Why an Assassinated Psychologist - Ignored by US Psychologists - Is Being Honored

Why an Assassinated Psychologist - Ignored by US Psychologists - Is Being Honored
Sunday, 16 November 2014 00:00
By Bruce E Levine, Truthout | Op-Ed

In November 2014, people around the world who decry oppression will commemorate the 25th anniversary of liberation psychologist Ignacio Martin-Baró's assassination in El Salvador by a "counter-insurgency unit" created at the US Army's School of the Americas.


On November 16, 1989, in El Salvador, liberation psychologist Ignacio Martin-Baró, together with five colleagues, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, were forced into a courtyard on the campus of Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, where they were then murdered by the Salvadoran government's elite Atlacatl Battalion, a "counter-insurgency unit" created at the US Army's School of the Americas in 1980. The massacre is detailed in the Report of the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador.

This year, 25 years after Martin-Baró's assassination, the Liberation Psychology Network, the Latin American journal Teoría y Crítica de la Psicología, and peace and justice activists around the world will commemorate Martin-Baró, whose integrity, courage and activism for the people of El Salvador cost him his life. Embarrassingly, the vast majority of US psychologists and psychiatrists know nothing about Martin-Baró and liberation psychology. Outside of Pacifica Graduate Institute, I'm not aware of any US graduate program with an announced focus on liberation psychology.

Noam Chomsky, longtime critic of both the US government and US psychology, has tried to inform the world about the life and work of Martin-Baró. Chomsky, in praising a collection of his essays, Writings for a Liberation Psychology, said that Martin-Baró had a "rare combination of intelligence and heroism to the challenge his work sets forth 'to construct a new person in a new society.' His life and achievement are a true inspiration."

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As a Jesuit priest, Martin-Baró embraced liberation theology in opposition to a theology that oppressed the poor, and as a social psychologist, he believed that imported North American psychology also oppressed the majority of people. Martin-Baró concluded that mainstream psychology either ignored or only paid lip service to social and economic conditions that shape people's lives.

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27244-why-an-assassinated-psychologist-ignored-by-us-psychologists-is-being-honored