On the evening of March 24, 1980, while performing mass, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by a death squad for his public denunciations of El Salvador’s militarized state and mass human rights violations. In 1993, a report by the U.N. Truth Commission on El Salvador revealed the person responsible for ordering the assassination as Roberto D’Aubuisson, a graduate from the School of the Americas in Colombus, Georgia. Archbishop Romero’s funeral on March 30, 1980 was attended by more than 250,000 people, and is recognized as one of the largest demonstrations in Latin American history. Today, people throughout El Salvador and the world remember a man who was committed to the principles of liberation theology and spoke out bravely against poverty, torture, and social injustice. For these same reasons, Romero was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and is widely considered the unofficial patron saint of the Americas. Ironically, as the world celebrates Archbishop Romero, the Texas Board of Education voted on March 10th to remove all mention of Romero’s life, work, and political activism from its curriculum because he is, as members argued, “not well known.” My question: Isn’t making things known the precise point of education?

By lesoltis
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Commemorations, Democracy, lesoltis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.