February 17th, 2005 marked the 25th anniversary of
Archbishop Oscar Romero’s letter to President Jimmy Carter asking him not to
send military aid to El Salvador. Five weeks later Romero was assassinated. Two
days following Romero’s funeral, the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on
Foreign Operations approved Carter’s request for “non lethal” military aid to El
Salvador. This letter still resonates today as the “Salvador Option” is
considered as a strategy in Iraq.
San Salvador
February 17, 1980
His Excellency
The President of the United States
Mr. Jimmy Carter
Dear Mr. President: In the last few days, news has
appeared in the national press that worries me greatly. According to the
reports, your government is studying the possibility of economic and military
support and assistance to the present government junta.
Because you are a Christian and because you have
shown that you want to defend human rights, I venture to set forth for you my
pastoral point of view in regard to this news and to make a specific request of
you.
I am very concerned by the news that the government
of the United States is planning to further El Salvador’s arms race by sending
military equipment and advisors to “train three Salvadoran battallions in
logistics, communications, and intelligence.” If this information from the
papers is correct, instead of favoring greater justice and peace in El
Salvador, your government’s contribution will undoubtedly sharpen the injustice
and the repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often
been for respect for their most basic human rights.
The present government junta and, especially, the
armed forces and security forces have unfortunately not demonstrated their
capacity to resolve in practice the nation’s serious political and structural
problems. For the most part, they have resorted to repressive violence,
producing a total of deaths and injuries much greater than under the previous military
regime, whose systematic violation of human rights was reported by the Inter - American
Commission on Human Rights.
The brutal form in which the security forces
recently evicted and murdered the occupiers of the headquarters of the
Christian Democratic Party, even though the junta and the party apparently did
not authorize the operation, is an indication that the junta and the Christian Democrats
do not govern the country, but that political power is in the hands of unscrupulous
military officers who know only how to repress the people and favor the interests
of the Salvadoran oligarchy.
If it is true that last November a “group of six
Americans was in El Salvador...providing $200,000 in gas masks and flak jackets
and teaching how to use them against demonstrators,” you ought to be informed
that it is evident that since the security forces, with increased personal
protection and efficiency, have even more violently repressed the people, using
deadly weapons.
For this reason, given that as a Salvadoran and
archbishop of the archdiocese of San Salvador, I have an obligation to see that
faith and justice reign in my country, I ask you, if you truly want to defend
human rights:
· to
forbid that military aid be given to the Salvadoran government;
· to
guarantee that your government will not intervene directly or indirectly, with military,
economic, diplomatic, or other pressures, in determining the destiny of the Salvadoran
people;
In these moments, we are living through a grave
economic and political crisis in our country, but it is certain that
increasingly the people are awakening and organizing and have begun to prepare
themselves to manage and be responsible for the future of El Salvador, as the
only ones capable of overcoming the crisis.
It would be unjust and deplorable for foreign
powers to intervene and frustrate the Salvadoran people, to repress them and
keep them from deciding autonomously the economic and political course that our
nation should follow. It would be to violate a right that the Latin American
bishops, meeting at Puebla, recognized publicly when we spoke of “the
legitimate self - determination of our peoples, which allows them to organize
according to their own spirit and the course of their history and to cooperate
in a new international order” (Puebla, 505).
I hope that your religious sentiment s and your
feelings for the defense of human rights will move you to accept my petition,
thus avoiding greater bloodshed in this suffering country.
Sincerely,
Oscar A. Romero Archbishop
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