[Mb-civic] A lesson unlearned in El Salvador - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  A lesson unlearned in El Salvador

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  April 26, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

First of two parts
AS AUXILIARY bishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chavez wonders if the 
United States learned anything from its murderous meddling in his 
nation. He remembers reading a magazine article shortly after the 
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, about how Americans surround 
themselves with information but much of it ''frivolous and superfluous." 
He said the article talked about how such shallow knowledge leads to US 
foreign policy being based on the moment, ''only looking at our navel as 
if the world ended at the border with Mexico."

Rosa Chavez wondered if the attacks would wake up the United States to 
look beyond the navel. He wondered if Americans would truly begin to 
ponder the question of ''Why do they hate us?" After the unprovoked 
invasion of Iraq under false pretenses in 2003, the answer was a 
terrible no.

''Pope John Paul called the war a 'defeat for humanity,' " Rosa Chavez 
said. ''The pope gave his condolences to the American people for Sept. 
11. But we also needed to enter a new understanding that we are one 
world where we only have a future together if we get rid of barriers and 
walls. Preemptive war makes no sense . . . I worry the US will have to 
ask again, 'Why do they hate us?' "

Rosa Chavez was in Cambridge last week to receive the Romero Truth Award 
from Centro Presente, a Latino immigrant advocacy organization. The 
award is named for Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop who 
was assassinated in 1980, presumably by a right-wing death squad. The 
assassination was part of a 1980-1992 civil war between leftist 
guerrillas and a US-backed right-wing government that resulted in at 
least 75,000 deaths and thousands more disappeared.

Rosa Chavez said Iraq means that El Salvador is a lesson unlearned. The 
Reagan and first Bush administrations gave the Salvadoran government $6 
billion in economic and military aid during the war. Rosa Chavez and the 
Catholic church condemned atrocities on both sides but was often 
threatened by the government because its pleas for human rights for 
peasants were seen as too far to the left.

No amount of killings mattered to anti-communist hard-liners in 
Washington, not even the murders of four Maryknoll nuns from the United 
States and six Jesuit priests. One such hard-liner was then-Defense 
Secretary Dick Cheney. Intelligence documents released in 1993 indicated 
that Cheney opposed attempts by members of Congress to withhold military 
aid to El Salvador during that government's slothful investigation of 
the murder of the priests. In a 1989 appearance on ABC's ''This Week 
with David Brinkley," Cheney claimed there was ''no indication at all" 
that the Salvadoran government or the army were involved.

Documents and soldier confessions in the mid- and late-1990s showed that 
the killings of the priests and nuns were directly tied to the military, 
and the Reagan administration suppressed and overlooked intelligence on 
state-sponsored terror links. As late as 1990, US military officers were 
training well-to-do Salvadorans linked to death squads.

A decade later, Vice President Cheney turned that legacy upside down, 
trumping up discredited intelligence to invade Iraq. In the 2004 vice 
presidential debate, he had the nerve to use El Salvador as an example 
of what would happen in Afghanistan and Iraq. He boasted, ''we held free 
elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress. . . . 
And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free 
elections."

This is after he refused to ''observe" how we sponsored so many of the 
75,000 deaths over the 12 years of the Reagan and first Bush 
administrations.

Rosa Chavez, part of the religious vanguard that risked life for peace 
and elections, remembers a whale of a lot more than Cheney, enough to 
fear for the future of Iraq. He remembers US ambassadors denying witness 
protection and cruelly interrogating courageous people who came forward 
with information on the state-sponsored terror. ''It was really terrible 
because (US) politics were not based on values and human rights," he 
said. ''During the war, I had to receive many US delegations, and 
frequently I got the impression they really did not care about the 
people. It was painful.

''I would say the Salvadoran case is even worse than Iraq. In Iraq, the 
US sent its army. In the Salvadoran case, the arms came from outside, 
but the deaths are all Salvadorans."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/26/a_lesson_unlearned_in_el_salvador/
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