The reasons behind the closure of the office opened by the Oscar
Arnulfo Romero have changed.
The current Archbishop of El Salvador has spoken of “administrative irregularities.”
The closure of Tutela Legal, the human rights office of the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador is shrouded in mystery.According to the Archbishop of El Salvador José Luis Escobar Alas the office opened by Mgr. Oscar Arnulfo Romero 36 years ago “is no longer needed”.
He announced this as the office’s 12 employees were called into a room to begin the required administrative procedures for their dismissal and “receive all final payments due”.
Criticisms and concerns about the dense archive comprising 50 thousand complaints lodged in writing as well as in audio and video format, came pouring in from across El Salvador and from Latin American, U.S. and Europe-based human rights NGOs.
The now obsolete office provided assistance to a thousand people who were victims of the El Mozote massacre, one of the most serious military massacres Latin America has ever seen.
It helped these victims obtain financial compensation after the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the state of El Salvador guilty of human rights violations.
Two days after Tutela Legal was shut down, El Salvador’s curia stressed that its structures needed to “be adjusted to ensure the rights of victims were defended as best as possible in the present”.
So Tutela Legal was closed down, but this was done in order to improve the activities of an office that is already considered valuable and to boost its efficiency. Guarantees were also given about the safeguarding of the large archive which contains documentation on crimes committed.
This is even more crucial given the recent tendency of El Salvador’s Supreme Court of Justice to question the constitutionality of the 1993 amnesty law.
It is also especially important now that the public prosecution seems intent on resuming investigations into human rights violations committed during the civil war, with the aim of taking legal action against those responsible for the crimes.
Meanwhile, the current Archbishop of El Salvador has issued a surprise statement backing the new reasons for the office’s closure, saying there were “administrative irregularities” in Tutela Legal, meaning the office was apparently not run in a completely transparent manner.
But the Archbishop went further, claiming that the staff working in the office in recent times had made changes to it, to the point that obvious irregularities began to arise in the exercise of its functions. These irregularities showed a bias against the interests of the victims allowing the office’s interests to prevail.”
According to the latest version of the story surrounding the office’s closure, an investigation was apparently launched into these irregularities and these can now be proved.
These serious accusations were made four days after Tutela Legal was closed down and still need to be proved or at least documented and made public.
Mgr. Ricardo Urioste, who was Mgr. Romero’s Vicar General and worked closely with him, told Vatican Insider to “ignore” all this talk of “irregularities”.
Urioste, who is head of the Romero Foundation, does not believe it was necessary to close Tutela Legal to achieve the goals stated.
“If circumstances have changed, then Tutela Legal can adapt to these changed.”
Urioste said he does not believe that this incident will have any negative repercussions on Oscar Arnulfo Romero’s beatification cause, a cause Pope Francis has give fresh impetus to.