El Salvador shutters historic rights clinic
El Salvador shutters historic rights clinic
Founded by assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero, many are angry about last month's closure of Tutela Legal.
Nina Lakhani Last Modified: 12 Oct 2013 14:32
Neris Gonzalez would journey 25km every week from her rural village in San Vicente, El Salvador to the nearest town in order to phone Archbishop Oscar Romero. Gonzalez, a 23-year-old community leader, would recount the latest murders, disappearances and mutilations committed by security forces in her district to the Archbishop. This was 1978, a time of increasing repression and human rights violations in El Salvador in the run-up to the coup d'état in October 1979 and subsequent 12-year civil war.
Archbishop Romero founded the Human Rights Office, originally known as Socorro Juridico (Legal Relief) in 1977, in order to document these abuses from across the country. It was one of the only places people could go to report state-sponsored crimes.
Every Sunday until his assassination in March 1980, Romero would broadcast a homily from the grand cathedral in the capital San Salvador which included the latest denunciations. Communities in every tiny village and hard luck neighbourhood could be found huddled over battery-operated radios listening to his homilies which disseminated the horrors being inflicted upon civilians.
Since then, the Archbishop's Human Rights and Legal Aid Office, known as Tutela Legal since 1982, has documented more than 50,000 cases of human rights abuses - before, during and after the civil war which ended in 1992. It holds the most comprehensive archive of El Salvador's bloody history and its lawyers continue to represent survivors of notorious massacres including El Mozote and Rio Sumpul.
End of an era
On September 30 the staff arrived at work to find the locks changed and armed guards on the doors. They were allowed 10 minutes to clear their desks chaperoned by the security guards.
More:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/10/el-salvador-shutters-historic-rights-clinic-20131010112129327660.html