Spotlight on El Salvador: the countries of the hemisphere will gather in this Central American nation when it hosts the OAS General Assembly.

AuthorLuxner, Larry
PositionOrganization of American States

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At the solemn Monument to the Disappeared, the names of over 25,000 victims of El Salvador's long-running civil war are etched in an 85-meter-long wall of black granite. Tourists and locals alike visit this somber reminder of El Salvador's violent past which bears a striking resemblance to Washington's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. November 11 marks the anniversary of a major anti-government offensive launched in 1989 by the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (FMLN)--a leftist rebel group whose successors are today running El Salvador.

"We come here every year on November 11, the day of the offensive, and also on November 2, the day of the dead," said Carolina Solís, a middle-aged woman visiting the monument in the heart of San Salvador's Parque Cuscutlán to honor the memory of her brother, Edwin Omar Solís. Asked if El Salvador is better off today with the FMLN in power, Solís said that

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"Things are changing, but the right-wing government left us a lot of problems: education, for example," she said in answer to a question. "During that government, kids were going to school barefoot."

Not far from Parque Cuscutlán, at the downtown Catedral Metropolitana de San Salvador, lies the tomb of one of the key figures of El Salvador's civil war: Archbishop Oscar Romero.

A champion of liberation theology and an outspoken opponent of the military regime, Romero was assassinated March 24, 1980--one day after giving a sermon in which he urged government soldiers, as Christians, to obey God's orders by refusing to carry out human-rights abuses against civilians.

Cindy Portello hadn't even been born when Romero was shot. But the 23-year-old woman from El Salvador's eastern region says she admires Romero for standing up to injustice in her country.

"I come here in key moments of my life, whenever I begin something new," Portello said as she sat in the darkness by the famous priest's tomb, scribbling private thoughts in her notepad. "Oscar Romero was a voice for those who didn't have a voice. He realized the government was abusing human rights. He knew what was going on."

El Salvador's civil war, which killed some 75,000 people between 1979 and 1992, is never far from the surface anywhere you go in this densely populated land of 7.5 million--the smallest of Central America's seven nations. Indeed, it was the second-longest military conflict in Latin American history, ranking only behind Guatemala's civil...

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