![]() ![]() How to Balance Safety and Openness for America’s Diplomats Different as they were, both men shared a willingness to risk their lives in the name of justice. It is the tale of an improbable bond between a Salvadoran soldier with a guilty conscience and a young American diplomat with a moral conscience. embassy in San Salvador tracked down the killers has never been told. But the full story of how one of the most junior officers in the U.S. In the years since, much has come to light about this pivotal event in the history of U.S. This time, he vowed, the Salvadoran government would not get away with murder, even if it cost him his career. White, grim-faced and tieless in the heat, knew immediately who was behind the crime. Investigators would conclude that all had been sexually assaulted before they were dispatched with execution-style gunshots to the head. The women were dressed in ordinary clothes-slacks and blouses. The black-and-white photos snapped that day document a grisly crime. Two days later, White and a crowd of reporters gathered as the bodies of the four Americans were pulled by ropes from a shallow grave near the airport. The NYPD Is Kicking People Out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven’t Committed a Crime.Within hours, all four women would be dead. The next day, after breakfast with the ambassador’s wife, they drove to San Salvador’s international airport to pick up two colleagues who were flying back from a conference in Nicaragua. Because of a curfew, the women spent the night at the ambassador’s residence. The women were alarmed by the incoming Reagan administration’s plans for a closer relationship with the military-led government. The talk turned to the government’s brutal tactics for fighting the country’s left-wing guerrillas, in a dirty war waged by death squads that dumped bodies in the streets and an army that massacred civilians. They worked in rural areas ministering to El Salvador’s desperately impoverished peasants, and White admired their commitment and courage. On December 1, 1980, two American Catholic churchwomen-an Ursuline nun and a lay missionary-sat down to dinner with Robert White, the U.S. ![]()
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