By Benjamin Cuellar Martinez
On October 26, 1987, 35 years ago, minutes before seven o’clock, Herbert Anaya Sanabria was gunned down; he then directed the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador (CDHES). He had just left his home and was going to board his vehicle, in a parking lot in the populous neighborhood where he lived with his family. The assassins were waiting for him. Exactly seventeen months ago, this indomitable fighter was arrested by agents of the Treasury Police without uniform, but heavily armed; After the first physical and mental torture, Herbert remained imprisoned until February 2, 1987.
Qhen it was a couple of years my classmate at the Faculty of Jurisprudence and Social Sciences of the University of El Salvador – then committed, vital and combative but today kidnapped, distant and soulless – at some point he stated the following: “The agony of not working for justice is stronger than the certain possibility of my death; this last one is only an instant, the other constitutes the totality of my life”. That was the size of his gills. Herbert, then, defender of the dignity of the suffering Salvadoran people, was undoubtedly a brave man.
Marianella García Villas – initiator of the same humanitarian entity and heroic protagonist of the same cause – was captured, tortured and executed by the Salvadoran army in mid-March 1983; she should also be considered as such. She before her was brave our now Saint Romero of America and later Segundo Montes, co-founder of Christian Legal Aid in August 1975 and a decade later promoter of the creation of the Human Rights Institute of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University; he was its first director from then until he was massacred on November 16, 1989. I occupied that chair, I say it proudly, for more than twenty years since the beginning of 1992.
There is a long list of brave women and men who in our country embraced and made their lives the reason for the greatest love in the world: the one who, according to the evangelist, has no equal because he is the one who surrenders his existence for his fellow men. That inventory is, admittedly and painfully, extremely long. But there is also another that I would like to imagine shorter: the one that records those who kneel before power to distill poison, openly or underhandedly, against the causes of truth and justice. It is the list of the characters who settle in the comfortable and passive cowardice or in the active betrayal of the aggrieved people, pushing buttons from their partisan seat, assuming important positions without deserving them, sowing poison through media microphones or “pontifying” tediously and slavishly from the pulpit.
To the latter, Romero rubbed their hypocrisy and falsehood in their faces, telling them that the “gospel that does not take into account the rights” of people and the “Christianity that does not build the history of the earth, is not the authentic doctrine of Christ. but simply an instrument of power.” And he lamented that the Church had also “fallen into that sin”; according to the spirituality “authentically evangelical, we do not want – he made it clear – to be a toy of the powers of the earth but […] the Church that carries the authentic, courageous gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, even if it were necessary to die like Him on a cross. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear…
In homage to the caste of fighting people in the midst of this barbarism, for almost ten years, every October 26, the National Day of Human Rights Defenders is officially commemorated here. And it is that doing it “chest to the ground” and even “putting the chest” when required, stuck in disadvantageous and risky trenches to face unreason and selfishness, abuse and compromise –as it had to be done– was not easy at all. It was not, above all, for the mothers and grandmothers who searched for their detained and forcibly disappeared relatives in the midst of the permanent and widespread terror that prevailed in the country, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. the grandmothers who are still alive continue tirelessly in that battle.
And history repeats itself. Thirty years after the end of the war, the mother of a teenager beaten and forced to have an abortion by the repressive forces of the ruling party demands that Nayib Bukele, suffering and brave, hand over her daughter detained and held during the so-called “exception regime”. ”. But she, in addition, confronts him by offering him back the “three hundred coins” that he “gave” her yesterday from our taxes. With those, today, she has not been able and will not be able to buy her silence; much less, ease her pain.