Tom Gibb has a report on the killing of Monsenor Romero in The Guardian with The killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero was one of the most notorious crimes of the cold war. Was the CIA to blame?
However, new evidence suggests that Washington not only knew far more about the killing than it admitted – but also did nothing to investigate for fear of jeopardising its war effort. Vital evidence was ignored. Key witnesses, including the most likely gunman, were killed by those supposed to be investigating.
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.
Some of it is new, some not so new. At this point, I honestly sometimes forget what is the most recent knowledge. Close collaboration between death squads “led” by Roberto D’Aubuisson and the Salvadoran military. The US CIA doing a lot of dirty work, often in an “advisory” role. Our CIA helped to establish (not sure the right word – structure? improve?) Salvadoran death squads. The US unable to gain leverage over Salvadoran military units to fight the right way but unable to gather human intelligence the way the Salvadorans did. The right and the left both infiltrated each other’s organizations and used information from spies to kill each other.
Here’s more from a 2010 interview with one of the accomplices in Romero’s death.
