Hernandez, Maria Julia

▪ 2008

      El Salvadoran human rights activist

born Jan. 30, 1939 , Honduras

died March 30, 2007 , San Salvador, El Salvador

devoted her life to chronicling and investigating the abuses and massacres committed by right-wing paramilitary death squads, which were believed supported by the U.S., during El Salvador's civil war (1980s and early '90s), as the founder (1983) of Tutela Legal, a Roman Catholic-based human rights group. Hernández was teaching law at the University of Central America, San Salvador, when Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero recruited her to help support his human rights activities. After Romero was murdered in 1980 by death squads, she continued to seek evidence of paramilitary abuses and to work toward bringing these killers to justice. She documented the slaughter in 1981 of several hundred villagers in El Mozote with the testimony of the lone surviving eyewitness to the massacre, Rufina Amaya (who died on March 6, a few weeks before Hernández), and sought to prosecute the perpetrators with the help of evidence from forensic anthropologists. She also investigated the deaths in 1989 of six Jesuit priests slain on the campus of the University of Central America. Though a Truth Commission was established, an amnesty pardoned those involved in the killings that took place during the civil war. Nonetheless, Hernández continued to minister to the families of the dead and to work for social justice.

* * *