María Julia Hernández Apr 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition
María Julia Hernández, fighter for human rights, died on March 30th, aged 68.
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WHEN forensic teams from Argentina dug in 1992 into the earth at El Mozote, in the mountains of eastern El Salvador, they first came upon a reddish rubble, mixed up with the roots of thorn-plants and weeds. A little deeper they uncovered small, thin skulls, some of them blackened by fire. Underneath these were bundles of what seemed to be brown rags: the blood-soaked cotton dresses, trousers and socks of what had once been children, killed more than a decade before. The pockets of some still held their lucky plastic toys.
The forensic work at this, the most dreadful killing-field of modern Latin America, was memorably reported by Mark Danner in the New Yorker. But it might never have been carried out, and the massacre of 794 people, overwhelmingly civilians, in December 1981 might never have been forced to the world's attention, if María Julia Hernández had not been on the case. She was in charge of the Socorro Jurídico, later the Tutela Legal, which during El Salvador's murderous civil war of 1980-92 kept track of human-rights abuses for the archdiocese of San Salvador. She was therefore the person to whom Rufina Amaya Márquez first told her story.
Rufina had been the sole survivor of the massacre. When the troops of the elite Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran army had come to the village to flush out leftist rebels, she had been locked up with the other women. She had seen her husband beheaded with a machete; her baby daughter had been torn from her breast. But as the women were led away Rufina managed to hide beside a crab-apple tree, and the screaming of the others distracted the soldiers from seeing that she had gone. When night fell she crawled away into the maguey plants, her skirts knotted up so as not to hamper her, and dug a little hole into which she could press her face to weep without being heard.
Miss Hernández took all this down. She was a homely, sympathetic sort, who in her old-fashioned print dresses looked much like a priest's housekeeper; but she had been a professor of law at the University of Central America in San Salvador, and would fix those who tried to deceive her with a stony, intellectual stare. Since 1978, as El Salvador slid into disorder, she had been compiling for the archdiocese a book of the dead. These were the corpses left by right-wing death squads in the city streets most nights, their faces dissolved by battery acid and their backs or chests scored with the tags of their killers. Her colleagues would take photographs, and relatives of the missing would come to her office to leaf through the portfolio in the hope, or fear, of finding them. But El Mozote was an atrocity beyond any of this.
For years, with a lawyer's thoroughness and steely determination, Miss Hernández amassed the evidence. The government would not help; it denied that anything had happened, and dismissed Tutela Legal as a guerrilla front. The Reagan administration, intent on stamping out communist infection, agreed that Miss Hernández was a trouble-maker. She was undeterred. In 1989 six Jesuits were shot dead at her old university; Tutela Legal did the first investigation, and found that the army had ordered it. In 1991 her office published the first investigation into El Mozote, including the names of all the dead.
The signing of peace accords the next year ended the civil war, set up a Truth Commission and led to the dig at the site of the massacre. Miss Hernández had the names of those responsible; but in 1993 the new government declared an amnesty for all of them. She kept going, campaigning to overturn the amnesty and to bring the killings before the Inter-American Court of Justice. On her death the case had been reopened and, with her help, evidence was slowly being gathered again. She was also publicising corruption and brutality in El Salvador's police force.
The heart entire
Her life was full of risks, cheerfully faced. Each day, settling to her work in a room as bare as a nun's cell, she began with a prayer: "Well, God, will I see you today, or will you leave me a bit longer, fighting?" Papers carrying death-threats were often pushed through the door. She drew strength from her dearest friend, Oscar Romero, who in 1977 had become archbishop of San Salvador and had set up the human-rights office. Like Christ calling the disciples, as she liked to remember it, he had summoned her from the university, "and I didn't really know how to [follow him], but I said yes." Once she went searching for the archbishop, out into the countryside, and found him saying mass for the campesinos under a tree. From him she learned to love and defend the poor; and when he too was murdered by a death squad, at the altar, in 1980, she felt bound to continue the work he had begun.
She died relatively young, from a heart attack, in the same month that Romero had been killed and on the very day of his burial. Salvadorans found a fascinating symmetry in that. Miss Hernández had liked to show visitors where he was buried and to tell the story that, though he had been shot in the chest, his heart had been undamaged. She was sure it was still whole under the earth, evidence of his continuing power to encourage her, just as the reddish soil at El Mozote had preserved, in blood and bones, the truth.
