Barack Obama, Oscar Romero, and Structural Sin

[Judi Lynn]

Barack Obama, Oscar Romero, and Structural Sin
Greg Grandin
March 23, 2011

In El Salvador, on the last leg of his Latin American tour, President Barack Obama paid a highly symbolic visit to the tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero, shot through the heart as he raised the Eucharist chalice during a mass, in March 1980. His assassination was ordered by Salvadoran military officer Roberto D'Aubuisson, a School of the America’s graduate.

As El Faro – an important online source of independent Central American news – put it, Obama’s homage to Romero is a “truly extraordinary” gesture since D'Aubuisson not only ran private-sector financed death squads but was a founder of ARENA, an ultra conservative political party that until 2009 had governed the country for two decades and enjoyed excellent relations with Washington.

Today, El Salvador is led by President Mauricio Funes, head of a center-left coalition government that includes the FMLN, the insurgent group turned political party Ronald Reagan wasted billions of dollars and over 70,000 lives trying to defeat in the 1980s. By lighting a candle for Romero, Obama, it might be said, was tacitly doing in El Salvador what he wouldn’t – or couldn’t -- do in Chile: apologize for US actions that resulted in horrific human tragedy.

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Squeezed by Plan Colombia to the south and Mexico’s disastrous War on Drugs to the north, Central American violence has skyrocketed. Whole regions in Honduras and Guatemala are either overrun by narcos, or militarized by security forces, themselves deeply involved in criminal activity, including drugs, illegal logging, car theft and kidnapping. The explosion of biofuels production and the intensification of mining (particularly gold mining) has created an ecological disaster and generated widespread social dislocation. Protesting peasants, especially in Honduras and Guatemala, have been checked by a revived planter-death squad alliance, though now “death squads” generally go under the euphemism, “private security.” An increasing number activists are turning up dead. In February, the bullet-ridden bodies of four Q’eqchi’ Mayan community leaders -- Catalina Muca Maas, Alberto Coc Cal, Amilcar Choc, and Sebastian Xuc Coc – were found in a river.

More:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/159405/barack-obama-oscar-romero-and-structural-sin