“At that point they were killing the soldiers in the buses,” Bolduc told The Catholic Register in an e-mail interview.
El Salvador went through a brutal, seemingly endless civil war from 1979 to 1992 — not a war of armies maintaining defensive lines but of death squads, village massacres and manipulated elections. In the end the United Nations counted 75,000 dead, among them Archbishop Oscar Romero, three American religious sisters and a lay missionary raped and murdered, and six Jesuit university professors along with their housekeeper and her daughter.
Into the middle of this war the Congregation of Notre Dame decided to launch a new mission. This month the sisters — who are based in Montreal — are celebrating 25 years of continuous service in El Salvador.
“I experienced fear on several occasions,” said Bolduc. “But as Amabilis and I both said, it is dangerous to be on the streets but we didn’t come here to remain in the house.”
Bolduc and Deveau set up in a poor village that was then outside of the capital, San Salvador. They went about doing exactly the sort of things missionaries do everywhere — training catechists, running youth groups, visiting the sick and the elderly bringing them Holy Eucharist. But the context was violence.
“I was very affected by the deaths of the six Jesuits, Elba and Celine (Ramos) and what it did to Obdulio, Elba’s husband, whom I also consider one of the UCA martyrs, though he only died in ’96,” Bolduc wrote.
On the ninth anniversary of the rape and murder of Jean Donovan, Sr. Dorothy Kazel, Sr. Maura Clarke and Sr. Ita Ford, Bolduc found herself one of the readers at a memorial service in El Salvador. She later visited the site where the bodies had been hidden. Of course the figure of Romero, murdered by a military death squad as he said Mass in 1980, was no less a presence for the missionaries.
Bolduc, who taught psychology for 15 years at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., only realized how much the war had entered her subconscious when she was in Montreal in the mid-1990s for a couple of courses in missionary theory. One morning in 1995 a helicopter flew near the institute where she was staying, probably reporting on traffic. Her heart raced. She was suddenly aware of every sound. She was ready to run.
“I was unconscious of the reason for the physical reaction to the helicopter until I worked through this,” she said.
Though El Salvador has demilitarized gradually over the last 20 years and held fairly respectable elections, violence is not a thing of the past. The Institute for Economics and Peace in the United States ranks El Salvador 112 out of 162 in its 2013 Global Peace Index, putting it among the top 25 per cent of most violent countries.
“Our presence in the three Central American countries where we minister is more necessary than ever,” Bolduc said. “Since the end of the wars, there has been an increase in violence, poverty, corruption, extortions, kidnappings and gang activities.”
Bolduc and Deveau never voluntarily stepped back on account of the danger. After the University of Central America massacre it was the regional council of the CNDs who decided Bolduc should go with the young sisters in studies to Rafael Landivar University in Guatemala. Up until the UCA murders, Bolduc had been preparing young women in formation to attend the Jesuit school in San Salvador.
“I asked that another sister be named to accompany (the students to Guatemala) so that I could remain in San Salvador with Amabilis,” wrote Bolduc. “However, this was not permitted.”
She returned at the end of 1992, as the peace process was fitfully taking hold.
Today, at 81, Bolduc has no regrets.
“As countless missionaries I have known over the years, neither would I trade my life for another,” she said. “After 27 years of formal education in my own country (the United States), I came to Central America to be with the people, to accompany in whatever way I could. I have been so enriched over the years.”
The job is not done, nor will it ever be. Today, mining and hydro-electric projects are dividing communities and pushing people out of their villages and traditional way of life. The sisters today are helping rural people directly affected by resource development be heard by their own government.
“The bonanza is a myth,” Bolduc said.
Promises made to host communities are broken. Government revenues from the projects are too small in relation to the investors’ take, said Bolduc.
This is the land and these are the circumstances where liberation theology thrived 25 years ago. In Bolduc’s mind there’s no such thing as evangelization that leaves people still chained by ignorance, oppression and injustice.
“Liberation theology has been a catalyst for awakening of many people in these countries where there are so many serious problems,” Bolduc said. “We must become a real Gospel people, called to stand up to the many injustices which prevail.”
Ultimately, someone else will decide how long Bolduc will continue her work in El Salvador. But she knows her own mind.
“When I arrived in ’84 my desire was to remain here until death,” she said.