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250 24 THE DEATH OF THE ARCHBISHOP If human rights are the soul of U.S. foreign policy, then the Carter administration sinned in dealing with El Salvador.Jimmy Carter began his presidency by coming to the support of Andrei Sakahrov, the great Soviet human rights activist. He ended up with policies that isolated Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez of El Salvador, a man who took even greater risks to promote human rights in his own polity. In an open letter on February 17, 1980, Romero wrote President Carter and urged him to not support the Salvadoran government then in power. Continuing to supply military equipment and advisors to the junta would only lead to a major blood bath, Romero advised, and would“sharpen the injustice and the repression inflected on the organized people,whose struggle has often been for respect for their most basic human rights.”1 Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, in a reply delivered by the new U.S. ambassador Robert E.White, noted that while“we understand your concerns about the dangers of providing military assistance [to the Salvadoran government, it]...offers the best prospect for peaceful change toward a more just society.”2 Behind the scenes, the administration , with Carter’s full knowledge, was attempting to persuade Pope John Paul II to pressure the archbishop to drop his active role in opposing the junta. A few days after receiving the U.S. reply, Romero was delivering Mass in the chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia of San Salvador. A single bullet fired by a professional assassin from a red Volkswagen outside the chapel felled him.“May God have mercy on the assassin,” were his dying words.3 At his funeral on Sunday, March 30, more than 50,000 people gathered at San Salvador’s major cathedral. In the midst of a tribute to Romero by the Mexican cardinal Ernesto Corripto Ahumado (John Paul II’s representative), a bomb exploded and was followed by several bursts of gunfire. In the end, approximately forty people were killed. Many, uninjured by the blast itself, were trampled or crushed against fences surrounding the cathedral during the ensuing panic as people tried to escape from the blast.4 Romero’s death was due in part to his political isolation from the two forces in El Salvador—the United States and the Vatican—that might have more openly protected him from right wing elements that had penetrated the governing junta,the army and various governmental bureaus. Concerns about a left wing takeover, reinforced by the recent victories of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, led the United States to resist Romero’s open opposition to a series of juntas that at best were simply unable to bring about significant reform or control violence. The concerns of the Vatican, somewhat more complex, led to a policy that complimented that of the United States. THE DEATH OF THE ARCHBISHOP 251 Saint or Politician? At the time of his appointment as archbishop in February 1977, Romero was seen as a conservative who would correct the leftist course undertaken by his predecessor. But only three weeks after his installation, his good friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, was murdered on his way to celebrate Mass.5 When the then-in-place regime of General Carlos Humberto Romero (not related) failed to show any interest in actively pursuing the murderers of Grande and several other reformers, the archbishop began to move in another direction.At first he refused to appear at government events, seeing any churchly appearance as legitimizing a government that made no attempt to bring the murderers to justice.As a priest,he presided over the funerals of people killed in the pursuit of justice as he saw it.6 When a military junta overthrew General Romero’s regime in October 1979, the archbishop shared the hopes of the Carter administration that the new government would reform the Salvadoran economic and justice systems. But the archbishop and the Carter administration would soon come to a parting of the ways as several new governments underwent a series of resignations and failed to reduce the violence against those demanding land and political reforms. In January of 1980, the civilian members of the first junta resigned. The second junta was no more successful. On March 10, Hector Dada and five other leading Christian Democrats resigned from both the government and their party. Dada wrote in his letter of resignation that“we have not been able...

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