The document is titled “From Madness to Hope: The 12 Year War in El Salvador.”
Weighing 3 pounds and measuring 2 inches thick, it contains 200 pages of compelling, single-spaced copy detailing the atrocities committed in El Salvador-and naming those who committed them-during more than a decade of civil war between the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government and leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.
Doug Cassel, a puckish, 44-year-old Chicago lawyer and professor, didn’t fight in that war. But his position as a counsel to the Commission on the Truth, formed by the United Nations in 1992 to compile the report as a requirement of peace accords signed last year that ended the war, made Cassel a key player in a dangerous peacetime drama.
The commission interviewed more than 2,000 Salvadorans and sifted through a maze of explosive information to determine who should be held accountable for the many human-rights violations during the 1980-92 war, including mass murders of civilians; executions of clergy, politicians and journalists; and ritualized tortures.
The commission did its job as an unwanted visitor in a still-dangerous, trigger-happy land. Neither side welcomed the UN nosing around in its recent, dark past, where the violent antecedents of the struggle are still alive.
“It was kind of rough going; we even had death threats faxed to us in our offices down there. Even though we were under constant guard, things were still so tense, we finally moved everything, all the documentation and everybody, back to New York.”
That’s why Cassel, who returned to Chicago only this month from New York, admits to feeling the mix of withdrawal, relief and sadness associated with battle fatigue.
“It almost feels eerie,” he said, “coming back to all this . . . serenity.”
The March 15 release of the report, which recommended the removal from political, judicial and military positions of scores of people-mostly military officers, including Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce, the minister of defense; Joaquin Villalobos, the former top guerrilla commander; and the entire Supreme Court-created an uproar in El Salvador and elsewhere.
Once again, the tiny country’s name was splashed across newspaper headlines worldwide, just as it had been when the land of 5 million people was singled out by the Reagan administration as the last stand against the spread of communism throughout Latin America.
Back then it received huge amounts of American economic and military aid-a total of more than $6 billion since 1981-during a struggle that took more than 75,000 lives, created a flood of Salvadoran refugees (1.3 million people) to other lands, and displaced 500,000 people within the country.
On a gloomy March morning, only a day before the Salvadoran National Assembly would, in defiance of stern UN recommendations, vote a general amnesty for all those named in the report as human-rights abusers, Cassel showed no frustration or anger over being thrashed in an editorial and op-ed page article in that day’s Wall Street Journal.
Both were highly critical of the commission’s report and its investigators and authors, who included Cassel.
After a few moments of thought, he carefully and concisely rebutted the negative arguments made against the report by the Journal, whose condemnation has been outweighed by praise elsewhere.
“In the end,” he said with prescience, “it is the Salvadorans who will decide how to proceed with the information in this document. My hope for them is that they will use the information to move them forward to national reconciliation and democratization … but there are problems, of course … and there are a lot of people down there who are still very afraid.”
Grace under pressure
Cassel had been beckoned for duty by Thomas Buergenthal, the Lobingier professor of international law at George Washington University Law School in Washington. Buergenthal is a distinguished jurist in the field of international human-rights law and was one of the three members of the Commission on the Truth. The other commission members were Belisario Betancur, former president of Colombia; and Reinaldo Figueredo, a former Venezuelan foreign minister.
Buergenthal describes Cassel’s work as “truly outstanding and splendid.” Cassel’s greatest strength, Buergenthal said, was that “he never lost sound judgment under enormous pressure.” He echoes Cassel when he adds somberly, “What was evident throughout the investigation was that nobody seemed to be immune from fear.”
That fear first touched Cassel when he was an observer for the American Bar Association at the 1991-92 criminal trial of Salvadoran Army Col. Guillermo Benavides and several other officers and soldiers. They were charged in the infamous, middle-of-the-night, execution-style murders of six Jesuit priests, the priests’ housekeeper and her teenage daughter in November 1989.
In January 1992, Benavides and a lieutenant were sentenced to 30 years in prison for their parts in the killings. But the commission report states that Gen. Ponce, who was not charged in the case, ordered the killings and participated in a cover-up after the murders.
The trial was held as the U.S. was sending signals to the Salvadorans that its patience and wallet were wearing thin, and that because of the international scorn heaped upon the Bush administration for continued U.S. aid to El Salvador, as well as internal congressional and public pressure, further military aid would be dependent upon a conviction in the trial.
That infuriated the Salvadorans, many of whom had adopted a defensive, grudging attitude toward their nearly complete dependence on the U.S.
Assumptions shot down
“I had assumed,” Cassel said, “with a fair degree of justification gained from a couple of previous short visits to make contact with members of human-rights organizations, that for the most part Americans were granted a fair degree of protection.
“But the Jesuit trial was an astonishing experience for me from every point of view.”
Cassel said he went to El Salvador feeling immune from the savagery around him. “It was a very highly visible, internationally observed proceeding,” he said, “and I was there wearing the mantle of the American Bar Association.
“For the first couple days of the three-day trial, I didn’t have any concerns for physical safety. Security was very tight-lots of heavily armed people around, the jury was hidden behind a wall. …”
His voice trails off, then a knowing, grim smile crosses his face as he recalls his first real brush with fear in El Salvador.
“On the morning of the last day of the trial, during defense closing arguments, we began to hear demonstrators’ chants outside the courthouse, beyond the first security perimeters, two blocks away: `Justice for the defendants,’ `Foreigners go home.’ And within minutes, I realized they were right outside the courthouse, which meant that the people supposed to be protecting us had allowed them to cross all the security perimeters . . . and the demonstrators were led by a colonel.
“The judge sent someone to stop the chanting, but they refused, and it became obvious to everyone in the courtroom that the judge was powerless to stop them. Nobody knew how far it would go, and then we heard the aircraft buzzing the courthouse … all this in the context where the judge was racing to get the trial over with quickly and it was well known that the prosecutors would be leaving the country as soon as possible after the trial.
“In fact, one of the prosecutors who did not leave the country was the victim of an assault which nearly killed him and left him a paraplegic.
“In this environment, for the first time what struck me was, if I felt this much fear as an American who was going to be leaving right after the trial, how could the jury have felt, and the judge?
“Now, I don’t think I can ever feel fully the fear they feel, but it certainly was an eye-opener, or a psyche-opener if you will.”
Epiphany in Spain
The “psyche-opener” was not the first for Cassel, who was born to a “typical white middle-class family in which I was raised through a series of white middle-class suburbs, as sort of a Barry Goldwater Republican.
“In 1964, at the age of 16, I spent an academic year in Spain. I remember reading in Time magazine before going that Generalissimo Francisco Franco was an outpost of democracy against the communist menace in Europe. I got to Spain, and quickly learned that what I had been told by the American media did not square with what I saw in Spain, and that changed my world view dramatically.
“I did not become one of the ’60s `bombers,’ but I became convinced that American foreign policy during the Cold War was profoundly mistaken in measuring everything in its impact on Moscow instead of the impact on the people in countries where we had influence.”
After Spain, it became clear to Cassel that he was not destined to become a businessman or toil for a corporation. He went to Yale, then to Harvard Law School, where he spent time working on civil rights cases.
He was a Navy lawyer for three years before joining the Chicago-based, privately funded group Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, where he handled cases ranging from a class-action suit against the FBI for political surveillance and harassment of activists to various consumer and environmental lawsuits.
During that time he began to make trips on behalf of human-rights organizations to Central America and the Middle East. By 1989, he was convinced he wanted to work in international human-rights law full time. “It was absolutely compelling for me,” he said. “These cases were the real thing, the difference between life and death.”
He worked out an arrangement with De Paul University Law School-where he is now a professor of international human-rights law-and private contributors to create the International Institute of Human Rights at De Paul and serve as its executive director. The institute acts as a technical adviser to human-rights organizations and provides training in international human-rights law, as well as programs for lawyers wishing to do free human-rights work.
Cassel lives on the North Side with his wife, Bea, and their young daughter. He has two other children from a previous marriage.
A devil’s advocate
Cassel put all his legal skills to the test working for the UN commission.
“I was what you would call a devil’s advocate,” he said. “I had to provide an internal layer of monitoring of the investigations, which would in turn provide credibility for authors of the report. And what we uncovered-even though much of this information was out there … was astonishing.”
The investigation was slow going at first, with people reluctant to talk and suspicious of the anonymity offered. But little by little, and with repeated interviews, missing bits and pieces of some of the most infamous human-rights abuse cases in El Salvador emerged.
One case, Cassel said sadly, “made me feel, for one of the very few times in my life, ashamed to be an American.”
El Mozote. In El Salvador the name is synonymous with the long-reported massacre of as many as 700 civilians in 1980, in the village of El Mozote and four nearby hamlets, by members of the elite, American-trained, special forces Atlacatl battalion, led by Salvadoran Col. Domingo Monterrosa, who was murdered by guerrillas in 1984 and buried as a national hero.
The report confirms that the massacre took place and names the assassins. It contains information, Cassel said, that diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador knew and steadfastly denied, probably so the Reagan administration could provide Congress with required human-rights certification before Congress’ granting more economic and military aid to El Salvador. Cassel worries about the impact of the report on Salvadorans, and about the safety of the people who gave information to the commission.
People have been threatened, and some witnesses have fled the country under UN supervision. And it’s far from clear whether the report, more candid and far-reaching than most people expected, will move the Salvadorans toward national reconciliation and democratization, or again ignite the volatile political and social differences underlying the war.
Back in Chicago, Cassel draws a deep breath before somewhat wistfully answering a personal question about him and the report that shook a nation.
“I would say, in the light of the current feeling there about the report, that it would probably be a good idea, at least for a while, if I were to avoid going to El Salvador … probably for a significant length of time.”
