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Spain sentences ex-colonel to 133 years in jail for murder of five Jesuit priests during the El Salvador civil war https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-europe-54126548 Not mentioned here was that one of those priests was Ignacio Martín-Baró, social psychologist and founder of liberation psychology
Martín-Baró was a remarkable man who applied the tools of social psychology to understand the role of state violence in the El Salvadoreon civil war, one of the most brutal civil wars of many brutal civil wars in the 20th Century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacio_Mart%C3%ADn-Bar%C3%B3
His work (still mostly untranslated from Spanish) is often explicitly Marxist, and in a war between hard right state forces and broadly Marxist revolutionary forces he was made a target, along with colleagues, by a right wing death squad.
He was clearly a man of peace and you can understand his Marxist leanings in terms of a reaction to entrenched social inequalities in El Salvador and to brutal state repression that was often indiscriminate and intended to traumatise communities into submission.
However, you could legitimately raise a question about political naivety given the atrocities also being carried out by left wing forces. Because of this, he leaves a complex legacy. He is an important but deeply polarising figure in Latin American psychology.
Left-leaning British psychologists have recently discovered a passion for liberation psychology as if it were a sort of universal benign good, apparently unaware of its devisive political roots.
For example, the ELN guerilla forces still prosecuting the Colombian armed conflict, were explicitly founded on liberation theology - the roots of liberation psychology. Despite this, along with all other belligerents, they have been responsible for horrific human rights abuses.
For lots of people who have suffered human rights abuses by people motivated by these ideas, your 'universally benign' framework may seem like an extension of that oppression, regardless of your motivations.
I learnt a lot of this by working with Colombian community psychologists who taught me a lot of hard lessons about uncritically adopting ideologies without a deep understanding of their role within the communities you work in.
In El Salvador, the murder of the five priests, including Martín-Baró, was an atrocity that was considered shocking even at the time. The prosecution of his killer is a landmark moment for justice that will hopefully continue to bring closure to this dark chapter.
