926, and grew up, the oldest of five, in Melrose, a working-class town near Boston...
...On December 5, President Carter cut off economic and military aid to protest the American churchwomen's deaths-—only to restore it on January 13...
...In a memorial Quigley wrote for The Witness (September 1980), he compared Romero's death to the Passion and death of Jesus, "He is stirring up the people...
...On December 11, Patricia Derian, Carter's assistant secretary of state for human rights, said that comments by the Reagan transition team had contributed to the murders of the women...
...But was democracy really possible in a country that had a long history of political violence and limited judicial procedures, and almost no history of democratic practices...
...It is also no easy matter to extract from Robert White an explanation for his public dissent as ambassador and the end of his career in the Foreign Service...
...funding for the Alliance gradually evaporated as the war in Vietnam escalated through the 1960s, finally leaving only military aid for counterinsurgency programs...
...It is no easy matter to extract from Robert White an extended reflection about his religious faith...
...they were a terrible thing...
...Amid the fear and paranoia, the chaos and the killings, White worked to sustain the ever-shifting political center...
...His testimony was part of the evidence brought against General Carlos Vides Casanova and General Jose Guillermo Garcia, Salvadoran military officers now retired and living in Florida...
...I wanted to contribute to making things better...
...policy in El Salvador became a contested arena between the outgoing Carter administration and the incoming Reagan one...
...Despite this shift in composition, the Carter administration believed that the coalition had to be supported...
...Working inside, of course, meant "that the respect that really matters is the respect of your colleagues...
...But, they—the colonels, the military, the police, and the Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal...
...Visits from members of the Reagan transition team to El Salvador gave the elite and the military reason to understand that concern for human rights was being downgraded in favor of wiping out the Communists...
...At age seventeen, he had joined the World War II Navy, and then served in the Pacific...
...They may have a particular view, but talking to them I found out what was going on...
...Such views reflected White's commitment to a middle way, a centrist, democratic El Salvador...
...He also knew Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J., the rector of the UCA "who I thought had gone too far into a Marxist definition of things...
...Some of the priests were Basques or Catalans, revolutionaries from birth...
...Now it was a church divided between that alliance and the call of the gospel as put forth by the Latin American bishops at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, by liberation theologians, and by foreign missionaries...
...Since Alexander Haig dismissed him in 1981, White has exercised his considerable skills as a diplomat in policies affecting trouble spots around the world...
...In any case, U.S...
...Garcia and Vides Casanova, who had tolerated and encouraged those abuses, retained power in El Salvador with the blessings and financial support of the U.S...
...On December 13, Senator Helms demanded White's resignation, calling him "one of the most irresponsible and inept ambassadors that the United States has ever sent abroad...
...U.S...
...During the Reagan administration, White says, there was "a consistent tissue of lies about El Salvador, about Nicaragua, about what we were doing in Honduras, and in Guatemala...
...But we lost most of the time...
...For example, White listened to Jean Donovan, the night before she was murdered, argue that "there were some real reasons for revolution...
...I don't go out looking for windmills to joust...
...The first week in December, shortly after the four churchwoman had been killed, a Reagan transition team critique of Carter's policy and a "hit list" of U.S...
...Yet, that very sense of himself as a disciplined Foreign Service officer may be what led to his dissent and going public...
...A number of Salvadoran military and political leaders were on its payroll...
...The two diplomats finally broke out in an armored Cadillac amid a contingent of Marines and a cloud of tear gas...
...But the price for the metamorphosis of the Carter policy into the Reagan policy was more than millions of dollars...
...When Ambassador White returned home that day, Mary Ann White remembers him being "very quiet and terribly upset...
...Helms likened White's confirmation to "a torch tossed in a pool of oil...
...He asked me who I was and where I was going...
...Those who could left the country...
...policy in Colombia and Cuba...
...those who remained lived under the threat of torture and violent death...
...Although six National Guardsmen were convicted of the murders in 1984, no one believes they acted independently...
...White offered the group assistance, and "he wanted to know where we were going and whom we were meeting with...
...policy...
...Sitting in the congregation, White felt that Romero was addressing him directly...
...nor would he be deterred by the violence and subterfuge around him...
...Paraguay: in 1986, White and a group of Americans attempted to return Domingo Laino, an opposition leader, to his country...
...The cold-war impulse to support a "primitive anticommunism" made the United States "anti-union, anti-free expression," often opposing local reform efforts inspired by American values...
...visas, "made perfectly decent men and women pariahs in their own countries," marking them as unacceptable to the U.S...
...The problem came—and here I have to go into Latin America—in the developing world where we fought proxy wars that really did not need to be fought...
...The next day Archbishop Romero was shot through the heart while saying Mass...
...Commonweal 10 October 26,2001...
...Congressional differences were mirrored in the Carter administration itself...
...The priests and the bishops of the church in Latin America were almost always very, very well informed...
...You can go to work as a lobbyist for the country that you were once accredited to, but you can't dissent...
...The death of the four churchwomen opened the final chapter of Robert White's tenure in El Salvador, and as it turned out, in the Foreign Service as well...
...The Kennedy White House hoped to change all of that by a combination of cold-war strategies and social reform...
...government and are still fending off lawsuits in the United States...
...This combined with an intellectual anti-Americanism and a very progressive liberation theology—boy, that was a tough mix...
...You already knew where the government was...
...The former ambassador has described his twenty-five-year Foreign Service career as "failing upwards...
...Haig was not interested in White's analysis...
...I told him I was in the Foreign Service on my way to a new post...
...The Carter administration's emphasis on human rights and its embrace of detente gave White and like-minded Foreign Service officers a framework that loosened the straitjacket of anti-Communist policy—but inevitably created tensions both with Latin American countries and in Washington itself...
...Five months after going public in his congressional testimony, White was "retired" from the Foreign Service...
...Anything resembling "faith sharing" is not a mode that comes readily to a person deeply formed in the preconciliar church...
...and finally, that the Reagan administration's request for $25 to $30 million in military aid would undermine rather than support the civilian government...
...And "it wasn't just the Salvadorans," she recalls...
...He looked at me and said, everyone knows they send the dregs of the department down there...
...In six weeks, the Salvadoran military had wiped out center-left politics, crippled the land-reform program, and given notice that American missionaries and reformers (even those with CIA connections) were not exempt from the tribunal of the death squads...
...If you let this man go, thou art no friend of the United States...
...When White arrived early in March, his assignment was to encourage the growth of a political center and to discourage the flagrant human-rights abuses of the military and the death squads (usually the military in civilian dress), which were driving moderates and leftists into political alliances with the guerrillas...
...To that end, the Alliance for Progress was organized in 1961 under the auspices of the Organization of American States (OAS) to bring social and economic change...
...The Whites belong to their local parish in Alexandria where, he pointedly notes, there is very little preaching on social justice...
...The $5.7 million "nonlethal" military aid package (communication and transportation equipment) that White considered his leverage with the military was the subject of strenuous objections not only by Romero but also by the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) and others who favored Carter's human-rights policy but opposed support for the Salvadoran military...
...Diplomats are the consummate bureaucrats trained and sworn to carry out the foreign policy of their country, shaping their public speech and actions to those ends...
...That was a searing memory...
...The crosscurrents and tensions in Washington were more than matched by those White encountered in El Salvador...
...You can't be insulting.' He tried to explain to her his view of the situation...
...She also recalls how "hard it was to figure things out...
...State Department had issued an advisory against travel to El Salvador), and feared that names on their itinerary would fall into the hands of Salvadoran intelligence...
...He congratulated the ambassador on doing a fine job in El Salvador and summarily and unceremoniously removed him from his post...
...In Nicaragua and Honduras, White watched with sympathy the development of "third-way" projects, usually Jesuit-sponsored workshops promoting Christian Democratic unions and political parties on a European model...
...It was one of the few professions where you could do work that was intrinsically interesting—and get paid for it...
...A Sandinista-like government was a future that some Catholics saw as the solution to the grinding poverty and inequities of El Salvador...
...it is better that one man die...
...policy while Carter remained in office...
...A nice conceit, but like many Irish-American Catholics after World War II, White's whole life could be said to have "failed upwards...
...But Senator Helms did not want an activist human-rights ambassador in El Salvador and held up White's confirmation for four months...
...He was subpoenaed and appeared on February 25 before the House Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations...
...White once referred to him as a "psychopathic killer...
...At the same time, Garcia gradually transferred progressive officers from San Salvador, the capital, to rural posts, and sometimes abroad...
...In retrospect, he concedes that the Alliance "may have been the product of wishful thinking, in effect, asking the elites of Latin America to preside over their own destruction...
...The next morning, Tuesday, December 2, Defense Minister Garcia came to have one of his regular breakfasts with the ambassador...
...And so was Nicholas Caranzza, head of the Treasury police...
...The papal nuncios usually had a very different viewpoint than the local bishops...
...When White was given his first ambassadorial post in Paraguay in 1977, he had an opportunity to probe how committed Washington was to the new human-rights policy in concrete circumstances...
...And I said I hear the same thing about the New York Times...
...Last October, White testified in federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, about conditions in El Salvador during his time as ambassador...
...He would concede only that rogue elements in the National Guard might be responsible for some deaths, but insisted against all logic that it was the guerrillas who were killing peasants and workers...
...But he was not done with El Salvador...
...There were contending versions of liberation theology...
...Who was telling the truth...
...He testified that the Salvadoran security forces were the country's chief killers...
...Before leaving for El Salvador, White attended a National Security Council meeting...
...Duarte was on the CIA payroll," White points out...
...Foreign Service in Latin America...
...And then, she recalls with a sad nod of her head, "I saw them off at about eleven o'clock...
...In the final calculus, she believes that the deaths "just made him determined that this was not going to happen again...
...Policies, such as refusing U.S...
...They came with two other American missionaries, Father Paul Schneider and Sister Christine Rhody...
...This new aid, the president said, was based on State Department assurances that progress was being made in investigating the deaths of the four churchwomen...
...deputy chief of mission at the OAS (1975-77...
...The following Sunday, March 23, the archbishop called in his sermon for Salvadoran soldiers to lay down their arms, "Thou shalt not kill...
...Those eyes open in a steady gaze as he delivers a pithy conclusion or a brief story: "When I was a young officer flying to Latin America, I sat next to Juan de Onis, the New York Times reporter...
...In February, the junta had agreed to land-reform measures and a change in banking practices...
...In favoring democratic reform but refusing, even more strongly, to countenance another leftwing government in Central America, wasn't U.S...
...As president of the Center for International Policy since 1990, White continues to try to influence U.S...
...But the Reagan conservatives wanted to demonstrate an ability to crush revolutions...
...In 1955, he was appointed a Foreign Service officer and wed Mary Ann Cahill, a field director for the Girl Scouts, who had promised to marry him when he got a real job...
...After his youthful stint as a radioman in the Pacific in World War II, White returned home to Melrose to help support his family...
...policy in El Salvador among Catholics as among U.S...
...If you've got a Pentagon that's overfunded, and you've got a CIA that's overfunded and the State Department is underfunded, and AID has practically no money, then you're going to get policies that emphasize the wrong things for a democracy to emphasize...
...He is certainly among those who embraced the changes the council brought to the church and its stance toward the world in the 1960s...
...Sitting in his Washington office at the Center for International Policy (CIP) in the spring of 2001, White summons that past, those people and events, with virtually instantaneous recall...
...White remembers a lively and friendly evening...
...policy, in effect, ultimately supporting a brutal status quo...
...The allegations, which turned out to be true, were a violation of the Geneva Conventions...
...White's aggressive and very public promotion of human rights and democracy in Paraguay made him the ideal candidate to help foster a moderate democratic regime in El Salvador and forestall a takeover from the left like that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in July 1979...
...As ambassador to Paraguay in the late 1970s and, earlier, as a Foreign Service officer in several of Latin America's similarly unsavory dictatorships, he had confronted human-rights abuses, violence, even murder...
...You didn't have to live in penury the way you did at universities...
...There was, in his assessment, "no surer way of undermining U.S...
...The experience of December 4 would lead him on an unexpected journey from successful American diplomat to candid critic of U.S...
...By contrast, Ambassador White, who had flagged the abuses of the military and refused to acquiesce in U.S...
...And that is where I drew the line...
...In contrast, White often found reforming local priests "less radical because they were far Commonweal 17 October 26,2001 more deeply immured in the reality of their country...
...Tom Quigley of the USCC remembers Romero processing up the aisle, "a little bit like Christ entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday...
...The plaintiffs were the families of the victims, Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan...
...The rules are clear: selfdiscipline, honest reporting in cables, discretion, silence, and acquiescence in policy made by elected leaders...
...oligarchy of El Salvador—did get away with it...
...There, introduced by Secretary Vance, he was given advice by various cabinet officers...
...After Reagan's inauguration, Alexander Haig recalled White to Washington...
...He drew White into his gospel metaphor, "Caesar, too, strutted upon this stage, unwitting and unwilling, perhaps, but present nonetheless...
...And despite his far-reaching criticisms, he retains a conviction that the United States has a positive role to play in the world...
...Sociologists often refer to White's generation as preVatican II Catholics...
...The process was disrupted by violence and the election was postponed...
...White would have none of it: shortly after Reagan's election, he refused to sign a request for lethal military aid, ostensibly from him but in reality from the Army's Southern Command in Panama...
...Now, as it turned out, he was on the payroll of the CIA...
...I view this as a [situation] that can be solved by political means.' And he kind of just shook his head...
...At two points he stepped out of the normal Foreign Service career track, first to serve as Peace Corps director for Latin America (1968-70) and later as U.S...
...Mary Ann White, having retired from a Girl Scouts outreach project for the greater Washington area, works with Hispanic immigrants...
...If the CIA did not object to these practices, why should Garcia and other military leaders take the ambassador's admonitions seriously...
...Afghanistan: in 1988, White and former ambassador to Tehran William Sullivan led the first delegation of Americans to the country since the Soviet invasion...
...I was fired by Commonweal 12 October 26,2001 the Nixon White House for opposing politicization of the Peace Corps, reprimanded by Henry Kissinger for speaking out on human rights, and finally, definitely dismissed by Alexander Haig for opposing a military solution in El Salvador...
...Shortly after arriving in early March, White had paid Romero a visit...
...in White's tenure the right was criticized as well...
...Hhat journey continues...
...White considers that the "CIA had its own agenda and it was not necessarily the agenda of U.S...
...policy that he heard that evening from Jean Donovan, but he was not going to stand by and let Salvador's brutal death squads and their American apologists get away with this atrocity...
...Would the tiny nation of 5 million people revert to military rule by the extreme right, which had kept it one of the most oppressive and inequitable societies in Latin America...
...Nothing but dictatorships Major cold-war tensions—the war in Korea (1950-53), the Cuban missile crisis (1961), and the Berlin Wall (1961)—dominated U.S...
Vol. 128 • October 2001 • No. 18
