On December 2, I stood in the small chapel on the grounds of San Salvador’s Hospital Divina Providencia, whose mission is to provide palliative care. Almost forty-five years earlier, on March 24, 1980, the archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, living on the hospital’s property ministering to the infirm, was behind this altar finishing his sermon.

As he concluded his homily, a shot rang out from a parked red Volkswagen in front of the sanctuary, through the church’s open doors, and into Romero’s heart.

My pilgrimage to where Romero died preaching the good news of liberation was a moving experience. I found myself kneeling beside the altar out of reverence, not just for the martyr’s blood spilled there, but also in remembrance of the 75,000 other sacred lives lost during the Salvadorian Civil War from 1980-1991.

Although Romero’s assassin was never prosecuted, we know he was part of a four-member death squad led by Roberto D’Aubuisson. D’Aubuisson was a military officer, legislator, and 1984 presidential candidate. 

He was also trained by the U.S. at the School of the Americas, now located in Fort Benning, Georgia. Students of this U.S. military facility went on to become future military dictators and heads of death squads throughout the Américas.

About three weeks after my return from El Salvador, Jimmy Carter died. Since then, mainstream and social media have showered him with accolades. 

He is portrayed as a man of conscience guided by his Christian principles. My Facebook feed exploded with posts of pictures of the late president posing with people I know, praising him for implementing policies grounded in his evangelical Christian beliefs.

Certainly, compared to other presidents (especially the convicted felon about to be inaugurated), Carter was a breath of fresh air. He strived to do good. 

His post-presidential Carter Center in Atlanta has tirelessly promoted democracy worldwide and eradicated the Guinea worm disease. Through their volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity, he and his wife Rosalynn built or remodeled 4,447 houses in fourteen countries.

However, contrary to tributes about his life, he was no saint. He was still the leader of the empire. Like other empire guardians before and after him, he had blood on his hands.

Five weeks before his martyrdom, Romero wrote a letter to Jimmy Carter. Challenging the president, Romero wrote: “Because you are a Christian and because you have shown that you want to defend human rights . . . I ask you, if you truly want to defend human rights, to prohibit the giving of this military aid to the Salvadoran government.”

Romero likely set in motion the forces that would eventually take his life when, a week later, he publicly mentioned the letter he wrote Carter during his February 24th sermon: “I earnestly desire that the United States provide no more aid until our Armed Forces are converted.” He knew he was a marked man, declaring: “This week, I was advised that I am on the list of those they are planning to eliminate next week.”

He probably signed his own death warrant when he told soldiers three weeks later, during his March 19th sermon, not to follow orders: “I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when 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 recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order.”

Within a day of delivering the sermon, he lay dead behind the altar. Carter, in a statement, “condemn[ed] the tragic assassination,” which he found “shocking and unconscionable.”

Carter restricted military aid to El Salvador over human rights concerns from early in his administration; he nonetheless resumed aid to the tune of $45 million, plus $7 million for the military (including Huey UH-1H helicopters), after the Sandinista’s July 1979 victory in neighboring Nicaragua.

Carter again stopped aid after three U.S. Maryknoll nuns and a lay missionary were abducted, raped and murdered on December 2, 1980. During my time in San Salvador, I walked to the spot where they were killed on the forty-fourth anniversary of their martyrdom.

However, as the anti-dictatorship forces launched a major offensive the following month, Carter reopened the tap, reauthorizing a massive flow of military funding. Carter’s actions, despite his human rights rhetoric, provided the financial support needed for the Salvadorian military to continue committing human rights violations.
 

Carter may not have been a saint, but Oscar Romero was. The Catholic Church canonized him in 2018, but the people recognized him as a saint decades before the church made this official. 


To and for Romero, I offer this invocation:

Saint Romero, patron saint of the poor, of the oppressed, and of those who stand in solidarity with the least of these, pray for us during these difficult times as the spirit of fascist right-wing forces responsible for your own martyrdom infect worldwide political structures, especially here within the U.S. Guide us to be, as you were, instruments of peace as this world becomes more violent to those who proclaim Jesús’ good news about liberation. Let the people of God say ¡Amen!”     

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