By Rick Rozoff
March 27, 2010 “Information Clearing House” — March 24th of this year was the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of El Salvador.
His killing drew attention to the murderous rampages of death squads in that nation and throughout Central America as no other slaying had, although hundreds of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras before and during the 1980s by paramilitary formations usually led by graduates of the U.S.’s School of the Americas and covertly funded by the same nation’s Central Intelligence Agency.
Graduates of the Pentagon’s School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia (now the equally euphemistic Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) include the man responsible for ordering Romero’s killing, the late Roberto D’Aubuisson; Efrain Rios Montt, head of the military junta in Guatemala in 1982-1983 which perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in the nation’s bloodstained history; and Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, who was dismissed as chief of the Honduran military on June 25 of last year and led the coup against President Manuel Zelaya three days later.
After being appointed El Salvador’s top ecclesiastic in 1977 Romero, until then considered a doctrinal if not a political conservative, spoke out forcefully against the abuses of the country’s military and the deaths squads linked to it.
Two months before he was killed he wrote to then U.S. President Jimmy Carter imploring him to desist from arming and training the Salvadoran army, particularly plans to “train three Salvadoran battalions in logistics, communications and intelligence,” and criticizing the fact that three months before “a group of six Americans was in El Salvador…providing $200,000 in gas masks and flak jackets and teaching how to use them against demonstrators.” [1]
His appeal was ignored.
On the last full day of his life Archbishop Romero celebrated mass at the Cathedral of San Salvador and ended his homily (a sermon ordinarily based on the day’s Gospel reading) with impassioned words that were an indictment, plea and command:
“I would like to make an appeal in a special way to the men of the army, to the police, to those in the barracks. Brothers, you are part of our own people. You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters. And before an order to kill that a man may give, the law of God must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God.
Related articles:
- Israeli Death Squads to Infiltrate Egyptian Protests
- Secret order prepares new US wars in Middle East and Central Asia
- CIA Assassination Squads Target US Citizens (With Videos)
- Top US Senator Assassinated As Obama “Weather War” Plunges World Into Chaos
- US sanctions on Iran’s central bank “an act of war”