Authors: Pete Earley
Howard Safir had handpicked the deputies on the flight: William Brookhart, Paul Brinson, Alfred Miller Jr., Paul Moreno, James Tafoya, and Charles Almanza, who would double as Shur’s interpreter. Along with their weapons, which included an Uzi submachine gun, they had packed survival equipment and maps in case they were forced to hide in the jungle. Also tucked inside the airplane’s cargo hold was a brand-new magnetometer, a metal detector, which they planned to install outside the judge’s courtroom. As the jet began its descent toward the capital city of San Salvador, the pain in Shur’s legs became more intense, but he kept silent and grabbed his carry-on bag from the overhead compartment after the plane landed.
The State Department had warned them not to trust anyone except U.S. embassy personnel. The Salvadoran military didn’t want the national guardsmen prosecuted, and killing Shur’s squad would be an effective way to intimidate the judge and stop the trial. The FMLN might also try to harm Shur and the deputies and then blame the attack on the government to stir up trouble between their country’s politicians
and the U.S. Congress. As Shur entered the terminal, he spotted a tall American dressed in a business suit standing near the gate. “Justice Department security team!” the man called out, waving an arm in the air. “Anyone on board from the Justice Department security team?”
“Keep walking,” Shur whispered to the deputies.
They passed the man and strolled around the terminal for several minutes until they felt confident no one was lurking nearby. Returning to the gate, Shur introduced himself.
“I’m here to drive you to the embassy,” the man explained. “Whew! I thought I’d lost you.”
“Another stupid move like this one and you
will
lose us, permanently,” Shur thought.
The deputies discovered their magnetometer had been stolen during the trip. “How’s that possible?” Shur asked. It was a heavy piece of equipment, and the only stop the jet had made after leaving the United States was a brief layover in Guatemala for refueling. Deputy Al Miller began making calls and learned the missing metal detector had been “confiscated” by Guatemalan customs officers when they rummaged through the plane’s hold during refueling. It was already being used at a Guatemalan airport to screen passengers.
Shur and the deputies were driven to the El Presidente Hotel, where the U.S. embassy kept a block of rooms reserved. It wasn’t going to be difficult for the national security forces or the rebels to find them here, Shur thought, since they were staying in the same hotel where the embassy usually boarded Americans. So much for security.
They asked for adjoining rooms so if one of them was attacked, the others could come to his aid. Once
inside, they began looking for electronic bugs. They found plenty. It didn’t matter. They’d already agreed they wouldn’t discuss anything about their mission unless they were in the U.S. embassy or on the streets walking together. “We were doing what John Gotti and other gangsters did back home,” Shur recalled later. “Gotti would walk up and down the sidewalk in front of his social club to avoid FBI bugs.”
By now an exhausted Shur was ready for bed, but the pain in his legs kept him from sleeping. The MS attack had not yet subsided. Around 10:30
P.M
. his room shook with a loud explosion. All six deputies came bursting in, guns drawn. The rebels had set off a bomb near the hotel, but the blast had nothing to do with their visit.
The embassy expected Shur and the deputies to spend their first day meeting various Salvadoran politicos and court officials, and although Shur was still feeling as if he were being stung by bees, he greeted each dignitary and questioned them about the nation’s judiciary. He was told the government couldn’t control its own national security force, and that corruption and threats were so widespread that only 5 percent of the defendants arrested for crimes were ever brought to trial. Having dispensed with the diplomatic and political formalities, Shur and his team planned to fly by helicopter the next morning to Zacatecoluca, where they would inspect the courtroom for the trial. Flying was safer than driving because of land mines along the jungle highway. That night Shur again had trouble sleeping, so just before dawn he took his camera and went outside to take a few snapshots. It was a clear, beautiful morning, and as he walked, his legs began to feel better. He noticed that men with guns were standing in the doorways of downtown buildings. They were
guards, and most of them were carrying weapons so ancient that Shur wondered if they would explode in their hands if fired. “I suddenly realized that these men were actually human alarms,” he said later. “If anyone was going to attack, the guards would be the first ones shot, and when the persons inside heard the shot, they’d have time to grab their own guns or hide.”
As he returned to the hotel, an older man carrying a World War I–vintage carbine stepped in front of him. “It’s okay,” said Shur. “I’m a guest here.” But the guard refused to move, barking out a stern order in Spanish. Shur didn’t understand. The guard nodded toward the camera and spoke again. Shur thought he might have inadvertently photographed some government building in violation of the law, especially when the guard swung his rifle off his shoulder and cradled it in his arms as if he were preparing to shoot it. Finally Shur understood. He snapped the guard’s photograph as he stood at attention. Less than a month later, the man would be dead, the victim of a sniper.
Deputy Almanza greeted Shur with bad news. There were no helicopters available. The embassy was sending over two cars. “What about the land mines?” Shur asked. “The drivers are supposed to know how to miss them,” Almanza replied.
Within an hour, they had left the city and were weaving through the lush mountain terrain along a rutty road when a tire on the lead car went flat. Shur and the deputies stepped from the two cars to stretch their legs while the driver began changing the tire. Suddenly Shur spotted someone moving in the brush. Then another. They were soldiers, but he couldn’t tell if they were rebels or national guardsmen. The deputy marshals had seen those two and more hiding in the jungle. “Don’t draw,” Shur said. “Let’s see if they are
friendly.” Almanza called out, and a soldier stepped from behind a tree. Instinctively the deputies formed a protective shield around Shur. The soldier asked what they were doing and where they were going. Almanza motioned to the flat tire and said they were U.S. health workers going to help some sick children up the highway. Shur glanced over at the car he had been riding in. The Uzi submachine gun was on the backseat. He didn’t think health workers usually carried machine guns, and he knew the weapons would be prizes worth the soldiers’ taking. Shur nodded toward the gun, and one of the deputies began easing toward the car to hide it. As Almanza continued talking to the soldier, the spare tire was quickly bolted into place.
“Got it,” the driver called out as he tossed the flat tire into the car trunk. “Let’s get out of here.” The men eased into the cars. Almanza was the last. If the soldiers were going to attack, they would have to do it now. Shur felt like a sitting duck as Almanza slipped into the space next to him. The two cars moved forward. One of the soldiers waved from the bushes. Shur began to relax.
Before they reached Zacatecoluca, the delegation stopped in a village to inspect its courtroom. It was inside a building that had housed a grocery store. The floor was dirt, and there was no electricity. Because it was hard to see inside the building, the local judge sat near the building’s huge front window. There was no glass, and anyone walking by could have reached through it and tapped the judge on the shoulder or, Shur thought, just as easily shot him in the head. With Almanza serving as an interpreter, Shur interviewed the local judge. He told them that soldiers in the area would often walk into the courtroom while a trial was in session and take a witness or a spectator away. Some
were beaten; others never returned from the jungle. “They’re watching you right now,” he warned them, motioning down the street. Four soldiers were lingering outside a store about a block away. Noticing that the courtroom contained only a desk and a few wooden chairs, Shur asked the judge where he kept his court files and records. “The trunk of my car,” he answered. “It has a lock.” The delegation stopped at another village and found the courtroom there just as barren. Yet Shur was impressed by the commitment of the local magistrate. He said he didn’t believe anyone could really protect him from the rebels or the national security force, yet he continued to hold court.
By the time Shur’s squad reached the Zacatecoluca courtroom where the national guardsmen were going to be tried, he felt a sense of inspiration. “Those of us who stand up for justice are the true soldiers,” he told Judge Bernardo Rauda Murcia. “We are the soldiers of truth.” Later, he would say that he had become caught up in the moment. “My sermonizing and theatrics caught the deputies by surprise, but I was truly moved. It is much easier to dispense justice in some marble federal courthouse that is well guarded in a nation like ours, which has a history of respect for the judiciary and law and order, than it is in a barren store in an impoverished, war-torn country. It was clear during our brief mission that even though guns were more powerful than the law, they could not deter these judges.”
When the judge asked Shur if he had any ideas about how to protect jurors, he replied: “Begin sequestering them.” A look of horror formed on the judge’s face. Almanza explained that the judge had interpreted the word
sequester
to mean “kidnap.” Shur apologized. “Here I had been lecturing him about how we were soldiers
of truth and then he thought I wanted him to begin kidnapping jurors. In a country where the national security forces were snatching up people every day, it had made him wonder just how concerned about justice I really was.”
Rauda Murcia’s courtroom was a large oblong room that had been divided into three sections. The judge sat behind a desk in front of a waist-high wooden railing. The defendants sat on a plain wooden bench behind the railing, which enclosed them like a box. Spectators sat closest to the door, behind the defendants.
“Where are the light switches?” Almanza asked.
There were none. “We don’t need them because we don’t hold court at night,” the judge replied.
The deputies quickly decided the best way to protect the court was by having two armed men stationed next to the judge, two more stationed inside the railing with the defendants, and several more at the room’s entrance. Now all they had to do was find guards brave enough to attend the trial. “When we returned to San Salvador, we asked officials from every component of the Salvadoran government whom they trusted most, and all said, without hesitation, the prison guards,” Shur recalled, “so we recommended that they be used for the trial of the nuns’ killers.”
The next morning they headed back to the airport. Shur flashed his diplomatic passport at the gate but the guard there wouldn’t let him pass without having him open his carry-on bag and step through a metal detector. Shur explained that he was carrying a gun—they all were—and they didn’t want to surrender it. They’d already lost a magnetometer to Guatemalan customs officials, and Shur didn’t want the weapons, especially the Uzi, to disappear. He also didn’t want to
be sitting in the gate area unarmed while waiting for the flight. Almanza and the security guard argued for several moments in Spanish, then the deputy told Shur that everyone could hang on to their weapons until it was time to board. Shur scanned the crowd. He was eager to get home to Miriam. Then Almanza had everyone put their guns into a bag, and with the security guard at his side, Almanza carried the bag onto the airplane and put it in the cockpit. After the airplane had pulled away from the terminal, he fetched it and walked through the cabin handing out pistols to his fellow deputies and Shur. He left the Uzi in the bag. Not a single passenger said a word.
“How’d you get that guard in the airport to let us keep the guns?” Shur asked.
“His bullets were old, so I gave him two of mine.”
Shur had to work fast back in Washington. The trial was scheduled to begin in less than seven weeks. He spent hours on the telephone handling logistics. Sixty Salvadoran prison guards had been chosen in San Salvador and were waiting to hear from him. Shur arranged for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, to fit the guards into its packed training schedule and give them courses in basic courtroom security, automatic-weapons firing, and evasive driving techniques. None of the guards spoke English, so the center’s training manuals had to be translated into Spanish. The deputies who had gone with Shur to El Salvador recommended the guards be given the best new equipment available so they could make a “show of force” that would cause national security forces and rebels to think twice before attacking the courtroom. The Marshals Service recommended they be provided with two dozen bulletproof vests, several cases of gas grenades, eighteen heavy-duty police
cars, two bulletproof SUVs, and two nine-passenger vans specially equipped to transport prisoners, along with a number of firearms. Money wasn’t a problem. The State Department and the Agency for International Development had set aside $800,000 for the purpose. The trouble was petty politics. While making arrangements, Shur learned there wasn’t enough ammunition at the Georgia training center for the M-16 rifles the guards were going to be shooting, and the ammunition manufacturer couldn’t deliver enough rounds in time for the training course. Shur was stymied until he learned the State Department had several crates of ammunition in a warehouse. Its security division didn’t want to share their bullets, and it took Shur a day of infuriating telephone calls and finally the intervention of a senior State Department official to get the crates delivered. Then, just when it seemed everything was falling into place, Shur was told by an Agency for International Development (AID) officer that her budget chief was refusing to charter an airplane to fly the prison guards to Georgia. Shur lost his temper. “Everything was ready to go,” he said later. “We had managed to do the impossible by getting the training center, which is booked months in advance, to find room for the guards. We had hired interpreters and found equipment, and now, because someone didn’t want to sign an authorization form, we couldn’t get the guards flown here.” Shur telephoned an airline charter service and hired a pilot, crew, and airplane for the trip, charging the entire bill to his credit card. Two days later, an AID official sheepishly agreed to pay for the flight.