Defending Human Rights and Historical Memory in El Salvador (Interview)

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 416-421
Author(s):  
Hilary Goodfriend
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
Historical Memory

Óscar Romero and the Politics of Sainthood

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Holy See ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Face ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
The One

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization

Reflections

2019 ◽  
pp. 66-72
Author(s):  
Williams Guevara Martínez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
Legal Representation ◽  
College Credits ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Legal Relief ◽  
Formal Status

Born in El Salvador, Williams Guevara Martínez left home at seventeen to escape domestic abuse and seek refuge with family members living in the United States. After a hazardous journey and crossing into the United States in a context of heightened migration, he was immediately apprehended, detained in federal custody, and ultimately released to his brother’s care in Maryland. He found excellent legal representation and was granted legal relief in the form of Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. Now with formal status, steady work, and college credits he looks back to chronicle the challenges of youth who enter the country alone and without authorization. Guevara Martínez recounts his life in El Salvador, his harrowing journey, experience in federal custody and after release, including personal attachments, educational opportunities and his commitment “to give back” by helping others like himself. He shares the lessons he learned commenting critically on violence, the migration process, human rights, and his hopes for the future..

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Eisenbrandt
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Truth Commission ◽  
Arrest Warrant ◽  
The One

To this day, Álvaro Saravia remains the only person held responsible by a court of law for the murder of Óscar Romero, and his penalty is nothing more than a dollar figure he has never paid. This lamentable reality is less an indication of the significance of the lawsuit we brought and more an indictment of the tight lid that impunity has imposed whenever efforts to seek accountability have bubbled up in El Salvador. The Amnesty Law passed in 1993, five days after the Truth Commission named Saravia, Roberto D’Aubuisson, and others as the men who killed Romero, endured for twenty-three years, surviving ARENA’s departure from political power and the ascension of the former guerrilla party, the FMLN, to a second consecutive presidential term. But in July 2016, the Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador’s Supreme Court, a body more independent of outside influence than the one that threw out the arrest warrant against Saravia in 1988, ruled the Amnesty Law unconstitutional. One of the judges who voted to scrap the amnesty was previously a lawyer in the archdiocese’s human rights office who investigated the abuses that Monseñor Romero denounced from his pulpit....

Restoration of Historical Memory and Dignity for Victims of the Armenian Genocide

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Armenian Genocide ◽  
New Developments ◽  
European Court

This article argues that United Nations human rights principles and new developments in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights suggest a route to provide effective reparation through restoration of historical memory and dignity for victims of the Armenian Genocide.

Strategy, Ideology, and Human Rights: Jimmy Carter Confronts the Left in Central America, 1979–1981

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 57-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Soares
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
Central America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jimmy Carter

This article discusses the Carter administration's policies toward Nicaragua and El Salvador after the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua in July 1979. These policies were influenced by the widespread perception at the time that Marxist revolutionary forces were in the ascendance and the United States was in retreat. Jimmy Carter was trying to move away from traditional American “interventionism” in Latin America, but he was also motivated by strategic concerns about the perception of growing Soviet and Cuban strength, ideological concerns about the spread of Marxism-Leninism, and political-humanitarian concerns about Marxist-Leninist regimes' systematic violations of human rights.

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