Justicia como memoria y derecho a la verdad frente a la politice del silencio y el olvido en el Salvador: apuntes sobre la percepción de la figura de Oscar Arnulfo Romero y la experiencia de los diálogos intergeneracionales en las parroquias de la Arquidiócesis de San Salvador

Abstract

The policy of silence and oblivion, which was been adopted in El Salvador after the 1993 Amnesty Law, has fostered ignorance in Salvadoran society (particularly in young people under twenty-five) about the causes and consequences of the 1980-1992 non-international armed conflict and about the serious human rights violations that occurred in it. The parishes of the Salvadoran Church are not alien to this situation, because, as the intergenerational dialogues promoted by the Office of Tutela de Derechos Humanos of the Archbishopric of San Salvador in July 2018 have shown, their younger members are completely unaware of the degree of persecution to which their community brothers were subjected by military and police forces during the armed conflict. The controversy over Oscar Arnulfo Romero, that has existed, at least until 2013, between different factions of the Salvadoran Church is the result of this situation, which has a negative effect on the individual and collective dimensions of the right to the truth, prevents the satisfaction of justice understood as memory, prevents serious international crimes committed in El Salvador from being considered when constructing its historical memory, provides a breeding ground for historical revisionism and prevents necessary measures from being taking to avoid new serious human rights violations. Faced with this situation, the intergenerational dialogues held in 2018 in some parishes of the Archdiocese of San Salvador have shown their ability to expose and overcome the negative impact of the policy of silence and oblivion.