Today is the feast day of Saint Oscar Romero of El Salvador, killed this day in 1980 by US-backed forces while saying Mass. Oscar Romero presente!

 

"If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people" - Archbishop Óscar Romero assassinated 24 March, 1980.

“I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.”

Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who spoke out against poverty, social injustice and the death squads, was murdered while giving mass on the order of right wing death squad leaders. At his funeral hundreds of mourners were killed by the Salvadoran army. Despite these crimes, and countless others, the government of El Salvador and the right wing death squads continued to be supported by the United States throughout the 1980s.

No one was ever convicted of his killing.