Not too long after that, two of her best friends were murdered immediately after walking Jean home. She thought about leaving El Salvador. “I almost could,” she wrote, “except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.”
On the evening of December 2, 1980 Jean and Dorothy drove to Comalapa International Airport to pick up Maura and Ita, who were arriving from Nicaragua. On the way home the women were stopped by the National Guard, kidnapped at gunpoint, raped and executed. Their bodies were left to rot in a shallow roadside grave. The Salvadoran regime claimed that the women had been the victims of a robbery.
This was a very convenient lie for the incoming Reagan administration, which was obligated to prove to Congress that El Salvador was making progress on human rights as a condition for continued US aid. Reagan was unburdened by any of the human rights concerns that his predecessor Jimmy Carter claimed to care so much about, and the new president turned a blind eye to the most horrendous abuses as he ramped up military and economic aid to El Salvador. Secretary of State Alexander Haig even had the audacity to go before Congress and declare that the four American churchwomen may have been responsible for their own deaths.
