On December 2, 1980, four bodies were unearthed in the Salvadoran countryside. The corpses, some of which bore signs of rape, were found in what Eileen Markey describes as a “hastily dug grave at the edge of the Cold War.” The four were soon identified as North American churchwomen, assassinated by US-trained Salvadoran death squads: Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, and Maura Clarke, the latter the subject of Markey’s biography A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura.

The women’s murders were brutal, but they also seem uncannily banal amid the omnipresent violence in the El Salvador on the eve of what would be a twelve-year civil war. Still, their slaughter drew international outcry, causing great discomfort for the incoming Reagan administration as it sought to scale up political and military support for the Salvadoran military dictatorship.

The US-backed regime was at war with a growing leftist insurgency born out of frustrated peaceful movements for democratic reforms and an end to the semi-feudal and oligarchic distribution of wealth and power in the country. In a bid to stave off any revolutionary aspirations sparked by Cuba in 1959 and enflamed by Nicaragua in 1979, the United States pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the bloodthirsty Salvadoran military as its forces massacred entire villages; murdered and disappeared tens of thousands of civilians; and assassinated opposition politicians, labor leaders, priests, and even, as Markey’s book vividly recalls, US-born nuns.