El Salvador: Ghosts at the Polls

El Salvador: Ghosts at the Polls

By Don North
March 24, 2010 (Originally published June 24, 2009)


Editor’s Note: Three decades ago today, Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered in cold blood while saying Mass, an event that marked a troubling turn toward violent right-wing extremism in El Salvador and beyond, a pattern that continues to this day even in the threatening tone of U.S. politics.

Romero was gunned down on March 24, 1980, because he had emerged as an impassioned voice for impoverished peasants seeking greater justice. The assassination of a high-level Catholic cleric soon became a signal to global right-wing forces to do whatever was necessary to reverse trends toward equality.

In El Salvador and across Central America, Romero’s death was followed by a bloodbath of extrajudicial killings. By November of that year, right-wing oligarchs and their security forces rejoiced at the victory of their U.S. ally, Ronald Reagan, who then helped train their troops and provided weapons to make their violent campaigns even more efficient.

It would take a dozen years for El Salvador to emerge from its bloody nightmare and nearly three decades before Romero's political heirs finally gained control of the country via elections. In a story from last year, Don North, who had covered the Salvadoran conflict as a war correspondent, returned to witness that moment of Romero’s posthumous victory:

“If they kill me, I shall arise again in the Salvadoran people,” said Archbishop Oscar Romero in March 1980, just two weeks before he was gunned down by a sniper while saying Mass.

Today, many Salvadorans believe that Romero’s prophecy has been fulfilled with the election and inauguration of Mauricio Funes, the FMLN’s candidate for president, the first time the Left has won a national election in El Salvador’s history.

Romero’s assassination by a rightist death squad in 1980 marked the beginning of a 12-year civil war between government forces and the guerrillas of the FMLN, the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front, which now holds power as a political party.

In my new documentary “Yesterday’s Enemies,” I open with a song by Kris Kristofferson from 1983, the first year I reported from the war zone around the Guazapa volcano in central El Salvador. “They killed so many heroes, but the dreams they left behind them ain’t as easy as a man to blow away,” the lyrics said.

That appears to have proven true with Archbishop Romero, whose spirit seemed to hover above the 2009 election campaign, both as inspiration for Funes and the FMLN and as a reminder of the grisly history behind ARENA, the longtime rightist governing party.

In 1993, a United Nations truth commission determined that ARENA’s founder, Major Roberto D’Aubuisson ordered the assassination of Romero, who had emerged as a powerful voice protesting the repression of the country’s many poor and dispossessed.

Much as Romero became the inspiring symbol for El Salvador’s Left, D’Aubuisson, a boyish-looking former intelligence officer who ran death squads on behalf of El Salvador’s wealthy oligarchy, became the face of El Salvador’s Right.

After Romero’s murder, D’Aubuisson death squads (often government soldiers dressed in plain clothes) systematically slaughtered leftist politicians, labor activists, students, intellectuals and clergy. Eventually, the opposition retreated to the countryside and took up arms as guerrillas under a coalition known as the FMLN.

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/032410a.html