This Friday in the Plataforma program, the journalist Serafín Valencia recalled the Plaza Libertad massacre, a place where around 300 people who were concentrated in the place to protest against the electoral fraud of 1977, were massacred on February 28, that same year.
“On February 20, presidential elections had been held, declaring General Carlos Humberto Romero the winner, but the population knew that this was the result of fraud, UNO was the second time that the presidential election had been stolen”he detailed.
He added that President Arturo Armando Molina had also come to power as a result of another fraud against the then candidate Napoleón Duarte. Valencia pointed out that Molina was a repressor who said “defend democracy and the Constitution” and he did it at the point of a rifle and a cannon.
At that time, the government mounted a disinformation campaign saying that only one person had died as a victim of the stampede and that what was said by the media and social organizations was a lie, that no one had been killed.
The journalist stated that the facts were never investigated, and justice was not applied, the masterminds and materials responsible died with impunity. “Nobody was punished… El Salvador is a country with a strong culture of impunity that we continue to suffer today”he expressed.
Finally, Valencia expressed that memory and history serve to read the present and affirmed that in the past there were already many electoral frauds with fatal results, “Leaders who sowed hatred among the same Salvadorans as now”.
