The New Dark Age

Yoselina Guevara L.

Behind the apparent fragility of Edmundo González Urrutia, former candidate to the presidency of Venezuela for the extreme right in the elections of July 28, 2024, hides his past as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States and operator in the execution of the Condor Plan, a security strategy of the U.S. government during the Cold War, which was aimed at assassinating and repressing democratic, popular, leftist or nationalist political sectors, as well as youth, union, religious, neighborhood and peasant organizations that sought to dismantle the power of the state in the economy and to take benefits away from privileged national and transnational sectors.

González Urrutia graduated in the mid seventies with a degree in international relations and joined the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, becoming first secretary in 1978 at the Venezuelan Embassy in the United States where he was recruited by the CIA, from where he was transferred to the Venezuelan diplomatic mission in El Salvador in 1981.

Operation Centauro

Between 1979 and 1992 an armed conflict developed between the Armed Forces of El Salvador, the right-wing dictatorship with power in the hands of the military, widely supported by the United States and the leftist forces of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), in which the combatants against authoritarianism operated, who also politically and ideologically formed the Salvadoran people in the principles of collective welfare and grassroots organization.

According to declassified CIA documents (February 2009), the Venezuelan Ambassador to El Salvador in 1989, Leopoldo Castillo and Edmundo González Urrutia, an official of said embassy, are indicated as co-responsible for the intelligence services and were the ones who coordinated and financed the execution of Operation Centauro, which consisted in the assassination of elements considered subversive, regardless of their nationality, sex or age, using the so-called “death squads”.

Among these actions was the physical elimination of religious communities gathered around the search for a peaceful and negotiated solution to the civil war in El Salvador, consistent with the theology of Liberation. In this way, religious men and women who defended dialogue as a method to eradicate violence, who tried to achieve the reconciliation of the confronted sectors and sought to achieve a climate of peace based on justice, were cruelly assassinated. But, for the Salvadoran army, the rulers and the oligarchs of that historical moment, working for peace was a betrayal and those who wanted to walk the path of reconciliation were considered traitors.

Massacre of the Jesuits

In the early morning of November 16, 1989, a group of approximately 30 men dressed in military uniforms, carrying automatic weapons, entered the house of the rector of the Central American University (UCA), the Jesuit priest and doctor Ignacio Ellacuría (59), where six Jesuit religious and two domestic servants were also staying. After savagely beating everyone in the house, they took them to a small patio where they were placed face down on the ground, and proceeded to shoot them macabrely in the head, massacring them. As they left, they unloaded their weapons on the image of Christ on the Cross, which was at the entrance of the University.

The question that arises is why the cruel and ruthless murder of a group of foreign priests and two humble Salvadoran women? The answer lies in the leadership of Rector Ellacuría who was working to negotiate a dialogue solution to the armed conflict. At that time, the Jesuit priest was the only intermediary who dialogued with all parties, acting as a bridge between President Alfredo Cristiani and the members of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Therefore, he became the “target” to be eliminated and with him the rest of the religious, for being “militants of the extreme right”,  part of “an international communist conspiracy”,  together with the Catholic Church.

The rest of the victims of November 16, the Spanish priests: Segundo Montes (56), Ignacio Martín-Baró (47), Juan Ramón Moreno (56), Amando López (53) and Joaquin López (71), were taking refuge in the house of Rector Ellacuría because they knew that their lives were in danger because they were suspected of having links with the FMLN. The two maids, Julia Elba Ramos (42) and Celina Meredith Ramos (13), were murdered so as not to leave witnesses to the massacre.

This is only one of the crimes committed in El Salvador by the death squads, in addition to a long list of summary executions, human rights violations, as well as the assassination of Monsignor Arnulfo Romero Arias, executed with a shot in the heart, at the moment of the consecration when he was officiating mass in the cathedral of San Salvador; the ambush and assassination while attending mass of the priest Rutilio Grande along with two parishioners Manuel Solórzano (72 years old) and Nelson Rutilio Lemus 15 (years old); the rape and murder of the American nuns Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and the lay missionary Jean Donova, among others. These are just some of the crimes of a period of obscurantism in El Salvador that left 75,000 people dead, 8,000 disappeared, with hundreds of thousands displaced.

Gonzalez Urrutia was a co-participant in these crimes; if not materially, at least intellectually, such was his hatred for the left or for those who seek and are defenders of social justice. The historical memory remains latent. Yet,  Venezuelan Leopoldo Castillo, who now works as a journalist from Miami, and Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, former presidential candidate, cannot erase their criminal past. The traces of innocent blood shed do not disappear with time.

Yoselina Guevara López: Venezuelan social communicator, political analyst, columnist in different international media, whose work has been translated into English, Italian, Greek and Swedish. Winner of the Simon Bolivar 2022 National Journalism Award (Venezuela), special mention Opinion; Anibal Nazoa 2021 National Journalism Award (Venezuela); I Comandante Feliciano 2022 Historical Memory Contest (El Salvador) Third place. X: @lopez_yoselina