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28 March 2010 By Rick Rozoff 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. “No one has to fulfill an immoral law. It is time
to recover your consciences and to obey your
consciences rather than the orders of sin. The church,
defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of
human dignity, the dignity of the person, cannot
remain silent before such abomination. We want the
government to take seriously that reforms are worth
nothing when they come about stained with so much
blood. In the name of God, and in the name of this
suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day
more tumultuously, I beg you, I ask you, I order you
in the name of God: Stop the repression!” [2] The following evening he said mass at the small
chapel of the Divine Providence cancer hospital.
During the most solemn segment of the Catholic
service, the liturgy of the Eucharist, the officiating
priest consecrates and elevates in turn the communion
wafer and wine. As he lifts first the host, then the chalice, he
utters an account of Jesus at the Last Supper: “Before he was given up to death, a death he freely
accepted, he took bread and gave you thanks. He broke
the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: Take
this, all of you, and eat it; this is my body which
will be given up for you. “When the supper was ended, he took the cup. Again
he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his
disciples, and said: “Take this, all of you, and drink from it; this is
the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and
everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for
all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of
me.” It was while Romero recited the last words that a
shot from an M16 assault rifle pierced his heart,
leaving him to bleed to death in front of the altar,
his blood mingling with the spilled communion wine. Thirty years later no one has ever been convicted
of, no one has ever been charged with, his murder. The Salvadoran death squads and their opposite
numbers elsewhere in Central America tried to hide
their violent and grisly crimes under the cloak of
religiosity, but to murder El Salvador’s top religious
leader at the moment and under the circumstances they
did was the work of men without moral or spiritual
motives. It was the act of brutes. Eight years ago a BBC report stated that the
killing was, “according to declassified US documents
and other witnesses, carried out by Salvadorean police
intelligence agents on the orders of Major Roberto
D’Aubuisson.” [2] The U.S. military-trained
D’Aubuisson carried the details of his role to the
grave with him in 1992. After Romero’s death, after his – even in the most
secular acceptance of the word – martyrdom, the mantle
of the U.S. presidency was passed from Carter to
Ronald Reagan, who appointed then recently retired
Army general and NATO Supreme Allied Commander
Alexander Haig as his secretary of state. In his eighteen-month tenure at what is formally
the top diplomatic post in the U.S., Haig was involved
in military, covert and in some instances openly
terrorist operations against the governments of
Afghanistan, Angola, (post-Khmer Rouge) Cambodia,
Ethiopia, Grenada, Mozambique, Poland and Suriname
among other nations, but from the day he took the helm
at the State Department his main focus was on Central
America. It was during his watch there from 1981-1982 that
the death squad campaigns in El Salvador, Guatemala
and Honduras and the Contra war against Nicaragua
began in earnest. During the early years of the first Reagan term
U.S. military aid to El Salvador was increased from
$5.9 million 1980 to $35.5 million in 1981 and to $82
million in 1982. A fourteenfold increase in two years. This March 24th a government of El Salvador for the
first time officially apologized on behalf of the
state for the murder of Romero. President Mauricio
Funes, elected last June on the ticket of the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front – the very
group Washington armed and trained the Salvadoran
military to exterminate thirty years ago – said on the
anniversary that “This is something that should have
been done a long time ago.” [4] His comment was uttered during a ceremony unveiling
a mural dedicated to Oscar Romero at San Salvador’s
international airport. A thousand Salvadorans marched from the chapel he
was killed in to the cathedral in the capital chanting
Romero’s own words: “They can kill me, but they will
never kill justice.” His words, his example have unfortunately assumed
more urgency thirty years after his death than any
would have wished. Last June 28 D’Aubuisson’s fellow graduate of the
School of the America’s, Hondura’s General Romeo
Vasquez Velasquez, led a military coup d’etat against
the standing government of President Manuel Zelaya and
forced the head of state into exile in Costa Rica. The very next day President Barack Obama welcomed
Colombian head of state Alvaro Uribe, linked to Latin
America’s longest death squad horrors, to the White
House, and the visit was followed by news that the
Pentagon was acquiring the use of seven new military
bases in the South American country. Colombia borders
Venezuela and Ecuador, both Bolivarian Alliance for
the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) members along with
Honduras before the coup. To use an apt Cold War term, the coup was the
opening salvo in the “rollback” against the most
serious attempt in Latin America’s history to assert
itself against centuries of U.S. domination. On January 13th of this year the post-coup regime
of non-popularly elected Roberto Micheletti withdrew
Honduras from ALBA, the only time a member has left
the alliance. “Honduras’s entrance into the bloc in 2008 under
the leadership of President Manuel Zelaya is
considered to be one of the motivations for the right
wing military coup that kidnapped and expelled Zelaya
last June.” [5] Washington’s desperation has increased dramatically
since the meeting of the Rio Group in Mexico last
month, which “agreed to form a Latin American
alternative to the Organization of American States
that excludes the United States and Canada.” [6] Cutting across major ideological lines, 24 Latin
American and 15 non-Ibero-American Caribbean nations
met at what was declared a Unity Summit, and in the
words of the host country’s President Felipe Calderon,
“We have decided to create an organization that
includes all the organizations of Latin America and
the Caribbean. We have decided to base an organization
on shared values including sovereignty and the non-use
of force, including threats of force, international
cooperation, ever closer integration of Latin America
and the Caribbean and permanent political dialogue.”
[7] The new and expanded organization proposed, the
Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC),
will include all nations in the Western Hemisphere
except for the U.S. and Canada, will supplant and
render moribund the U.S.-dominated Organization of
American States (OAS), and will “resolve a host of
problems, including the launching of interaction with
Mercosur, the Andean Community of Nations, the Union
of South American Nations, the Organization of Ibero-American
States and ALBA – the Bolivarian Alliance for the
Americas.” [8] A Russian analyst suggested that “There is little,
if any, doubt that the future Community will be at
loggerheads with the OAS, since Washington is used to
bossing Latin America around and imposing on the
region what strategically important decisions suit it
best.” He also warned that “The United States is certainly
not about to trust some newly-formed organization with
control of the processes under way in the countries
south of the Rio Grande. “The Empire is getting ready to ‘act energetically’
to foil a constituent summit of the future Community
of Latin American and Caribbean States.” [9] Early in March U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton visited Costa Rica to embrace her nation’s new
surrogate in Honduras, Porfirio Lobo, and to chastise
Latin America for defying Washington’s will. Lobo, for
example, was the only Latin American head of state
(though one only recognized by the U.S. and a few
allies) not invited to the Unity Summit in Mexico on
February 22-23. His exclusion was a frank commentary
on the June 2008 coup by every government in the
Western Hemisphere except his own and those of the
U.S. and Canada. “The United States helped to broker November
elections that brought Honduran President Porfirio
Lobo to power, but his government has been shunned by
several countries in the region because the polls were
organized by the de facto government that overthrew
Zelaya.” Clinton was “winding up a six-nation Latin American
tour during which she was challenged by leaders who
repeated charges that the United States did not take a
hard enough line against the coup, which echoed a long
history of military takeovers in the region.” [10] With a command of diplomatese that renders her a
worthy successor of the late Alexander Haig, Clinton
stated it was time to “move forward,” as “We think
that Honduras has taken important and necessary steps
that deserve the recognition and normalization of
relations.” Unintentionally emphasizing why there is a need for
ALBA and CELAC, she added, “Other countries in the
region say that they want to wait a while. I don’t
know what they’re waiting for….” In Costa Rica she met with Lobo and “said she had
notified Congress that the United States would restart
the flow of more than USD 30 million in
non-humanitarian aid to Honduras that was cut off
after the June 28 coup that ousted Zelaya.” While offering lip service to the relative
undesirability of military coups in the U.S.’s
backyard, she nevertheless asserted “But we think its
time to move forward and ensure that such disruptions
of democracy do not and cannot happen in the future.”
[11] Scant comfort to other ALBA member states
awaiting Washington’s next maneuver. To refute what Clinton characterized as the Lobo
regime’s “commitments to re-establish constitutional
order in the country,” on March 24 Honduran professor
Jose Manuel Flores, an active opponent of the
newly-installed government of Porfirio Lobo, was
murdered at the Instituto San Jose del Pedregal where
he taught, “shot in the back when hooded individuals
entered the school through the roof….” [12] Hooded assassins murdering dissenting academics
conjures up nightmares from the darkest period of
death squad atrocities in the 1980s. According to human rights and resistance groups in
Honduras, since last year’s coup there have been 130
murders and over 3,000 arrests of opponents of the
junta. [13] On March 25 the National Popular Resistance Front
announced plans for a mass rally in the capital that
“will coincide with a general strike and a national
mourning campaign convened by teachers’ organizations
after Professor Jose Manuel Flores was killed by
hooded men two days ago,” blaming “the Honduran
oligarchy and Porfirio Lobo’s de facto regime” [14]
for the latest killing of those Clinton demands “move
forward” by submitting to Washington’s diktat. In late February over 10,000 supporters of deposed
President Manuel Zelaya left the main university in
the capital of Tegucigalpa, but “were blocked by
soldiers from nearing the presidential palace and
diverted to the parliament in the city center….”
Troops ordered from their barracks by a regime that
“has taken important and necessary steps that deserve
the recognition and normalization of relations,” as
Hillary Clinton would phrase it a week later. “Six teachers’ unions backed the protests and
called for classes to be suspended nationwide.” [15] Military coups d’etat and masked hit squads are
back in Central America with Washington’s blessing and
the threats are not limited to Honduras, which is
intended as both object lesson and prototype by the
White House and the State Department. In February Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez
warned “that the right-wing in Latin America was being
organized to attack the Bolivian Alliance of the
Americas (ALBA) and the Union of South American
Nations (Unasur),” adding however that “the U.S.
government would not be able to stop the development
of ALBA in Central America despite the coup in
Honduras.” “The U.S. Empire” will employ reactionary and
covert forces to subordinate the next government of
Brazil (a general election will be held this October),
“which also will be terrible for the unity of South
America.” [16] In addition, it was reported on March 25 that
Nicaragua’s ambassador to the Organization of American
States, Denis Moncada, accused the U.S. ambassador to
his nation, Robert Callahan, of “meddling in
Nicaraguan internal affairs.” Callahan, Moncada
continued, “has publicly supported attempts by
Nicaraguan opposition parties, rating as fraudulent
the 2008 municipal elections, when the Sandinista
National Liberation Front won the majority of the
country’s mayoralties.” [17] The Nicaraguan press recently published an article
by Uruguayan journalist Jorge Capelan titled “The
United States and its Web of NGOs in Nicaragua,” which
detailed that “the destabilizing strategy the United
States has pursued in Venezuela through
non-governmental organizations and ‘contractor’ firms
is also being applied in Nicaragua against the
Sandinista government.” The report documented that since 1994 the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID)
created “so-called Offices of Transition Initiatives (OTI)
in several countries worldwide. “They were originally created to support transition
to capitalism in Eastern European countries, but they
later spread to other states where it was necessary to
address situations in which US interests were
threatened.” An OTI was launched in Venezuela in July of 2002,
two months after the 47-hour coup there, and in late
2005 in Bolivia in an attempt to prevent Evo Morales’
victory in the December 18 presidential election. Although there “is no OTI in Nicaragua,” USAID is
concocting “a similar strategy against the Sandinista
government through the CampTransparencia program run
by the paramilitary DynCorp firm. “CampTransparencia has organized forums and other
similar activities in Nicaragua. Its main cadres have
experience in ‘regime change’ operations.” [18] The current preferred method of effecting the
subversion and overthrow of governments considered to
present obstacles to U.S. geopolitical designs is the
“color revolution” model first employed in Yugoslavia
in 2000 and replicated in the former Soviet states of
Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. The first attempt to
export a variation of the technique to Latin America
was in Bolivia two years ago. Last May Hillary Clinton railed against “growing
Iranian, Chinese and Russian influence in the Western
Hemisphere,” which has ostensibly encouraged “leftist
leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo
Morales and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega to promote anti-U.S.
sentiment and rely on aid from China, Iran and
Russia.” [19] She particularly singled out Nicaragua,
stating “We are looking to figure out how to deal with
[President Daniel] Ortega” as “the Iranians are
building a huge embassy in Managua. You can only
imagine what it’s for.” [19] In the 1980s the Reagan administration frequently
invoked alleged Russian and Iranian influence in
Nicaragua to justify its support for the Contra war
against the nation. To Central America’s immediate north, on March 22
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and chairman of the
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen
accompanied Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to
Mexico, and upon returning top U.S. military commander
Mullen spoke of Mexico’s “own version of
counterinsurgency,” and said, “We’re working with them
to generate as much capability as they can in that
fight.” [19] In speaking as he did, Mullen reiterated
his statements in January of 2009 that the U.S.
military was prepared to employ the same
counterinsurgency tactics used in Afghanistan and Iraq
for Mexico and that the infamous Plan Colombia could
be the “overarching” model for the wars in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. Earlier this month the joint commander of United
States Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and North American
Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), General Victor
Renuart, spoke before the Senate Armed Services
Committee and said of his dual commands that their
missions range “from supporting law enforcement on the
U.S.-Mexico border to monitoring Russian military
planes and ships off U.S. borders,” and that “Northcom
has shared military lessons learned in Iraq and
Afghanistan to combat violence and illegal activity on
the Southwest border.” [20] The White House and the Pentagon are not prepared
to allow the rest of the nations in the Americas to
determine their own destiny without interference.
Without intervention. The 2002 coup in Venezuela and the 2009 coup in
Honduras are not the last that Washington will support
given the opportunity. Latin American vigilance and
unity are required more than ever before. 1) http://liturgyhouse.blogspot.com/2008/03/archbishop-oscar-romeros-letter-to.html |
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