“Too often, our debate on immigration in this country takes place in a vacuum, removed from the violence and poverty which too often have been exacerbated by America’s own history of intervention and destabilization in Central America.” — Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.)
Forty-four years ago in March, a sniper silenced the conscience of El Salvador’s brutal civil war. The assassin drove to San Salvador’s Carmelite hospital chapel and paused to be sure the priest preparing communion was the designated target. Satisfied, the killer then stepped outside the vehicle, took aim through the doors and fired a single round into the celebrant’s chest. The perpetrator disappeared for the ages, the victim died within minutes.
The celebrant that bright Sunday, March 24, was Archbishop (now Saint) Oscar Romero, voice for peace in a war ravaged country where left-leaning Jesuit clerics were warned to flee or be executed. Long expecting El Salvador’s rightwing regime to make good on that promise, tradition has it his final words were a plea for his killer’s peace and that of his beloved country — a peace that would be another 12 years and 75,000 civilian lives in coming.
Tormented as the Archbishop’s El Salvador of the 1970s and 80s would prove to be, his was one of three Central American states suffering brutal internal conflicts, each aggravated by massive foreign military and monetary interventions. Case in point, the US supplied the death-squad Salvadoran government with $6 billion in hardware, training and supplies — wartime aid born of then-President Reagan’s preoccupation with imposing western-style governments no matter each nation’s unique history, culture, politics and economics.
By 1996 (and with tepid diplomatic assistance from the US) concentrated civil wars within the region had narrowed to one. In December of that year, government officials and rebel leaders in Guatemala signed a peace accord ending 36 years of hell on Earth. War, as defined for two generations, was finally over.
But Central America is still far from the peaceful, equitable place of Archbishop Romero’s prayers. With few exceptions, the region suffers rising rates of violence, corruption, organized drug trafficking, unemployment and wealth disparities enough to foment new civil uprisings: The rocket-launcher wars bankrolled in part by Reagan and his advisers may be over, but not the consequences for those trapped in a generational, dead end existence not of their own making.
Hardly mentioned in the cacophony over our southern border, the suffering America helped inflict on an entire area of earth has returned to us in the form of sunburned and thirsty families in search of something better than a dead end. Suffering has begat more suffering.
But America has never been much for owning up to its colossal lapses in morality. (See the uphill battles for reparations for slavery and return of tribal lands.) The current Republican obsession with southern border policy minus history and heart should be seen for what it ultimately is: One more instance of a collective capacity to ignore, even deny the worst in us.
Don Rollins is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister in Jackson, Ohio. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2024
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