The Execution of the Maryknolls

We came to a place where we saw some campesinos. I leaned out of the window and shouted to them in Spanish: “Do you know anything about these women, white women, that something happened to out here?” And one of them said, “Oh, si,si, just down the road, around the turn, around a corner, in an open field.” At that moment, of course, we didn’t know if what he was saying was true. Then he showed us where the bodies of the four women, who turned out to be American Maryknoll nuns, had been dumped. I remember feeling this phenomenal tension, because the guy was standing there with a machete, implying that the women were buried there, and that we would be next – that kind of thing. We had been there a very short time when Robert White, the American ambassador, drove up with this big caravan of security people. Soon other journalists began to arrive. Then people began digging and pulled out the four American nuns. It was really quite shocking to see the bodies of the women, who had been both raped and executed.