Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador

Abstract

A mont before his death, Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador told an interviewer, “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people. . . . May my blood be the seed of free dom and the signal that hope will soon be a reality” (Romero, 1987: 461). Romero was shot through the heart as he said Mass, killed on the orders of a Salvadoran military colonel who organized both clan destine death squads and the farright political party that has ruled the country since 1989. The archbishop became a martyr for Catholics and other believers throughout the world. Romero died in the early days of the conflict between the Salvadoran government and the revo lutionary FMLN (the Spanish abbreviation for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front), a conflict that eventually consumed about 80,000 lives. The vast majority of the dead were civilian victims of the Salvadoran army, whose brutal counterinsurgency war was heavily supported by the United States