[Peace-discuss] US war against the RC church

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/a-jesuit-inspiration.html

Whether from editorial insistence or naivete, the author of this NYT op-ed disgracefully downplays the US government's responsibility for the murders he recounts.

"...The fall of the Berlin wall has rightly been celebrated in recent weeks, but there has been little notice of what happened one week later, on November 16 1989, in El Salvador: the brutal assassination of six prominent Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper Julia Elba and her daughter Celine, by the elite Atlacatl battalion, armed and trained by Washington. The battalion had just returned from a several-month refresher course at the JFK Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, and a few days before the murders took part in a further training exercise run by US Special Forces flown to El Salvador. Heralded as 'El Salvador's best,' the battalion had already left a bloody trail of the usual victims during the horrendous decade of the 1980s, which opened with the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the 'voice for the voiceless,' by much the same hands. The story was similar throughout Central America, leaving hundreds of thousands of corpses and general misery during a reign of torture, murder and destruction guided by the Reagan administration under the guise of a war on terror.

"It was surmised at the time that the murder of the Jesuits was planned by the High Command of the Salvadoran Army. That was confirmed two weeks ago by publication in the Spanish press of a copy of the document ordering the murders and any witnesses, signed by the chief of staff and his associates, all of them so closely connected to the Pentagon and the Embassy that it is hard to imagine that Washington was unaware. The dramatic discoveries have yet to be reported here..." [Noam Chomsky, 2009]

--CGE