Ita Ford

Ita Ford, M.M. (April 23, 1940 – December 2, 1980) was a Roman Catholic Maryknoll Sister missionary to Bolivia, Chile and El Salvador. She worked with the poor and war refugees. On December 2, 1980, she was tortured, raped, and murdered, along with fellow missionaries Maura Clarke, M.M., laywoman Jean Donovan, and Dorothy Kazel, O.S.U. They were killed in El Salvador by members of a military death squad of the right-wing Salvadoran military-led government.

Life and work
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 23, 1940, Ford was the daughter of William Patrick Ford, an insurance man who took early retirement due to tuberculosis, and Mildred Teresa O'Beirne Ford, a public schoolteacher. She had an older brother, Bill (1936-2008), and a younger sister, Irene. The family lived at 1029 56th Street in Brooklyn.

William Patrick Ford was related to the prominent Catholic publisher Austin Ford, who immigrated to the United States after a publication calling for social justice in Anglo-Irish relations was banned in Ireland. Austin's son, Francis Xavier Ford (1892-1952), was the first seminarian to apply to the newly-established Maryknoll Fathers in 1911 and, after being ordained as a missionary in 1917, went to China, where he became a bishop and a martyr. He died in a Communist prison camp there in 1952, when his young "cousin" Ita was twelve.

Though her mother taught in the public school system, Ita Ford was educated in parochial schools, beginning at age five in the Visitation Academy in Bay Ridge, run by the Visitation Sisters, a semi-cloistered order. She attended Fontbonne Hall Academy, a high school operated by the Sisters of St. Joseph, where she worked on the school newspaper. Finally, from 1957 to 1961, she attended Marymount Manhattan College, founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. (Marymount Manhattan split from its mother school, Marymount College, in 1961).

Following in her relative the Bishop's footsteps, Ford had confided in a high school friend at the age of fifteen that she not only wanted to be a nun, she specifically felt called to be a Maryknoll missionary sister. Even before her college graduation in 1996, Ford had a vocational counselor advising her about her fitness for Maryknoll. She formally entered the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic at the age of twenty-one. Three years later, due to ill health, she had to leave the novitiate.

After working seven years as an editor at a publishing company, Ford reapplied and was again accepted by the Maryknoll missionary order in 1971. After serving briefly in Bolivia in 1972, she moved to Chile a short time before the September 11, 1973 military coup. Ford lived in a poor shantytown with Sister Carla Piette in Santiago, where they ministered to the needs of the people, especially those who lived in poverty.

After spending a required "reflection year" in 1978–1979 before final vows in the United States, in March 1980, Ford moved with Piette from Chile to El Salvador, arriving the day of Óscar Romero's funeral. In June of that year, they began working with the Emergency Refugee Committee in Chalatenango. In this mission, Ford worked with the poor and war victims, providing food, shelter, transportation and burial.

After the death of Carla Piette in a flash flood on August 23, 1980—a flood which nearly cost Ford her own life, saved only by Piette's help in pushing her from the overwhelmed vehicle—Ford was joined on the mission by Maura Clarke, a Maryknoll sister who was already in El Salvador in contemplation of a mission assignment. Altogether, Piette and Ford had worked together in Chile and El Salvador for seven years, until their deaths barely three months apart on December 2, 1980.

Murder
In November 1980, Ford and Clarke attended a regional assembly of Maryknoll Sisters in Nicaragua. At the closing liturgy on December 1, 1980, Ford read a passage from one of Archbishop Óscar Romero's final homilies: "'Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, the one who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be held captive - and to be found dead.'" The following day, December 2, 1980, Ford and Clarke boarded a plane to return to El Salvador. They were picked up by missionaries Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline sister and Jean Donovan, a Roman Catholic laywoman. Several members of the National Guard stopped the vehicle they were driving after they left the airport in San Salvador. The four women were taken to a relatively isolated spot where they were tortured, raped, and murdered by the soldiers.

Subsequent history
According to the Maryknoll Order: “The U.N.-sponsored report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador concluded that the abductions were planned in advance and the men responsible had carried out the murders on orders from above. It further stated that the head of the National Guard and two officers assigned to investigate the case had concealed the facts to harm the judicial process. The murder of the women, along with attempts by the Salvadoran military and some American officials to cover it up, generated a grass-roots opposition in the U.S., as well as ignited intense debate over the Administration’s policy in El Salvador.

In 1984, the defendants were found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The Truth Commission noted that this was the first time in Salvadoran history that a judge had found a member of the military guilty of assassination. In 1998, three of the soldiers were released for good behavior. Two of the men remain in prison and have petitioned the Salvadoran government for pardons.”

Ita Ford's brother, attorney William P. Ford, spent more than 25 years using the U.S. court system to try to obtain justice for his sister and the other three murdered women. He worked closely with Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) on federal lawsuits to try to bring Salvadoran generals to answer for the murder of the women, and, in other cases, for the torture and murder of members of the Salvadoran poor.

The head of the National Guard, whose troops were responsible for the murders, Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, went on to become Minister of Defense in the government of José Napoleón Duarte. After their emigration to the U.S. state of Florida, Vides Casanova and his fellow general, José Guillermo Garcia, were the named defendants in the suit brought by Bill Ford on his sister's behalf.

Footage of the murders is also in Frank Dorrel's collection of mini documentaries including School of Assassins that tells of the School of the Americas as it trains assassins. Students of the school were convicted of the crimes against the Maryknoll nuns.