American involvement in the Salvador civil war is now widely recognised to have been one of the most painful and shameful periods of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. It was a policy that Ambassador White tried, valiantly, to influence, and if he is held in such high esteem in the US and within the inernational human rights and legal communities, it is precisely because of the principled stand he took at the time of these women’s death–a stand which, as he knew it would, cost him his job and his diplomatic career.

Ever since, Ambassador White has not spared himself to keep up the fight for justice and truth in a small, battered country, suffering the lack of both. It is admirable and entirely consistent with this history, that twenty seven years after the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop, Oscar Romero, Ambassador White would address the morally repugnant intention by the Salvadoran Arena Party to honor the memory of the notorious Roberto Aubuisson, a man who has been repeatedly named in official US documents for his close involvement in the organisation and murderous activities of the Salvadoran deathsquads and, in particular, for responsibility as the intellectual author of the murder of the great Archbishop Romero.

The behaviour, therefore, of the current Archbishop of El Salvador, who has sought to defend the indefensible–namely the reputation of a corrupt and murderous politician, who used his power to kill innocent unarmed civilians in the pursuit of an immoral civil war–such behaviour is scandalous and totally unacceptable. If the Catholic Church wishes to rescue its own tattered credibility in El Salvador and other Latin countries, then it must now take action to begin to repair the moral damage that the current holder of the Archbishopric in El Salvador has caused. The Vatican should be in no doubt that it needs to begin here and now by disavowing Archbishop Saenz Lacalle’s statements and removing him from his current post. He has no place in the diocese of his great, universally loved and revered predecessor–Archbishop Oscar Romero.