Allan Nairn responds to Obama's statement in Chile

"Well, there’s no change in U.S. policy. Obama visited the tomb of Archbishop Romero in Salvador, but the U.S. is like the killer who shoots his victim and then brings flowers to the funeral. It’s appropriate for a killer to ask forgiveness, as the Chilean journalist was saying, but that’s the last stage. That’s after the killer has been taken off the streets, tried and jailed. Chile has done that. Those who perpetrated the U.S.-backed coup in Chile in '73 and killed more—tortured and killed more than 3,000 civilian activists, the leading survivors have been put on trial and jailed by the Chilean government. General Contreras, for example, the old head DINA, the secret police, is serving a sentence of 289 years. Chile has done that. The U.S.—the U.S. has not. So, it's up to—it’s up to people to enforce that, because the U.S. is still acting in a lawless manner all over the world. And El Salvador is a good example, because it’s quite parallel to what the U.S. is doing today."

"There were four key facts about the Archbishop. In 1980, in February, the Archbishop wrote to then-President Carter asking him to stop supporting the Salvadoran military. Romero was attacking the U.S. support for this military, which had, at that time, for two decades, been helping the Salvadoran National Police, National Guard, Treasury Police and army to assassinate local activists. On March 23rd, Romero gave a sermon in which he attacked the chain of command. He told Salvadoran troops to disobey their superiors and refrain from killing civilians. The next day—he was assassinated. He was shot in the heart."

"...he was assassinated by the forces of Major d’Aubuisson, a political offshoot of the Salvadoran death squads, which were created and backed by the U.S., as I documented extensively years ago. At his funeral, six days later, 250,000 Salvadorans turned out. Snipers on the roofs fired into the crowd, killed 42 people—an amazingly precise parallel to what happened last Friday in Yemen.

As the Yemeni people were turning out against the U.S.-backed regime there, snipers on the roofs killed perhaps 52 people. We don’t yet know whether those Yemeni snipers were U.S.-trained, but we do know that the Green Berets are there training that armed force and the U.S. itself is sending missiles into Yemen. In Iraq, the U.S. adopted what they call the Salvador Option: backing the Interior Ministry death squads, which from ’04 to ’07 killed thousands. So, what the U.S. did in El Salvador is being reproduced today, and Obama is carrying it on."  -ALLAN NAIRN

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/24/as_obama_completes_first_latin_america