Latin America
Related: About this forumI finished my unit on US Cold War policy towards Latin America today...
Boy, am I just exhausted emotionally. I finished with a viewing of Romero. I literally felt ill having to discuss the movie with students.
http://www.un.org/en/events/righttotruthday/romero.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15472396
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/22/efrain-rios-montt-genocide_n_1535216.html
Sigh.
flamingdem
(39,304 posts)There were many groups protesting and at the time the FBI went after the people involved by going to their workplace and letting their boss know what they had been doing as far as solidarity work. Very ugly times.
Kolesar
(31,182 posts)I have not learned much about it in the US media although I have tried.
Judi Lynn
(160,217 posts)It's such an enormous subject, has altered the lives of so very many people, and the by-product here has been profound ignorance, and greater contempt and a false sense of superiority to all the people south of the U.S. border.
That has to change. It's dead wrong to keep an entire nation unaware of this horrendous moral debt.
For anyone who sees your thread who hasn't seen the last sermon of Archbishop Romero before his assassination, please read this link after reading a la izquierda's first link. This is an excerpt from the very end of his sermon:
The spokesman of Amnesty International said that the victims' bodies characteristically appeared with the thumbs tied behind their backs. Corrosive liquids had been applied to the corpses to prevent identification of the victims by their relatives and to prevent international condemnation, the spokesman added. Nevertheless, the bodies were exhumed and the dead have been identified. Fuentes said that the repression carried out by the Salvadorean army was aimed at breaking the popular organizations through the assassination of their leaders in both town and country.
According to the spokesman of Amnesty International, at least three thousand five hundred peasants have fled from their homes to the capital to escape persecution. "We have complete lists in London and Sweden of young children and women who have been assassinated for being organized," Fuentes stated....
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.
The church preaches your liberation just as we have studied it in just as we have studied it in the holy Bible today. It is a liberation that has, above all else, respect for the dignity of the person, hope for humanity's common good, and the transcendence that looks before all to God and only from God derives its hope and its strength.
More:
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/faculty/amcguire/romero.html
a la izquierda
(11,784 posts)When I finish up the semester and have some time to sit down and write, I'll add some more stuff. I've been up to my eyeballs in work.