Should Christian Contributions to Transitional Justice Focus on Reconciliation? Learning from El Salvador

Summary

INTRODUCTION

November 2009 saw the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the notorious massacre of six Jesuits, their housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her daughter, Celia, at the University of Central America. March of 2000 commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the following December marked the kidnapping, rape, and murder of the four American churchwomen – Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan. Such commemorations are important for the world, but they are especially important in El Salvador because of the way in which memories of injustice have been systematically denied and repressed. All of these figures were deeply committed to peace in El Salvador, but they insisted that the way to attain authentic peace is through justice. Their lives were rooted in a Catholic Christian faith and enlivened by the Second Vatican Council, according to which the church is most herself when she walks in solidarity with the poor and advocates policies to end structural injustice.

Thirty years after Romero's martyrdom, we are now in the age of “transitional justice” in which the language of reconciliation has come to play an increasingly important role in our moral lexicon. This is particularly true of Christian ethics, especially after the public successes of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its charismatic chair, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The international acclaim of the TRC (not always articulated as loudly in South Africa itself) sometimes tempts us to forget that the language of reconciliation was employed in El Salvador, as well as in Chile and Argentina, well before the South African experiment was conceived. Yet human rights activists in Latin America often suspect that appeals to reconciliation amount to a subtle attempt to evade accountability. Nowhere is this more the case than in El Salvador, whose history from colonialism to the present has been pervaded by impunity.

The church promotes mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation as primary expressions of the virtue of charity, the grace inspired love of God and neighbor. Christian contributions to transitional justice around the world have often focused on reconciliation.