Whatever Happened to Radicalism? Voices from the George Vickers Papers

The following excerpts of interviews conducted by George Vickers and colleagues in El Salvador in 1988 and 1989 offer insight into the ongoing civil war from disparate perspectives. María Julia Hernández served as the first director of Tutela Legal, a human rights advocacy office created by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador in 1982, and played a central role in documenting political violence perpetrated by El Salvador’s military government and affiliated paramilitary groups. Colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda was a member of the ruling military regime, and is believed to have been one of several high-ranking officers that authorized the November, 1989 murder of Jesuits by Salvadoran soldiers.