The US-backed regime was at war with a growing leftist insurgency born out of frustrated peaceful movements for democratic reforms and an end to the semi-feudal and oligarchic distribution of wealth and power in the country. In a bid to stave off any revolutionary aspirations sparked by Cuba in 1959 and enflamed by Nicaragua in 1979, the United States pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the bloodthirsty Salvadoran military as its forces massacred entire villages; murdered and disappeared tens of thousands of civilians; and assassinated opposition politicians, labor leaders, priests, and even, as Markey’s book vividly recalls, US-born nuns. [...]
Her first overseas mission was to Nicaragua in 1959, the year that Castro triumphed in Cuba, overthrowing the US-backed Batista dictatorship. Maura’s mission, however, had no such revolutionary ambitions. Quite the opposite: she flew from Miami to Managua with the mother-in-law of Anastasio Somoza, the head of the National Guard and key figure in the despotic ruling dynasty that, as Markey observes, “ran Nicaragua more as a business enterprise than as a nation.” [...]
In 1970, Maura began to work in the slums of Managua. This time, her mission was very different. She and her colleagues shared their neighbors’ poverty and their struggles; she accompanied her community as it became increasingly active in social movements met with escalating state repression and marched beside them in the streets, supporting students occupying the National Cathedral and ministering to hunger strikers demanding the release of political prisoners. Following the devastating 1972 earthquake, she organized CBCs in a refugee camp and supported the community’s campaigns for dignified living conditions. [...]
Nuns in El Salvador were receiving death threats from the US-backed military regime and its associated paramilitary groups. The right-wing extremists that governed the country trumpeted the slogan, Haz patria, mata un cura (“Be a patriot, kill a priest”), and after Romero’s murder, it was clear that no one was safe. In accepting the mission, Maura knew that there was a chance, even a likelihood, that she would meet the same fate as the archbishop. She went anyway.
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