El Salvador Assassination

On June 10, the day after my husband, Jose Antonio Rodriguez-Porth, was brutally assassinated by an as yet unidentified murder squad, you asserted that “Rodriguez-Porth’s widow suggested ‘the killers could have been terrorists from the right’ ” (Part I). Throughout the text of the article you brand my husband as an “ultra-right-wing ideologue,” who served previously in a right-wing military dictatorship and that he was an advocate of heavy-handed suppression of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The logical conclusion is that he could have been murdered by the “moderate” factions of the political “right-wing” in our country and that he somehow deserved his fate.

But my accusation was against both the “rebels” of the FMLN and the so-called “green squads” linked to the former Christian Democratic government, who in that manner pretend to suppress the uncovering of the extreme corruption and blatant human rights abuses committed during their 10-year tenure in power, and which are rapidly floating to the surface. On June 15 I aired my suspicions again on the local television networks.

Neither my husband, nor the Arena Party sustain doctrines or policies which could be labeled anything other than pro-Western, Christian and consistent with our legal system, as with those modeled after the major democracies.

As a prestigious former judge and diplomat, one of five members of a ruling junta in the early ‘60s, teacher, lawyer and presidential candidate, my husband was a public foe of violence and for that reason he lived and died unarmed, as unarmed were the two employees who accompanied him. But apparently he also knew too much about the propaganda ghosts and the horrible realities of life in El Salvador for the comfort of the groups who have manipulated power this past decade.

ANAMARIA RODRIGUEZ-PORTH

San Salvador