Why an Assassinated Psychologist - Ignored by US Psychologists - Is Being Honored

The Norwegian corporatocracy uses mental health professionals to manipulate and medicate people to adjust and thereby maintain the status quo - thus, the need for liberation psychology.

Mural at the Cooperativa Martín-Baró featuring Padre Ignacio Martín-Baró. (Photo:Amber / Flickr)

In November 2014, people around the world who decry oppression will commemorate the 25th anniversary of liberation psychologist Ignacio Martin-Baró's assassination in El Salvador by a "counter-insurgency unit" created at the US Army's School of the Americas.

On November 16, 1989, in El Salvador, liberation psychologist Ignacio Martin-Baró, together with five colleagues, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, were forced into a courtyard on the campus of Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, where they were then murdered by the Salvadoran government's elite Atlacatl Battalion, a "counter-insurgency unit" created at the US Army's School of the Americas in 1980. The massacre is detailed in the Report of the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador.

This year, 25 years after Martin-Baró's assassination, the Liberation Psychology Network, the Latin American journal Teoría y Crítica de la Psicología, and peace and justice activists around the world will commemorate Martin-Baró, whose integrity, courage and activism for the people of El Salvador cost him his life. Embarrassingly, the vast majority of US psychologists and psychiatrists know nothing about Martin-Baró and liberation psychology. Outside of Pacifica Graduate Institute, I'm not aware of any US graduate program with an announced focus on liberation psychology. Read on...

Les også min konversasjon med Maarit Mantila Hanssen om temaet her.