Remembering Romero El Salvador's Leftist Archbishop Was Assassinated 25 Years Ago By Joe Mozingo Knight Ridder Newspapers
Saturday 02 April 2005
Usultan, El Salvador - The priest has no parish. He travels the red dirt roads and smoky landscape on an old Suzuki motorcycle, preaching of a salvation not in heaven but here on this rutted piece of earth.
Rallying peasants to fight for their rights, the Rev. Pilar Rivas Sandoval takes his inspiration from El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated 25 years ago in one of the ugliest chapters of the Cold War.
Throughout Latin America, Romero's legacy of denouncing repression and fighting for the poor endures in dusty backwaters like this one, even as the once widespread movement he came to represent long ago lost its momentum.
The theology of liberation, as it is known, reached bloody heights here in El Salvador and found its biggest martyr.
Recently, thousands of admirers lined up in front of Romero's tomb in the San Salvador Cathedral, carrying flowers and votive candles. One group carried a giant sign with the prelate's face and the phrase, "You were resurrected in your people." Hundreds more marked the anniversary at the hospital chapel where he was shot through the heart while celebrating Mass.
That one fatal bullet on March 24, 1980, helped fuel El Salvador's fratricidal war between Marxist guerrillas and a U.S.-backed government, a war that left at least 75,000 dead before it ended in 1992.
Church workers defending the poor found themselves in the crossfire. Nine months after Romero's death, El Salvadoran guardsmen raped and murdered four American churchwomen near the airport. And in 1989, soldiers shot to death six prominent priests at the Jesuit-run University of Central America.
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When the war ended three years later, El Salvador quickly distanced itself from its horrific past.
The middle class boomed, cities became virtual shrines to capitalism - packed with cell phones and malls and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants - and the religious struggle for the poor became largely a footnote relegated to the places left behind, such as the farmlands along the Rio Lempa, El Salvador's main river.
While Pope John Paul II has espoused the theme of social justice, he has made a concerted effort to squelch liberation theology in the Latin American church. He rooted out Marxist priests, appointed conservative bishops and replaced left-wing seminary instructors.
"The church now basically tries to have good relations with the government," said Miguel Cavada Diez, theology professor at the University of Central America in San Salvador. "They avoid any acts or any statements that could jeopardize that relationship."
But the church is a sea of many currents. Romero has gained such a populist following around the world that the Vatican, which had admonished him in life for his vociferous condemnations of the brutal U.S.-backed military, is now considering whether to declare him a saint.
And from the slums of San Salvador to coffee cooperatives on the slopes of volcanoes, priests are fighting to keep Romero's ideals alive.
The Rev. Pedro Leclerg, 66, lives in a sweltering chapel with a tin roof in a dust-covered hamlet called Tierra Blanca. The facade of his plain cinder-block church is painted with a mural of Romero. The interior is decorated with images of other El Salvadoran martyrs.
As a disciple of Romero, the Belgian-born cleric urges his parishioners not just to pray but to fight for their rights in the political realm.
"Monsignor Romero would say that to pray and leave the responsibility to God is not prayer, it's just laziness," Leclerg said, smoking a cigarette under a ceiling fan amid piles of books.
Ironically, devotees of liberation theology never could have imagined that Romero would become an icon of their movement when he was rising through the church.
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The son of a telegraph operator, Romero grew up in mountains reachable only by foot. As a young parish priest and auxiliary bishop, he was shy, conservative and rigidly orthodox, a pious bookworm hidden behind thick-framed glasses.
But in the mid-1970s as a bishop, Romero began to see the ruthless exploitation of peasants and underwent an emotional conversion. Soon after he became archbishop in 1977, Romero decried the murder of five priests and denounced the military regime as few others would dare.
"In the name of God," he implored on March 23, 1980, "in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly every day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression."
The next day, he was killed.
A quarter-century later, priests such as Leclerg and Rivas try to follow his example. In poor villages along the Rio Lempa, about 60 miles southeast of the capital, they fight for land reform. They organize peasants to protest free trade. They lobby the government to reduce the debt on farmers who took out loans to form cooperatives more than two decades ago.
In December 2003, they helped organize a five-day march to the capital to demand that the government finish building the dikes along the river.
Rivas, 37, walked all the way to the end, where the group was met by anti-riot police.
"He tells us we have to defend our rights, our communities," said Pastor Villanueva, a 42-year-old farmer and former guerrilla with a face mangled by shrapnel 20 years ago. "He is involved in everything."
Villanueva joined the march because he regularly sees his corn crop destroyed and his home inundated knee-deep in water.
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His land is low, flat and fertile, thinly shaded by thorny acacias. The river doesn't look like much to worry about. Most of the year, it pools and gently bends around sandy shoals.
But when it rains hard, the hydroelectric plant upstream releases huge surges of water from a reservoir. The river tops the banks and devastates the countryside.
"It's always a fight against the government," Villanueva said. "The church is the one who goes before us."
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Mitayo Potosi
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