Daily Archives: May 26, 2015

Church, Economic Justice

35 years after Romero, El Salvador is still at war

CRUX
by John Allen Jr. (Associate Editor)

Members of the 18th street gang gather together at the Cojutepeque Jail in El Salvador. (Photo: Getty Images)
Members of the 18th street gang gather together at the Cojutepeque Jail in El Salvador. (Photo: Getty Images)

SAN SALVADOR — When the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador is beatified on Saturday, it will mark a public celebration of a martyr shot to death at the altar in 1980 for seeking justice and peace in a country that, on the cusp of a brutal civil war, was sorely lacking in both.

Although it’s hard to know what Romero might make of the honor, it seems far more certain he would have mixed feelings about what’s happened in El Salvador in the 35 years since his death.

On one hand, following a deadly conflict from 1980 to 1992 that saw an estimated 85,000 people killed, 8,000 missing, and 1 million displaced, a peace agreement between the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and a US-backed conservative Salvadoran government produced a cease-fire that has never been broken.
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Children, Development, Education

New World Information Order, Internet and the Global South – Part I

IPS/ International Press Service
By Branislav Gosovic

VILLAGE TUDOROVICI, Montenegro – More than four decades ago, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) launched the concept of a New International Information Order (NIIO).

Children surf the net in a remote island community in the Philippines where fishing is the main source of income. Credit: eKindling/Lubang Tourism.
Children surf the net in a remote island community in the Philippines where fishing is the main source of income. Credit: eKindling/Lubang Tourism.

Its initiative led to the establishment of an independent commission within the fold of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), which produced a report, published in 1980, on a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO).

Incomprehensible to the general public and not suitable for consideration in multilateral policy forums, the Internet governance deliberations have largely been under control of the world superpower and its cyber mega-corporations from Silicon Valley.

The report, titled “One World, Many Voices,” is usually referred to as the MacBride Report after its chairman.

The very idea of venturing to criticise and challenge the existing global media, namely the information and communication hegemony of the West, touched a raw political nerve, apparently a much more sensitive one than that irked by the developing countries’ New International Economic Order (NIEO) proposals. More…