Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero deserves justice as much as sainthood

[Judi Lynn]

Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero deserves justice as much as sainthood
By MARY JO MCCONAHAY
Los Angeles Times September 9, 2014

When Pope Francis announced he was unblocking the canonization process for Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, killed in 1980 by a death squad during his country's civil war, it was heartening and frustrating. Romero stood up to a murderous army on behalf of the poor in El Salvador. President Obama visited his tomb in 2011, and his statue stands on a wall of Westminster Abbey, among modern Christian martyrs including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet the archbishop's murderers remain free. Judges in El Salvador have said a controversial amnesty law forbids prosecuting war crimes, though the nation's Supreme Court is considering a challenge to that decision. Most notoriously, Romero's brother bishops, who might be expected to call out for justice, have dragged their feet or blocked progress toward legal redress for Romero's killing and the rest of El Salvador's wartime crimes.

"Sainthood, yes - for us he is already a saint," said a Salvadoran friend after he heard the pope's news about Romero. "But without going after the perpetrators, this will induce a form of amnesia, pushing away the violence while creating a kind of myth that serves the country." The perpetrators are alive, he pointed out, as are their financiers.

Romero died at the beginning of a 12-year civil conflict, a leftist attempt to overthrow a repressive, military-backed government. The war ended in 1992 with a truce between the government and rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. The United Nations-backed Truth Commission for El Salvador described horrific massacres, calling Romero's murder "a brutal symbol of the nightmare the country experienced during the war." Its report said about 70,000 people died, most of them unarmed civilians, at the hands of a military supported by the United States.

A bespectacled provincial bishop with a reputation as a conservative, Romero was appointed in 1977 as archbishop of the small Central American country, a nation riven by inequalities. The Salvadoran church had long enjoyed a marriage of convenience with wealthy families who ruled with help from the army. Romero, however, responded like a pastor to growing violence.

More:
http://www.islandpacket.com/2014/09/09/3302912_salvadoran-archbishop-oscar-romero.html?rh=1

[Louisiana1976]

1. That amnesty law in El Salvador ought to be repealed. As long as it is in effect right-wing

killers won't be brought to justice.

[Judi Lynn]

2. What the military did to the innocent people in that country was hideous.

It can most surely be described as wildly sadistic, designed to strike absolute terror into the hearts and minds of everyone living there who heard about what they had done to their neighbors, loved ones, fellow human beings. It was deliberately meant to paralyze the citizens with fear.

For this, for their success in terrorizing El Salvadoran citizens, they were rewarded with never spending a day in the slammer, probably got great retirement benefits, who knows what else? They surely have immunity, these people the US military trained and supplied, in ordered to assassinate every potential leftist in their country.

How can they live with themselves? They are dirty people, for doing the evil "work" of the Salvadoran elites and their US corporate, political friends for them.