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By Root 2768 0

concerning the identity of Romero’s murderers, and there were significant links of the murders to the highest officials of the Salvadoran military establishment. In fact, a judicial investigation in El Salvador headed by Judge Atilio Ramírez quickly pointed a finger at D’Aubuisson and General Medrano, a U.S. protégé in El Salvador. But Ramírez soon fled the country after several threats and an attempt on his life, and active pursuit of the case in El Salvador ended. In exile, Judge Ramírez claimed that the criminal-investigation group of the police didn’t arrive at the scene of the crime till four days after it was committed, and that neither the police nor the attorney general provided his court with any evidence. He concluded that there was “undoubtedly” a “kind of conspiracy to cover up the murder” from the very beginning.45

Needless to say, Judge Ramírez’s testimony was not featured in the U.S. media, nor was the accumulating evidence of D’Aubuisson’s involvement given significant play. It was back-page material at best, treated matter-offactly and never put in a framework of indignation and outrage by the use of emotive language or by asking allies of Romero to comment on the evidence, and it never elicited strident demands for justice. To this day one will find no mention of the fact that the effective rulers of this “fledgling democracy” are military officers who were closely associated with D’Aubuisson and his cabal and may well have been implicated in the assassination.

After D’Aubuisson was caught in a raid on May 8, 1980, with documents showing that he was planning a coup and with evidence of his involvement in the murder of Romero, he was arrested and faced with the threat of trial and imprisonment. An assembly of the entire officer corps of the Salvadoran army—seven hundred strong—was quickly convened, and demanded his release. He was turned loose shortly thereafter, with the concurrence of the minister of defense.46 The documents found in his possession dropped out of sight. The security forces also raided the legal-aid office of the archbishopric, removing all of their files bearing on the assassination. At the previously mentioned meeting of the Salvadoran officer corps, Colonel Adolfo Majano, the last of the reformers in the “reformist” junta of 1979, was denounced, and he quickly exited from the junta, to be replaced by yet another hard-liner. The army had expressed its solidarity with the hardline-death-squad right, and the junta was adjusted to meet this new threat to the image of a reformist junta, with Duarte advanced to president, serving as a figurehead for the benefit of Congress and the media, to ensure that arms would flow to the killers.

The U.S. mass media gave little notice to this important display and consolidation of the power of the extreme right, and the semi-official vindication of the murderers of Archbishop Romero. This was telling evidence about the nature of power in El Salvador and the fictional quality of the claim that the government was centrist or reformist. Unbiased media would have featured and explained the meaning of this information. But these facts contradicted the Carter-Reagan mythology, so the media predictably remained silent about these events and continued to perpetuate the myth. On November 29, 1980, following the massacre of the leaders of the opposition in San Salvador, the Times suggested that there is “a severe challenge to the credibility” of the government, but there is no hint that the revolt of May 1980 had changed their view of April 28 that this was a “weak centrist government.”

The media also adjusted nicely, then and later, to the rehabilitation of the probable murderer of Romero and his reintegration into the official power structure. As D’Aubuisson sought high office and eventually became president of the Salvadoran legislature, the U.S. mass media did not focus on his record as the probable organizer of the murder of Archbishop Romero and as the acknowledged leader of the death squads and a mass murderer. Even the open anti-Semitism of this Fascist