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 huamn rights was
reported by the Inter-American Commission
on Huamn 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 sentiments
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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