Forty years ago, on March 24, 1980, iconic Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by a sniper while saying mass.
The assassination, which was orchestrated in part by notorious right-wing extremist and death squad leader Roberto d'Aubuisson, helped definitively plunge El Salvador into a 12-year civil war that killed more than 75,000 people.
A post-war United Nations truth commission attributed the blame for approximately 85 percent of serious acts of violence committed during this war to "agents of the State" and allied paramilitary groups and death squads.
But the blame hardly stops there.
Shortly before his death, Romero - who had become a champion of the poor and a staunch critic of capitalism, arguing that "the root of all violence is institutional violence" - penned a letter to then-US President Jimmy Carter. In it, he urged Carter to withhold military aid to the Salvadoran junta in light of the rampant killings, forced disappearances, and other atrocities that were already taking place in the country.
And yet, despite all of Carter's purported concern for "human rights", the aid went through - as it would during the subsequent administrations of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, ultimately adding up to billions of dollars worth of lethal encouragement for a maniacally trigger-happy right-wing.
But, hey, this was the Cold War, and the very future of capitalist tyranny - pardon, freedom and democracy - was at stake.
As it so happens, Romero was not the only one to have given Carter a heads-up about the lay of the land in El Salvador.
In his book Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War, former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner notes that, just days before Romero's assassination, Carter's very own ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, wrote in a classified cable: "The daily total of dead, many among them teenagers bearing marks of brutal torture, result from right-wing terrorism."
White's analysis did not succumb to the anti-communist hysteria that was so in vogue in Washington either. In El Salvador, "the rich and powerful have systematically defrauded the poor and denied eighty percent of the people any voice in the affairs of their country," the diplomat explained, adding that the incipient conflict was not the fault of the good old communist menace but rather of "decades of oppression and a studied refusal on the part of the elite to make any concessions to the masses." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.