Church, Economic Justice

35 years after Romero, El Salvador is still at war

CRUX
by John Allen Jr. (Associate Editor)

Members of the 18th street gang gather together at the Cojutepeque Jail in El Salvador. (Photo: Getty Images)
Members of the 18th street gang gather together at the Cojutepeque Jail in El Salvador. (Photo: Getty Images)

SAN SALVADOR — When the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador is beatified on Saturday, it will mark a public celebration of a martyr shot to death at the altar in 1980 for seeking justice and peace in a country that, on the cusp of a brutal civil war, was sorely lacking in both.

Although it’s hard to know what Romero might make of the honor, it seems far more certain he would have mixed feelings about what’s happened in El Salvador in the 35 years since his death.

On one hand, following a deadly conflict from 1980 to 1992 that saw an estimated 85,000 people killed, 8,000 missing, and 1 million displaced, a peace agreement between the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and a US-backed conservative Salvadoran government produced a cease-fire that has never been broken.
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