Pope lifts beatification ban on Salvadoran Oscar Romero

[alp227]

Source: BBC

Pope Francis has lifted a ban on the beatification of murdered Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

For years, the Roman Catholic Church blocked the process because of concerns that he had Marxist ideas.

An outspoken critic of the military regime during El Salvador's bloody civil war, Archbishop Romero was shot dead while celebrating Mass in 1980.

Beatification, or declaring a person "blessed", is the necessary prelude to full sainthood.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-28845998

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The Guardian, 3/22/00: The killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero was one of the most notorious crimes of the cold war. Was the CIA to blame?

Seven years and 50,000 deaths after Romero's murder, I was feeling out of my depth as a novice reporter sitting on a park bench talking to a young deserter from Major D'Aubuisson's death squads who called himself Jorge. In 1984, he told me, he had guarded a safe house for three former guerrillas nicknamed the Little Angels. They spent their days with prostitutes, smoking marijuana and playing rock music at full volume. At night, they sallied out to capture and kill their former rebel comrades.

The men received orders from a National Police detective, Oscar Perez Linares, who came to the house. A man of few words, he was treated by the others with the respect reserved for those not afraid to kill. Several times, Jorge heard the others laughing at how Linares had shot Romero. Linares sat with a half-smile. "You should have seen the blood that came from that priest!" was his only comment.

At the time, Jorge's story was impossible to check - although the rest of what he said turned out to be true. After the war, I looked in declassified CIA files. Sure enough, in mid-1983, an unusually detailed CIA report, quoting a senior Salvadoran police source, named Linares as a member of a four-man National Police squad which murdered Romero. Other Salvadoran officers said the same thing. And the man who drove the car which took the killer to the church also picked out a photo-fit of Linares. So why, if the CIA had such evidence, and solving the murder was such a priority, was nothing done?

[billhicks76]

1. Reagan, Bush Sr and Negroponte

Are responsible for his assassination. And the murder and rape of those nuns.

[alp227]

2. How, since Romero was killed in 1980, before the Reagan presidency? nt

[rpannier]

4. White House Time Machine

[billhicks76]

6. They Were Still Conducting Foreign Policy

...then though it happened almost a year before they took office they set the tone with their rancid anti-communism campaign and coordinated it with US corporations in the region. They had been involved there for a very long time...mostly Bush Sr and Negroponte who go all the way back to the Bay Of Pigs. There is a reason Negroponte became ambassador to Honduras and Mexico under Reagan and Bush and then Homeland Security and Iraq. Ever see the photos of him in Cuba with the the JFK hating crew? By 1980 they were well entrenched behind the scenes in all of Latin America and setting up death squads to protect corporations. You think Dick Cheney was inactive from 93-99 just because he wasn't officially in office?

[starroute]

7. They were sending out clear signals

This refers specifically to the visit of John K. Singlaub and Daniel O. Graham to Guatemala in December 1979 -- but the message was directed to all the death squad nations:

http://bulldogger.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/wacl-moonstruck-singlaub-warriors/

In December 1979, Singlaub and Graham, who served on Reagan’s defense advisory committee, led a supportive American Security council delegation to Guatemala. In a later interview with Allan Nairn, Singlauub – who served as honorary chairman of the 1980 Reagan Campaign in Colorado – said that he was “terribly impressed” at how the regime of General Romeo Lucas Garcia was “desperately trying to promote human rights.” He urged sympathetic understanding of the death squads, arguing that the Carter administration’s unwillingness to back the Guatemalan regime in eliminating its enemies was “prompting those who are dedicated to retaining the free enterprise system and to continuing progress towards political and economic development to take matters in their own hands.”

The message from Singlaub and Graham was clear, according to one high Guatemalan official: “Mr.Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done.” Gordon Sumner of the Council for Inter-American Security and the ASC Task Force on Central American also defended the death squads to Nairn, arguing that while regrettable, “there is really no other choice.”

In February 1981, Amnesty international released a report entitled, Guatemala, a Government Program of Political Murder. The report described how death squad victims were targeted for murder in an annex of the National Palace under the direction of President Lucas Garcia. It concluded that “nearly 5,000 Guatemalans have been seized without warrant and killed since General Lucas Garcia became President of Guatemala in 1978. The bodies of the victims have been found piled up in ravines, dumped at roadsides or buried in mass graves. Thousands bore the scars of torture, and death had come to most by strangling with a garrotte, by being suffocated in rubber hoods or by being shot in the head.”

[blm]

8. Poppy Bush was working that arena in late 60s and early 70s.

He and Moon were also following through with their efforts to divide the world's religious flocks by pushing an onerous fundamentalism that just happened to coincide with the fascist political agenda.

The push towards fundamentalism within the world's religions required co-opting the church leaders, as well. Region by region. Religion by religion.

Some of the furthest right Catholic groups in Central and South America, like TFP, were being covertly funded by RevMoon. My own mother was caught up with the group's outreach to catholics here in the US and became politically radicalized beyond recognition.

[Judi Lynn]

10. Exceptional comments, and true. The US guys go back so much earlier than most people realize,

in their involvement in the Americas. Nothing good came of it, either, clearly.

Very sorry your mother was caught unprepared to see through these religious right-wingers. They are a curse.

[blm]

11. Same as David Brock's father.

.

[Judi Lynn]

3. He was, himself, the miracle. It's astounding a human being could love, defend, protect, cherish

the lives of his countrymen/women so much that his life meant very little to him if he had to lose it defending the voiceless, the innocent people who were tormented, tortured, terrorized, brutally murdered by men his government sent to the U.S.'s School of the Americas to learn advanced methods of intimidation, control of the population.

There may never be any words more searing, more impassioned than those in his last sermon given a week before he was mowed down in front of his congregation, at mass, by a SOA-trained sniper:

Archbishop Oscar Romero
The Last Sermon (1980)

~snip~

I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, "Thou shalt not kill." No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.

More:
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/faculty/amcguire/romero.html

[center]

[/center]
The crowd image was taken of the people who came to attend his funeral. The right-wing government's military snipers had surrounded the plaza and opened fire, creating a massacre of the people who came to grieve for their beloved friend.

I don't see how anyone living through this evil madness could ever forgive any of the people involved, or those who sent them.
How did they keep from going absolutely mad.

Archbishop clearly knew this was probably his end, and he cared more about standing up against evil, at the greatest price. He is a modern-day miracle. His life deserves beatification. No one could do more than he.

[bklyncowgirl]

5. I'm very happy to see this. nt

[flamingdem]

9. An amazing human being

Great to hear this