El Salvador's ex-guerrilla poised to win presidency in runoff election

[Judi Lynn]

5. That could put a crater in the life of anyone! My god.

Ran to get an article for anyone who didn't learn who he was. (What a shame his son is very active in El Salvador right-wing politics (Arena Party) currently.)

Saturday, March 6, 2010
Blowtorch Bob: The Duty to Remember Roberto D’Aubuisson

El Salvador’s Roberto D’Aubuisson (1944-1992) was uniquely malevolent. He would throw babies in the air and shoot them in midair, just for fun. The death squads of which he was the leader, hunted down and executed insurgents in the slowest, most exquisitely painful ways possible. The Spanish Inquisition could have learned a thing or two about torture from him: his favorite method involved a blow torch, earning him the nickname of “Blowtorch Bob.” I bet no one ever called him that to his face.


During the Salvadoran Civil War, 75,000 people were killed; 8000 were disappeared, and one million were left homeless, slaughtered by D’Aubuisson and his death squads. They killed a group of Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter; and a group of Catholic lay nuns who had just arrived in El Salvador. In El Mozote, they killed at least 794 townspeople: they separated the men from the women, locked them in a church, then took them out in small groups. After they raped the women, they murdered each one of them. Then they burned the bodies.

His crowning achievement was assassinating Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero: On March 24, 1980, one of his gunmen shot him in the heart as he was saying Mass. Romero’s offense? Demanding the end to the killing of innocent men, women, and children in El Salvador’s Civil War. What an odd demand from a Catholic priest: love thy neighbor.

When throat cancer killed D’Aubuisson on February 20, 1992 , sending him, one hopes, to join Satan’s own favorite sons, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Chauchesku in the first circle of hell, I vowed I would remember and celebrate his date of death every year. So today, I remember by telling my students, my friends, and you, my readers, about the fiend of El Salvador, Roberto D’Aubuisson.

D’Aubuisson’s education at the School of the Americas is particularly galling. The SOA, chartered by the United States Congress, and sponsored by the United States Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, gained its fame by training Latin American military officers in methods of interrogation, torture, kidnapping and executions. These methods were described by former United States Representative Joseph Kennedy (D-MA) as “worthy of the Soviet gulag.” Our government allowed and encouraged this instructional program as part of a perverted foreign policy focused on maintaining stability in the region at any cost rather than in protecting the basic human rights of all of the citizens of the hemisphere.

More:
http://professinghistory.blogspot.com/2010/03/blowtorch-bob-duty-to-remember-roberto.html

[center]

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dWIgnGUhWmQ/UwOfBCwWseI/AAAAAAAAq80/PP-9W-aEDR4/s1600/El+Salvador-Roberto+D%E2%80%99Aubuisson.jpg



Roberto D’Aubuisson



Government soldiers on a coastal road. February 8, 1982 (Credit: © Alain Keler / Corbis Sygma) - See more at: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/victory_photos.php?page=all&print=true#sthash.FG4ocgfh.dpuf[/center]
The events I've learned about from El Salvador are beyond forgiveness.

Can't imagine what it must have been for you to see this man's face. What a monstrous person, phenomenally evil.
He destroyed the lives of so very many people in the most vicious, disrespectful way possible. He meant to terrorize the survivors with what they saw happen to their loved ones.

Thank you for mentioning what you experienced. You are entitled to be "Comrade Grumpy," clearly!