Forwarded from the SCRA list
________________________________________
From: SCRA-L Div27 General Membership List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Regina D Langhout [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 20 November 2009 06:34
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SCRA-L] Ignacio Martin Baro

Friends,

I'm pasting a story below from the LA Times regarding recent
developments in El Salvador related to the murder of Ignacio Martin
Baro 20 years ago (although he is not directly mentioned in the
article).

Best wishes,
Gina

latimes.com
latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-salvador-jesuits17-2009nov17,0,4032324.story

El Salvador honors 6 slain Jesuits
During the ceremony for the priests killed in 1989, the defense
minister says that the
army is prepared to ask for forgiveness and that he is willing to
open military
archives to investigators.
By Alex Renderos and Tracy Wilkinson

November 17, 2009

Reporting from Mexico City and San Salvador

In a sign of the remarkable changes afoot in El Salvador, the
government Monday bestowed the nation's highest award on
six Jesuit priests slain by the army exactly 20 years ago.
Right-wing governments that ruled El Salvador since its civil
war have traditionally relegated the case of the murdered
Jesuits to a historic past they preferred to forget. But the
election in March of a new president from a leftist political
party made up of former guerrillas set the stage for Monday's
recognition.
"We want this to be an act of recovering our collective
memory," President Mauricio Funes said in the ceremony.
"For me, this act means [we] pull back a heavy veil of
darkness and lies to let in the light of justice and truth. We begin
to cleanse our house of this recent
history."
Funes, a former journalist who, like many Salvadorans, was educated
by the Jesuits, presented golden
medallions to relatives of the priests "for extraordinary service to
the nation."
Stunning the audience, the minister of defense then said that the
army was prepared to ask for forgiveness
and that he was willing to open military archives to judicial
investigators -- something that the priests'
advocates have long demanded but the army steadfastly refused. The
Funes government has not ordered
such an investigation.
"If the government asks me to open the archives, I will do it," said
the minister, Gen. David Munguia Payes,
who fought in the war against the guerrillas and served in the early
1980s as part of the presidential guard.
The 1989 assassination of the priests, along with their cook and her
young daughter, was a pivotal event in
El Salvador's long civil war.
The priests were highly regarded intellectuals, promoters of justice
for the poor and opponents of the war,
and seen by the Salvadoran right as pro-left subversives.
Among them was Ignacio Ellacuria, a Spanish national who was one of
the region's leading intellectuals and
rector at the time of the Jesuit-run University of Central America,
or UCA, in San Salvador.
Their killings provoked outrage worldwide; the pictures of the
priests sprawled face down on the lawn of
their modest home after being shot by soldiers were among the most
haunting images of the war.
It was a bookend atrocity, in some ways, to the 1980 slaying of San
Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero,
who was shot by an assassin as he said Mass. His death is often seen
as a marker of the start of the civil
war, and the Jesuits' killings the beginning of the end.
The 1989 assassinations finally broke long-standing U.S.
administration support for the Salvadoran army
and government, which in turn helped to force the end of the war in
1992.
A national truth commission, as well as several international
investigations, established that top Salvadoran
army officers had ordered and then covered up the slayings of the
priests, whom the military accused of
supporting the guerrillas.
Four officers and five soldiers were tried and convicted for their
roles in the killings. No one, however, was
higher in rank than a colonel, and all were released in 1993 under
an amnesty law. No one in the top
military leadership was prosecuted.
There is widespread suspicion in El Salvador and among U.S.
officials that Roberto D'Aubuisson, one of the
founders of the right-wing Arena party that ruled El Salvador until
this year, ordered the Jesuits' killings
during a meeting with other party officials in November 1989.
A lawsuit filed last year in a Spanish court is attempting to bring
senior military and civilian officials to
account.
Next week, attorneys and witnesses on behalf of the Jesuits'
families will present evidence based on
hundreds of pages of declassified U.S. documents from the late 1980s
and early 1990s.
The documents, including cables from U.S. Embassy, military and CIA
officials in El Salvador to
Washington, describe the Salvadoran army's "role in planning,
ordering and committing the crime and
covering it up afterward," said Kate Doyle, a researcher with the
National Security Archive, a Washingtonbased
organization that has been key in bringing much of the information
to light.
The ceremony Monday in San Salvador drew participants from all over
the world, including activists,
religious figures, journalists from the country's civil war era, and
U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), a
follower of U.S. policy in Central America who has long demanded a
full accounting of the Salvadoran and
U.S. government roles in the killings.
"We've had to wait 20 years for this," said Father Jose Tojeira, the
current UCA rector. "This is the first time
that a Salvadoran government publicly and officially recognizes the
courage, dignity and service of this
group of academics and men of faith."
Still, there are many in El Salvador who are critical of Funes for
not going far enough in pushing for a full
airing of the Jesuit case.
The Jesuits "don't need homages," an editorial on the leading
Salvadoran news website El Faro said
Monday. "They need, and especially we Salvadorans need, to know the
truth. . . . The new government . . .
has fled from its moral obligation to demand the opening of an
investigation."
[log in to unmask]
Renderos is a special correspondent.
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times



--
Regina Day Langhout, PhD
University of California, Santa Cruz
Department of Psychology
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
(831) 459-2535

"The role of the social sciences is to be troublesome, to disconcert
the habitual arrangements by which we manage to live along, and to
demonstrate the possibility of change in more adequate directions...
[Social scientists need to] get us into immediate trouble in order
to prevent our present troubles from becoming even more dangerous.
In a culture in which power is normally held by the few and used
offensively and defensively to bolster their instant advantage
within the status quo, the role of such a constructive troublemaker
is scarcely inviting."                  -Robert Lynd (1939)