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Was the CIA to Blame for the Death of Archbishop Oscar Romero?
Guardian
Thursday March 23, 2000
The killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero was one
of the most notorious crimes of the cold war.
Was the CIA to blame?
Tom Gibb uncovers new evidence about
the murder of El Salvador's spiritual leader
San Salvador. In the bright morning sunlight of March 24 1980, a car
stopped outside the Church of the Divine Providence. A lone gunman stepped
out, unhurried. Resting his rifle on the car door, he aimed carefully down
the long aisle to where El Salvador's archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was
saying mass. A single shot rang out. Romero staggered and fell. The blood
pumped from his heart, soaking the little white disks of scattered host.
Romero's murder was to become one of the most notorious unsolved crimes
of the cold war. The motive was clear. He was the most outspoken voice
against the death squad slaughter gathering steam in the US backyard. The
ranks of El Salvador's leftwing rebels were being swelled by priests who
preached that the poor should seek justice in this world, not wait for the
next. Romero was the "voice of those without voice," telling soldiers not to
kill.
The US vowed to make punishment of the archbishop's killers a priority.
It could hardly do otherwise as President Reagan launched the largest US war
effort since Vietnam to defeat the rebels. He needed support in Washington,
which meant showing that crimes like shooting archbishops and nuns would not
be tolerated.
The ordering of the murder was blamed on the bogeyman of the story, a
military intelligence officer called Major Roberto D'Aubuisson who had,
conveniently for Washington, recently left the army. In the weeks before the
murder, he was repeatedly on television using military intelligence files to
denounce "guerrillas." Those he accused were often murdered. Romero was near
the top of the list.
But US promises to bring justice came to nothing. With no trigger-man,
gun or witnesses, officials claimed lack of evidence. D'Aubuisson went on to
become one of El Salvador's most successful politicians before throat cancer
killed him at the end of the civil war 12 years later - the revenge of God,
many concluded.
However, new evidence suggests that Washington not only knew far more
about the killing than it admitted but also did nothing to investigate for
fear of jeopardising its war effort. Vital evidence was ignored. Key
witnesses, including the most likely gunman, were killed by those supposed
to be investigating.
Seven years and 50,000 deaths after Romero's murder, I was feeling out
of my depth as a novice reporter sitting on a park bench talking to a young
deserter from Major D'Aubuisson's death squads who called himself Jorge. In
1984, he told me, he had guarded a safe house for three former guerrillas
nicknamed the Little Angels. They spent their days with prostitutes, smoking
marijuana and playing rock music at full volume. At night, they sallied out
to capture and kill their former rebel comrades.
The men received orders from a National Police detective, Oscar Perez
Linares, who came to the house. A man of few words, he was treated by the
others with the respect reserved for those not afraid to kill. Several
times, Jorge heard the others laughing at how Linares had shot Romero.
Linares sat with a half-smile. "You should have seen the blood that came
from that priest!" was his only comment.
At the time, Jorge's story was impossible to check although the rest
of what he said turned out to be true. After the war, I looked in
declassified CIA files. Sure enough, in mid-1983 an unusually detailed CIA
report, quoting a senior Salvadoran police source, named Linares as a member
of a four-man National Police squad which murdered Romero. Other Salvadoran
officers said the same thing. And the man who drove the car which took the
killer to the church also picked out a photo-fit of Linares. So why, if the
CIA had such evidence, and solving the murder was such a priority, was
nothing done?
Linares was not just any detective. Nor were the Little Angels simple
ex-guerrillas. Before the war, when D'Aubuisson ran El Salvador's
intelligence agency ANSESAL - set up by the CIA to guard against Communist
infiltration of its hemisphere - Linares was one of his most successful
agents, infiltrating the fledgling rebel groups. One of his best spies
inside rebel ranks was the head of the Little Angels, who Jorge knew as El
Negro.
After the war, I tracked down El Negro's former rebel comrades. He had
been a top guerrilla leader, trained in Cuba. But he was, they said, a
traitor. In the years following Romero's murder, he helped to systematically
destroy the rebels in western El Salvador, where thousands of leftist
sympathisers were murdered. He betrayed gun-running units in neighbouring
countries and led guerrilla columns into ambushes. The operation continued
even after 1982, when the rebels realised El Negro was a traitor and he fled
their ranks. For the next three years, he and Linares led police units which
dismantled the rebels in the capital. Some rebel survivors described how El
Negro would appear during torture sessions. "Remember the time we were
together in Cuba?" he would say.
This was not a death squad rabble, but rather a highly structured and
effective dirty war in which the Americans were closely involved. The
much-blamed death squads, like the White Hand and the Secret Anti-Communist
Army, never existed as more than exotic names used to sow terror. Military
and police intelligence, as CIA reports from 1983 make clear, did the
killing. The CIA should have known. It helped the police throughout this
period, contracting in urban intelligence experts.
"They would sit next door and write out the questions, leaving it up to the
Salvadorans to extract the information," said Gerardo Le Chevalier, a senior
Salvadoran official at the time. Neither was Major D'Aubuisson the boss. He
played the bogeyman very well, leading political rallies to sing his party's
anthem.
"El Salvador will be the tomb where the reds end up!" he would shout.
But the major always denied his organisation was behind all the bloodshed.
"Who do you think I am, Superman?" he barked at us when confronted with his
death squad record. And, indeed, far too many units were involved for the
major to have had control. It was rather the policy of the generals and
colonels at the top of the army. In 1980, when Romero was murdered, the
major was coordinating closely with the small clique of rightwing generals
and colonels struggling to keep the army under their control. D'Aubuisson
may have ordered the killing. But it is very unlikely he did so alone.
Several US military men told me they could not get rid of the senior
officers with the worst human rights records without risking the whole war.
The US had no access to spies like El Negro Mario. The Salvadorans, who
never really trusted their US backers, kept that for themselves. Linares and
the Little Angels moved from safe house to safe house. US officials said
that to clean up the army would have fatally demoralised it. More to the
point, it would have lost its eyes and ears.
By late 1983, however, the dirty war was running out of steam. The army
was now losing a conventional war in the mountains against well-armed
guerrillas who could not be arrested and murdered in the middle of the
night. Reagan desperately needed Congress to grant more military aid, which
meant cleaning up the Salvadoran army's image.
Vice President George Bush and his aid Lt Col Oliver North were
dispatched to El Salvador. Later Bush claimed he faced down the death
squads. In fact, he met with the Salvadoran high command. Afterwards, North
slipped them a list of nine names the Americans wanted removed from the
army. Linares was one of the names.
His end came three years later, in 1986. By now, he and the Little
Angels were kidnapping rich businessmen who refused to pay towards keeping
the clandestine intelligence operation going. The kidnappers would pretend
to be guerrillas. But some victims recognised the voices of army officers
talking outside their rat-infested cells. The FBI and the National Police
were sent to investigate.
Linares, El Negro Mario and the others were quickly identified. Linares
was arrested after fleeing to Guatemala by a special police unit the
Americans set up to investigate human rights crimes particularly Romero's
murder. They killed him on the way back to San Salvador. El Negro Mario was
also captured and killed. "They knew far too much to live," was the verdict
of one top Salvadoran officer. The details of Romero's murder, as well as
thousands of others, went to the grave with them.
