A voice from the grave.

• Author: Helvarg, David
• Position: Sister Ita Ford, one of four murdered relief workers in El Salvador

In early April, The New York Times reported that four Salvadoran National Guardsmen who were convicted and jailed for killing three American nuns and a lay worker in December 1980 confirmed they acted on orders from higher-ups.

The outrage over the rape and murder of the churchwomen threatened to derail the Reagan Administration's efforts to arm the Salvadoran military. Secretary of State Alexander Haig claimed the nuns might have tried to run a military roadblock. Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, hinted that as "activist" nuns they could have expected trouble.

But to those of us covering the war in El Salvador at the time, it was clear that Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke, and Jean Donovan were the latest victims of state-sponsored terrorism carried out by El Salvador's military. All you had to do was count the dozen or more mutilated civilian bodies scattered around San Salvador every morning after the army curfew was lifted.

Only this time, the military chose American churchwomen.

I knew Sister Ita Ford. I had interviewed her just a few weeks before her murder.

The night before I met her, I was under fire in the rightwing-controlled town of Arcatao on El Salvador's northern border with Honduras. The guerrillas were firing on the police station.

I was stuck inside with a squad of drunken national guardsmen, who were firing blindly into the street while drinking TicTac cane liquor. During the firefight, the radio inside the police station blared The Wall by Pink Floyd.

Across the cobblestone street was an abandoned convent. Death to communist priests and nuns was scrawled on the building in white paint, along with Be a Patriot, Kill a Priest, and a white hand imprint.

"The colonel of the local regiment said to me the other day that the church is indirectly subversive because it's on the side of the weak," Ita told me. "And I guess maybe in the last ten or twelve years there has been a change in the church .... The church has begun aligning itself, `taking a preferential option for the poor.' The governments find this difficult to handle. It's very contradictory to their National Security ideology."

The church refugee center where we met among the red tile roofs of Chalatenango seemed a place of tranquility and reflection. A thoughtful and attractive woman, small, light-boned, and watchful, Ita was casually dressed in jeans and a cotton blouse.

We sat at a low wooden table on a couple of plastic school chairs...