Archbishop Romero’s murder to be investigated

The government of El Salvador announced on Friday that it would investigate the murder of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero who was killed during Mass in 1980 El Pais reported.

El Salvador’s leftist government led by President Mauricio Funes has agreed to follow the recommendations presented to it by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (CIDH) in 2000.

The Commission recommended a complete judicial investigation, which would be impartial and effective about the case with the goal to identify, judge and to sanction all those “material and intellectual authors” without being hampered by the Amnesty Law.The law was brought in after a 1992 peace agreement ended the country’s fierce 12-year civil war in which around 75,000 people were killed, 8,000 went missing and some 50,000 people were severly maimed.
The archbishop who was murdered as he was raising the chalice at the altar in the chapel of a hospital in San Salvador was an outspoken critic of the El Salvadorian government at the time, heavily criticising its human rights abuses. The gunman was believed to be an ultra-rightist. Over 50,000 people flocked to his funeral, where further violence caused another 35 people to be killed.

The Truth Commission investigating El Salvador’s war crimes suggested that the intellectual author of the assassination was Roberto D’Aubuisson, the founder of the right-wing National Republican Alliance Party , who died from cancer in 1992. The Amnesty Law prevented the crime from being investigated and ARENA governed El Salvador from 1989 to last year when the left-wing party came to power.

Archbishop Romero’s Cause for Beatification was opened in 1997. He has been declared a “servant of God”.