Today is National Romero Day in El Salvador, the very first official government recognition of the pueblo’s revered martyr for social justice – Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador.  While conducting mass on March 24, 1980, he was assassinated by State-linked paramilitary forces for openly denouncing and defying the U.S.-sponsored Salvadoran government’s bloody war on the poor.  Monseñor Romero believed, “If they kill me, I will be reborn in the Salvadoran people.”   Thirty years later, Romero continues to live on in the fighting spirit of the Salvadoran people, who have advanced the cause of social justice in the face of U.S. intervention and destructive economic policies, like the U.S.-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) imposed by the Washington Consensus and El Salvador’s right wing.

Today, February 25, 2010 marks an historic date in the struggle for true democracy and the respect for human rights in Honduras. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of supporters of the National People’s Resistance Front (FNRP) will march through the streets of Tegucigalpa to demand that the largely unrecognized month-old government of Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo halt its attacks on the peaceful Resistance movement. The FNRP has documented at least 254 human rights violations, including murder, kidnappings and rape, since Pepe Lobo took over for the de facto government.

Just yesterday, FNRP supporter Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodriguez was gunned down in her home in San Pedro Sula. Her two young children, ages 2 and 8, witnessed their mother’s murder.