Salvadorans protest plan to name street for death-squad chief

Salvadorans protest plan to name street for death-squad chief
Published December 16, 2014/
EFE

Victims of El Salvador's armed conflict marched Tuesday in this capital to reject the mayor's decision to name a street after the late Maj. Roberto D'Aubuisson, suspected mastermind of the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

"In the name of the victims, we wish to ask Mayor Norman Quijano and his City Council to find a way...to modify that municipal decision," a representative of the protesters, Jose Antonio Mejia, told reporters.

The march for peace was carried out in honor of Romero and in opposition to changing the name of San Antonio Abad street to Roberto D'Aubuisson, something the Catholic Church also opposes.

The march began with the placing of a floral tribute in commemoration of the late Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas in the San Salvador plaza that bears his name.

More:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2014/12/16/salvadorans-protest-plan-to-name-street-for-death-squad-chief/

Unbelievable!

[center][font size=6]"BLOWTORCH BOB BOULEVARD" [/font]

Congratulations to the brilliant mayor for his towering leadership and goodness. Sarcasm.[/center]
Saturday, March 6, 2010

Blowtorch Bob: The Duty to Remember Roberto D’Aubuisson

El Salvador’s Roberto D’Aubuisson (1944-1992) was uniquely malevolent. He would throw babies in the air and shoot them in midair, just for fun. The death squads of which he was the leader, hunted down and executed insurgents in the slowest, most exquisitely painful ways possible. The Spanish Inquisition could have learned a thing or two about torture from him: his favorite method involved a blow torch, earning him the nickname of “Blowtorch Bob.” I bet no one ever called him that to his face.

During the Salvadoran Civil War, 75,000 people were killed; 8000 were disappeared, and one million were left homeless, slaughtered by D’Aubuisson and his death squads. They killed a group of Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter; and a group of Catholic lay nuns who had just arrived in El Salvador. In El Mozote, they killed at least 794 townspeople: they separated the men from the women, locked them in a church, then took them out in small groups. After they raped the women, they murdered each one of them. Then they burned the bodies.

His crowning achievement was assassinating Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero: On March 24, 1980, one of his gunmen shot him in the heart as he was saying Mass. Romero’s offense? Demanding the end to the killing of innocent men, women, and children in El Salvador’s Civil War. What an odd demand from a Catholic priest: love thy neighbor.

When throat cancer killed D’Aubuisson on February 20, 1992 , sending him, one hopes, to join Satan’s own favorite sons, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Chauchesku in the first circle of hell, I vowed I would remember and celebrate his date of death every year. So today, I remember by telling my students, my friends, and you, my readers, about the fiend of El Salvador, Roberto D’Aubuisson.

D’Aubuisson’s education at the School of the Americas is particularly galling. The SOA, chartered by the United States Congress, and sponsored by the United States Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, gained its fame by training Latin American military officers in methods of interrogation, torture, kidnapping and executions. These methods were described by former United States Representative Joseph Kennedy (D-MA) as “worthy of the Soviet gulag.” Our government allowed and encouraged this instructional program as part of a perverted foreign policy focused on maintaining stability in the region at any cost rather than in protecting the basic human rights of all of the citizens of the hemisphere.

More:
http://professinghistory.blogspot.com/2010/03/blowtorch-bob-duty-to-remember-roberto.html

[center] [/center]

“All I know is that D’Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious.” – Jesse Helms

“Take care of this archbishop, these Jesuits, these other priests and especially these foreigners who are ruining the minds of our children. And if the gringos want to help the communists and cut military aid, we didn’t need military aid in 1932. If we had to kill 30,000…in 1932 (during “La Matanza” or “The Slaughter” where farmers and natives were killed during a revolt against the fascist government), we’ll kill 250,000 today.” — Roberto D’Aubuisson telling a rally of supporters what they would have to do ­after winning.

“The major has lived, step by step, the process of pacification of the country.” — Armando Calderon Sol on D’Aubuisson.

Who is this handsome man pictured above, waving his clenched fist at someone off-camera and with his big mouth wide open? It’s Roberto “Blowtorch Bob” D’Aubuisson, given such a charming name for his penchant for using blue-hot butane torches on his victim’s limbs and genitalia during the torture sessions of suspected leftists, liberals, communists and labor leaders. He became infamous in his home country of El Salvador during the civil war against the leftist FMLN movement for leading CIA-trained death squads that carried out scores of massacres. He was trained at the infamous “School of the Americas” in 1972.

The Hitler-loving D’Aubuisson was quoted as saying, “You Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of Communism and you began to kill them.” A former National Guard and founder of the ultra-conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance or ARENA party, it wasn’t popular support but rather support from abroad that was the true source of his power. Robert E. White, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to El Salvador, called him a “pathological killer” on American national television.

There is no area of the Cold War quite as consistent as the United States’ support for jackbooted anti-communist dictators and neo-fascist mass murderers such as ole’ Bob. His victims were by no means limited to left-wing categories—other undesirables in Bob’s way to neo-liberal privatized power were civilians, villagers, priests, nuns, women, children, infants and pretty much anyone unlucky enough to get between his death squads and supporters of the left-wing in El Salvador.

Despite this, D’Aubuisson and many others like him received exorbitant amounts of financial support and training from the United States. As the New York Times stated,

“In El Salvador, American aid was used for police training in the 1950’s and 1960’s and many officers in the three branches of the police later became leaders of the right wing death squads that killed tens of thousands of people in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s” (1).

A favorite of wealthy landowners and rich capitalists, D’Aubuisson first became known through nighttime television broadcasts where he accused civilian leaders, teachers and unionists of being communist subversives (the mutilated bodies of some were later found). D’Aubuisson studied intelligence and security in Virginia and New York, and in 1970 and 1971 studied at the International Police Academy in Washington. The academy was later closed after members of Congress said it had taught techniques of torture.

More:
http://theredphoenixapl.org/2012/08/12/cold-war-killer-file-the-death-squads-of-el-salvador-part-1/