"Tell the World What is Happening Here"
March 25, 2006
Dick Scobie was director of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee from 1972 to 1988. He has recently published a memoir of his time there. For Dick, the defining time in his career at UUSC was the long war in El Salvador. He writes about this time in his book, and in an excerpt just published in UU World magazine.
For centuries the Salvadoran economic and military elite had brutally exploited the peasantry. Then, in the 1970s, the Salvadoran people became caught in a cruel geopolitical struggle between the capitalist West and the communist East. Government-sponsored death squads targeted anyone who supported reform of any kind—priests, professors, students, farmers, union organizers, protesters of election fraud. You didn’t have to do much to get labeled a subversive, and the targets of this nasty campaign included UUSC’s project partners.
In April 1977 I made my first visit to El Salvador with John McAward, the UUSC’s director of international programs. We interviewed victims and witnesses of government-sponsored violence and met with the country’s Catholic archbishop, Oscar Romero. A small man with a scholarly demeanor, Romero saw that his faith would compel him to speak out against the government repression. With grave sadness, he told us about the deepening crisis. “What can we do?” we asked. His response: “Tell the world what is happening here.”
And tell the world they did. Beginning with leading a Congressional delegation to El Salvador later that same year, the UUSC was instrumental in helping to bring peace to the country, but only after a long, bloody struggle.
During the next fifteen years the UUSC sponsored more than twenty delegations, giving more than thirty congresspeople from both parties an incomparable view of the social and political realities in Central America, especially as the Reagan Administration expanded U.S. support for right-wing regimes in the 1980s. A number of the people our delegations met with were murdered—including Romero, who was assassinated while saying mass in 1980. Most were civilian peasants, numbering in the hundreds of thousands in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Our work for a just peace in El Salvador was recognized in 1992 when Heather Foote, one of McAward’s successors, was invited to represent the UUSC as an observer at the signing of the Peace Accords that formally ended the civil war.
I’ve come to know Dick the past several years from the time we spend at Ferry Beach in the summer. He is a warm, wonderful guy, and I am proud to be in his circle of friends.
Posted by Bill Trippe at March 25, 2006 9:33 AM
