The 30th anniversary commemoration of the women's kidnapping and murder featured the presentation of the Maryknoll Sisters' Justice Award to Bill Ford's wife, Mary Anne. Other Ford family members and relatives of the other women also attended the reception in the Rayburn House Office Building, as did several members of Congress, former Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., many members of different religious orders and representatives of the Obama administration and the Salvadoran ambassador to the United States.
Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner, head of the department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, presented Mary Anne Ford with a Salvadoran-made plaque commemorating her husband's work to shed light on the women's deaths and on the U.S. role in supporting the repressive Salvadoran government.
Posner recalled that at the time of their deaths, he was part of the fledgling Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights when he got a call from the Maryknoll Sisters informing him about the women's deaths and asking for legal help...
"We never felt we completely got justice," Posner said. But with the help of Dodd, former Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and others in Congress who pushed for an investigation and prosecution, the trial of the guardsmen in El Salvador was "the first break in a culture of impunity," he said.A well-deserved honor for Mr. Bill Ford, who died of esophageal cancer in 2008 at the age of 72.
It's said that two US Senators considered friends of Latin America were lost in the most recent election. Senator Dodd retired and Senator Specter lost his primary race. I'd much rather have Dodd and Specter making a five country tour of Latin America (Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Panama) than McCain and Barrasso. We all know how McCain's 1985 trip to Chile went.
Okay, that was a bit of a cheap shot.
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