Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Salvadoran forces assumed, because the guerillas were maintaining their strength, that
innocent civilians in leftist-controlled territory were no longer innocent. Civilian women
and children were considered combatants—fair game—in order for the popular revolt to
become less popular. As if draining the sea to kill the fish, right-wing forces targeted and
terrorized civilians with a brutal vengeance. Notorious “death squads” wrought havoc on
El Salvador's poor.
For example, the University of Central America's six leading Jesuit professors were
the intellectual leaders of Liberation Theology—and, therefore, they were considered
leaders of the revolution. Early one morning in 1989, government death squads came into
the Jesuits' humble quarters and dragged them into the garden. One by one, they were shot
in the brains with exploding bullets (because they were the “brains of the people's move-
ment”). Before the death squad left, they took time to shoot a bullet through the heart of a
photo of Romero hanging on the wall…still trying to kill him nine years after his death.
