{lives remembered}


Michelle Arène I


n


1952-2010 In tallying atrocities, kindness counted most by DaviD MontgoMery


n those days of disappearance and death 30 years ago in El Salvador, the place to go for answers to the hardest questions was a modest concrete house at the corner of Avenida España and 15 Calle Oriente, in the capital city, San Salvador. ¶ Visitors would spill out the front door, fill the garden: peasants in straw hats and thick-soled sandals; women in big aprons with lots of pockets; city workers in slacks and T-shirts. All with questions. ¶ My husband, have they found his body?


My son, how did he die? ¶ In a first-floor bedroom converted into an office, an unassuming 27-year-old woman with large eye- glasses greeted each one. Michelle Arène listened, took notes, gently prodded for more information.


Sometimes an answer lay in one of


her photo albums. A picture of a mu- tilated corpse provided bitter closure. Sometimes there was no answer — but at least someone had been there to lis- ten, and make a record. The mission of the Human Rights


Commission of El Salvador — where Arène worked from 1978 to 1983 — was to disseminate evidence of atrocities. Arène’s decision to also spend those mo- ments with relatives of victims brought a touch of kindness and humanity to an otherwise horrific task. “It makes me think, in retrospect,


that she was a confessor of a society,” said Jeannette Noltenius, who worked in El Salvador for the U.S. Agency for International Development. “Each story needed to be told and respected. This is the kind of person she was.” The daughter of a cellist and a bal-


lerina, Arène had studied in Paris and was teaching French at the University of El Salvador when civil war broke out in 1979. She had a brief love affair with a law student who sympathized with the leftist guerrillas. She went to work with her close friend Marianella García Villas, who co-founded the rights com- mission as a watchdog over the violence


monitored abuses. Romero was assas- sinated in 1980. At least two members of the com-


mission were murdered, and two disappeared. Men were seen following Arène, so Noltenius let her stay in a safe apartment. To cope with the stress and deflect the fear, Arène “focused on the task at hand,” said her younger sister, Teresa Arène. “As long as the documents were in order, as long as she could con- trol at least that aspect of it, then she could control her emotions, then the meaning of the work was possible.” One of her two younger brothers,


Alberto Arène, was politically active, and his name appeared on a death list. Before Alberto departed for the United States in 1980, Michelle gave him a briefcase crammed with case records. Alberto de- livered the briefcase to Francesca Jessup in the Washington office of Am- nesty International. “It was the most com-


Michelle arène, right, with Marianella garcía Villas in el salvador around 1979.


committed by government forces and right-wing death squads. Arène stayed behind the scenes,


collating information, translating, planning fact-finding trips, keeping the office running. She also took testimony from witnesses. “She was considered a ‘dangerous


woman’ by those who persecuted us,” said Roberto Cuéllar, legal adviser to Archbishop Oscar Romero, who also


22 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | december 26, 2010


plete single body of information that I had ever received,” Jessup re- called. “The photographs, which were horrific, tes- tified to the depth of the savagery.” The commission re-


ported that more than 30,000 civilians were killed in 1980 and 1981.


Salvadoran and U.S. officials accused the commission of inflating its numbers. But in at least one case — the notorious mas- sacre of several hundred villagers near El Mozote in late 1981 — the commission’s statistics proved more accurate than of- ficial denials of a mass killing, according to exhumations a decade later. When San Salvador became too dan-


gerous, Arène and García Villas moved the office to Mexico City. Arène was


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