Destruction of Historical and Human Rights Archives: Burning History in San Salvador
Weekend Edition Nov 29-Dec 01, 2013
Destruction of Historical and Human Rights Archives
Burning History in San Salvador
by SARAH MASLIN
At the crack of dawn on Thursday, Nov. 14, three armed men broke into the offices of Pro-Búsqueda, a non-profit in San Salvador that reunites families with children who went missing during El Salvador’s 1979-1992 civil war.
They beat up the guards, poured gasoline on the organization’s archive, and used torches to set hundreds of documents aflame. On their way out, they took computers with them.
The attack on Pro-Búsqueda was not a random crime. Pro-Búsqueda (“Search”) was founded in 1994 to investigate the nearly 1,200 cases of children separated or taken from their parents during the war. Since then, it has used DNA testing and detective work to identify 175 “disappeared” youths. Many had been adopted by families in the United States or Europe, and they’ve now been united with their families in El Salvador. But more than 800 complaints of missing children remain unresolved. Evidence for these cases was among the documentation destroyed by the gunmen.
Why?
On September 20, Salvadoran courts announced a review of the 1993 blanket amnesty law that has kept hundreds of military and government officials, including those responsible for the 1989 slaying of six Jesuit priests, out of jail. Should the law be overturned, much of the evidence needed to prosecute these individuals would come from the archives of grassroots human rights organizations like Pro-Búsqueda.
Another organization with valuable evidence, Tutela Legal, the human rights office of the Catholic Church, was abruptly shut down by the Archbishop of San Salvador on September 30. That day, employees of Tutela Legal arrived for work to find their office doors padlocked and guards stationed in the hall. They were told to gather their things. Founded in 1977 by Bishop Oscar Romero, Tutela Legal is one of only a handful of groups that provided support and legal counsel to El Salvador’s civilian population during the war. Despite hundreds who still depend on legal assistance from Tutela Legal, and despite 50,000 open cases, Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas decided that the organization no longer had a reason to exist.
This kind of sabotage is all too familiar for those who lived through the “anti-subversive” strategies of the regime in power during El Salvador’s civil war. Books were burned; student protests were attacked; anyone who threatened the oligarchy’s power could be hunted down by death squads or shot by the army’s elite, US-trained battalions. But after three decades of peace and increasing dialogue about human rights in El Salvador, this sudden resort to fear tactics — no doubt intended to intimidate those challenging the amnesty law — is troubling, to say the least.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/29/burning-history-in-san-salvador/
