Roberto D'Aubuisson

He is the descendant of Jacques, Marie, Germain, Gustave d'Aubuisson, who was born in Toulouse, France in 1822 and arrived in El Salvador at the age of 20, where he established himself as an ironmonger and salesman.

His father, Pierre d'Aubuisson, was Marquis and Lord of Nailloux and Ramonville-Saint-Agne.

Roberto D'Aubuisson Arrieta (23 August 1943 – 20 February 1992) was a Salvadoran military officer, neo-fascist politician, and death squad leader.

Roberto D'Aubuisson Arrieta was born on 23 August 1943 in Santa Tecla, La Libertad Department, El Salvador.

His father was Roberto D'Aubuisson Andrade, and his mother was Joaquina Arrieta Alvarado, a career civil servant.

D'Aubuisson enrolled in the Captain General Gerardo Barrios Military School in 1958 at the age of 15 and graduated in 1963, becoming a member of the National Guard.

He was part of La Tandona, the class of 1966 at the Captain General Gerardo Barrios Military School.

D'Aubuisson involved himself in death squad activity while in the military, and he became associated with the second death squad to emerge in El Salvador in the mid–1970s, called the White Warriors Union.

In 1972, he was trained in communications at the School of the Americas, a United States Department of Defense Institute that provides military training to government personnel in US-allied Latin American nations.

After completing his studies at the Institute, he subsequently became a member of the Salvadoran military intelligence.

In October 1979, after a group of progressive officers deposed the government of Carlos Humberto Romero in a bloodless coup d'état and established the Revolutionary Government Junta (JRG, 1979–1982), D'Aubuisson was forced out of military service for his death squad connections, although he continued working for senior military commanders secretly.

D'Aubuisson was regularly featured on Salvadoran television denouncing alleged traitors and communists, who were then murdered shortly afterwards by death squads.

D'Aubuisson was named by the United Nations' Truth Commission for El Salvador as having ordered the assassination of Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador in 1980.

On 7 May 1980, six weeks after the assassination of Óscar Romero, D'Aubuisson and a group of civilians and soldiers were arrested on a farm.

The raiders found weapons and documents identifying D'Aubuisson and the civilians as death squad organizers and financiers, and of planning a coup d'état to depose the JRG.

D'Aubuisson was soon released from prison, after 8 of the 14 military garrison commanders voted for his release, overruling the JRG.

His opposition to the JRG gave him international infamy.

In 1981, he co-founded and became the first leader of the far-right Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and served as president of the Legislative Assembly from 1982 to 1983.

In August 1981, The Washington Post reported that D'Aubuisson "openly talked of the need to kill 200,000 to 300,000 people to restore peace to El Salvador".

Shortly afterwards, on September 30, he founded ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance), a far-right political party.

D'Aubuisson accumulated much political capital among Salvadorans for his anti-leftist stridency and for his reputation as an effective counter-insurgency strategist.

He often accused the JRG of being a Marxist threat to El Salvador.

He praised Hitler to West German journalists, out of belief in the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy: "You Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of Communism and you began to kill them."

He also asked every Jesuit be murdered as instruments of Communism and threatened to kill James Cheek, a State Department official under Carter.

In the 1982 legislative election, the PDC won 40 percent of the vote but not a controlling majority in the legislature.

Meanwhile, ARENA won 29 percent of the vote, the PCN won 19 percent, Democratic Action (AD) won 8 percent, and other parties won the remaining 4 percent.

D'Aubuisson was among one of ARENA's 19 deputies in the Legislative Assembly; serving from the San Salvador Department, he assumed office on 26 April 1982.

Although ARENA and the PCN were held a majority and sought to elect D'Aubuisson as the country's president, pressure from the United States dissuaded the PCN which voted with the PDC to elect AD candidate Álvaro Magaña as the country's president.

Rather than being elected as president of El Salvador, D'Aubuisson was instead elected as the president of the Legislative Assembly, serving from 26 April 1982 to 20 December 1983.

The JRG's government ended on 2 May 1982

On 31 March 1983, D'Aubuisson was allowed entry to the United States by the State Department after deeming him not barred from entry any longer.

When asked about D'Aubuisson's association with the assassination of Archbishop Romero, the State Department responded that "the allegations have not been substantiated."

He was a presidential candidate for 1984 presidential election, losing in the second round to José Napoleón Duarte, the former president of the Revolutionary Government Junta.

On 25 March 1984, D'Aubuisson began his campaign for the Salvadoran presidency.

On 2 May he lost the presidential election to former President of the Junta José Napoleón Duarte of the Christian Democratic Party, receiving 46.4 percent of the vote to Duarte's 53.6 percent.

D'Aubuisson claimed fraud and U.S. interference on behalf of Duarte, who was later confirmed to have been a CIA asset.

In Washington D.C., a supporter of D'Aubuisson was Senator Jesse Helms, who had close ties with D'Aubuisson's ARENA party.

After ARENA's loss in the 1985 legislative elections, D'Aubuisson stepped down in favor of Alfredo Cristiani and was designated as the party's honorary president for life.

In November 1993, documents by the State Department, Defense Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency were released after pressure by Congress increased.

The 12,000 documents revealed that the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush knew of the assassinations conducted by D'Aubuisson, including that of Oscar Romero, and still worked with him despite this.