El Salvador publicly marks Archbishop Romero's killing for first time

[cory777]

Source: LA Times

By Alex Renderos
March 24, 2010 | 5:29 p.m

President Funes commemorates the 30th anniversary of the assassination. He asks forgiveness on behalf of the state for the slaying and for the 'thousands of innocent victims' of the civil war.

Reporting from San Salvador - Thirty years after Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated as he celebrated Mass, a divided Salvadoran society still struggles over his legacy and the failure of authorities to punish the killers.

For the first time, the Salvadoran state is publicly commemorating Romero. Through most of this month, marches, concerts and debates have honored the priest whose slaying pushed El Salvador into a bloody civil war that pitted a U.S.-backed right-wing government against Soviet-backed leftist guerrillas. Tens of thousands of people were killed.




Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-salvador-romero25-2010mar25,0,314039.story

[ck4829]

1. K&R

[EFerrari]

2. What "soviet backed left wing guerillas"?

:wtf:

[struggle4progress]

5. Staying on in El Salvador (Introduction)

By Mark Danner , Photographs by Larry Towell
June 1997

... If these diverse countries are knitted together by having endured the glare of that American searchlight, they have in common also a return, definitive and often abrupt, to obscurity. The searchlight moves on; the changes wrought under its intensity, vast as they often are, linger on ...

And so we come to the Mothers of the Disappeared and their terrible picture books. One notices first of all that they are many, these books, and that their pages are bound loosely, with spiral binders, to allow for the insertion of ever more photographs. For during those terrible years of 1979 and 1980 and 1981, as the cars without license plates cruised the streets of the capital each night and the bodies appeared on the streets each dawn, the numbers of dead went on mounting, until the photographers of the Human Rights Commission became unbearably busy – for on the streets of San Salvador each month no fewer than eight hundred mutilated corpses could be found.

Against the urban infrastructure of the Left – the network of political organizers, labor leaders, and activists who had put together the great demonstrations of the late seventies – the death squad onslaught proved devastating. The Christian Democrats, in particular, saw their party decapitated, with the murder of several hundred activists. By the end, however, the killing had become less discriminating – any “profile” that seemed to identify leftists would do; and so one morning a pile of corpses was found that proved to consist entirely of young women wearing tennis shoes and blue jeans: apparently, some intelligence officer had concluded that such a profile – women dressing in this casual way - reliably separated out subversives, and thus the young women had been seized and tortured and liquidated with all the others ...

We see not only the stumps of severed limbs, the crippled children, the gravestones, but also the neediness and the desolation, an overwhelming rural poverty that was there at the outset of the war and that remains there still, a decade and a half and billions of American dollars later. Amid all the changes in El Salvador, Towell shows us, there is far too much that has stayed the same: flocks of children still pick their way through the garbage dumps each morning, hoping to fill their stomachs. Of course, in America one no longer sees such images. In America the searchlight has passed on.

http://www.markdanner.com/articles/show/141



The control, over what Americans are allowed to see and what we are told, is almost total. The power elite would not tell us that Salvadoran peasants and workers, finally fed up with decades of brutality, organized against it -- and were met with a demonic extermination campaign funded from Washington. One might have hoped that the ceaseless hard work of solidarity groups here -- attempting to show bits of the bitter truth through the relentless media propaganda warning of a Soviet invasion of Texas from Central America -- would have had a lasting effect and that Americans today would know what had actually happened: but apparently that is just too much to hope and instead all those years simply vanish down the memory hole and those who come after rediscover only the official propaganda

[EFerrari]

6. It's mendacity. There was no Soviet presence in El Salvador

or even money. This is an iteration of the Faux "they do it, too" fallacy to cover Reagan's butchery.

[struggle4progress]

10. The dynamics of the propaganda deserves some attention. Throughout the Reagan

era, attempts to discuss the actual butchery (by the American-funded Salvadoran military) were regularly derailed into empty arguments about the alleged "Soviet role" in Central America. The facts were dreadful, and shocked the conscience of anyone who knew what was happening -- but the facts regularly disappeared behind disputes about counterfactual hypotheticals: claims about generous American efforts to help heroic enemies of "the Soviets" dominated the political landscape and provided ready excuses ("Well, war is brutal, but we really have to stand up to the Evil Empire") that did not require disillusioning oneself of cherished notions about "our goodness and selflessness." The problem, of course, with "debating" about the alleged "Soviet role" is that no one who believed it really had any evidence for it -- and having well-formed beliefs that did not depend on evidence, such believers were immune to evidence-based arguments: such "debates" sucked up time and energy that could be better spent educating less ideological audiences about the butchery and convincing them of our responsibility as Americans to discourage Congress from funding the perps

[EFerrari]

12. This is comical. The LAT's readers' rep replied to me.

She said Senderos was right about the Soviet backing because there were reports in the LAT, the NYTs and in other places that the guerillas were using Soviet made weapons.

I told her that all those same outlets said Saddam had WMD and that quoting yourself is not sourcing. lol Also, that the Taliban are today using Soviet made weapons -- did the Times think they are also backed by the Soviets? And finally that the best way to respect the dead, in this case Raygun, is to stop drawing attention to their lies and other misdeeds.

:evilgrin:

[struggle4progress]

13. Salvador Rebels: Where Do They Get the Arms?

By JAMES LeMOYNE; the writer recently completed a four-year assignment as the correspondent of The New York Times in San Salvador.
Published: November 24, 1988
... While Honduran officials have also denied that they are assisting the guerrillas, two senior American officials and three Salvadoran military officials have maintained that Honduran officers have allowed the shipment of supplies to the rebels through Honduras in the last year, possibly for bribes ... American officials maintain that the Central Intelligence Agency has detected rebel supplies going overland into northern El Salvador in the last year, unhindered by Honduran soldiers stationed in border areas. The officials also assert that the corrupt Honduran officers may sell weapons directly to the rebels. In addition, two Salvadoran officers said they feared that disaffected Nicaraguan rebels might be selling their American-made weapons to the Salvadoran guerrillas. But American and Salvadoran officials, including President Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador, assert that Nicaragua is still the rebels' most important source of support and supplies in the region ...
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/24/world/salvador-rebels-where-do-they-get-the-arms.html?pagewanted=1

Salvador Rebel Arms: Noriega Link?
By STEPHEN ENGELBERG, Special to the New York Times
Published: December 18, 1987
WASHINGTON, Dec. 17— A former employee of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, Panama's military leader, has told Congressional investigators that the general authorized arms shipments to the Salvadoran rebels in the early 1980's when the Reagan Administration was trying to keep Nicaragua and other nations from arming them ... http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/18/world/salvador-rebel-arms-noriega-link.html?pagewanted=1

Mohave Daily Miner - Feb 4, 1988
Ex-consul says North schemed with Noriega in weapons deal
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=943&dat=19880204&id=VVMLAAAAIBAJ&sjid=rVIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5855,1872535

[EFerrari]

14. Are you telling me Ollie North was being "backed by the Soviets"?

LOL! Boom!

[EFerrari]

7. So I sent the Readers's Rep a note asking if Mr. Senderos

has evidence of Soviet backing or if the Times has just adopted the Miami Herald's journalistic standards wholesale.

lol

[struggle4progress]

8. Since wingnuts bought the LA Times, I'd not hold my breath for high standards

[EFerrari]

9. I know. We were in HelLA when the deal was cut.

But they're still under the impression that they have a reserve of cool.

[mrs_p]

3. thank you archbishop romero for

your wisdom and courage. if the church hadn't turned its back on the peoples of latin america (and fought on the side of human rights and justice), i "might" still be catholic today.

[roody]

4. Peace and prosperity to El Salvador.

[pitohui]

11. wow this is huge EOM

.

[Judi Lynn]

15. Amnesty International urges El Salvador to reppeal amnesty law

Amnesty International urges El Salvador to reppeal amnesty law
Submitted by WW4 Report on Thu, 03/25/2010 - 22:18. From Amnesty International, March 23:

Amnesty International on Tuesday urged authorities in El Salvador to repeal an amnesty law that protects those responsible for thousands of killings and disappearances during the country's 12-year armed conflict, including the killing of Catholic priest Monsignor Romero on 24 March 1980.

The organization also called on the country's security forces to fully cooperate with any investigation by allowing full access to their files.

"It is unacceptable that those responsible for thousands of disappearances, killings and torture have not been held to account for their crimes," said Kerrie Howard, deputy director of Amnesty International's America's programme. "The Amnesty law must be urgently repealed and full investigations, initiated."

Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero was shot and killed as he gave mass in the chapel of a hospital. During his funeral on 30 March over 20 of his supporters were killed by the military.

A report by El Salvador's Truth Commission in 1992 concluded there was evidence that former Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, now deceased, had ordered members of his security service, acting as a "death squad", to assassinate the Monsignor.

In 1993, a blanket amnesty was passed into law, shielding perpetrators from prosecution. Nobody has been brought to justice for any of the human rights crimes committed during the conflict.

El Salvador recognized before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2009 its international responsibility for the death of Monsignor Romero. However, no measures have been taken to investigate the incident.

Thousands of Salvadorans were murdered, disappeared, raped or forcibly recruited as child soldiers during the country's armed conflict.

Between 1980 and 1992 in El Salvador a bitter armed conflict led to gross and widespread human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, "disappearances" and torture.

More:
http://www.ww4report.com/node/8501