"Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination.
In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression...
You can tell your people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish."
Oscar Romero
In El Salvador in the 1970's, a right wing coalition backed by the country's richest families inflicted a reign of terror on the reformers who sought peaceful change in their repressive, oligarchic rule where a few had the most, and the rest lived in deprivation and poverty.
The Catholic Church in that country, under the leadership of Archbishop Romero of San Salvador, offered peaceful support and comfort to the protesters and the reformers and the many victims of official murder and terrorism.
On 24 March 1980 Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying Mass at La Divina Providencia, one day after calling on the soldiers to stop torturing, raping, and murdering people in the reign of terror.
No one was every arrested or held responsible for this act.
On the day of his funeral, the mourners were bombed, and attacked by snipers positioned on the rooftops. Forty people died and many more were wounded.
Later that year four missionary nuns were raped and murdered shortly after they had arrived at the airport.
The assassination of Oscar Romero provoked a vicious twelve year civil war against financial and political repression, as the reformers gave up hope of any peaceful change. And it opened the door for more radical elements in their ranks as the people gave in to despair.
As had happened in the past, and continues to happen today, repression of peaceful change and justice threatened to bring about the very conditions that the ruling families of the country had feared. These are the fruits of greed and the lust for power, driven to hysteria and violent repression.
People like to remember the frightful abuses of state socialism at the extreme, and well they should do this. But they tend to overlook and excuse the crimes and repression inflicted on the people in the name of neo-liberal capitalism, which is nothing more than oligarchy and a fascism of the powerful. They both use fear and terror to herd the people into the abbatoirs of predation and repression. And we allow ourselves to be blinded by their lies and propaganda, their myths of our exceptionalism, and our own fear, hate, and willfulness.
Hatred and violence in all their forms, whether of the extremes of the left or right, no matter what is used to justify such acts, are little different in their offense against His commandments and His love, and to the sorrow of the individual victims.
"It was a civil war of the 1980s, one that pitted leftist revolutionaries against the alliance of countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades—with U.S. support—keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished. It was a bloody, brutal, and dirty war. More than 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in the fighting, most of them victims of the military and its death squads. Peasants were shot en masse, often while trying to flee. Student and union leaders had their thumbs tied behind their backs before being shot in the head, their bodies left on roadsides as a warning to others...
Many Americans would prefer to forget that chapter in American history; those under the age of 40 may not even be aware of it. Salvadorans haven’t forgotten, however."
Raymond Bonner, America's Role in El Salvador's Deterioration
'A true opium of the people is the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and murders we are not going to be judged.'
Czeslaw Milosz
