Slain El Salvador Jesuits paid price for their advocacy

13 November 2014

On November 17, 1989, I was in Thailand at a meeting of Jesuit Refugee Service workers. There I heard of the death of six Jesuits, their cook and her daughter. Jon Sobrino, the Jesuit theologian from El Salvador, was due to visit us in the evening. He came, and we celebrated Mass with him for his friends and colleagues.

I remember that on the front page of a Bangkok newspaper was a photograph of the murder scene. Jon looked at it and said, almost in surprise, ‘That is my room... my typewriter...my bible. A Jesuit visitor had come to stay a few days, was offered his room, and died there.

Elba Ramos cooked meals at the Jesuit community. Celia was her sixteen year old daughter. The Jesuits, Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Barro, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Joaquín López y López and Amado López, taught at the University and its associated institutes. It was a time of civil war, and the University and Jesuits were identified by the Government with the armed resistance. The crime that led directly to their death was their advocacy of a negotiated settlement to a war that the Government thought it could win unconditionally.

The roots of the civil war lay in the Government’s seizure and selling of communal land earlier in the century. It was accompanied by the massacre of the Indigenous population. A few families owned most of the country’s wealth and exploited the rural population. The Catholic Church as an institution was associated with the better-off.

The Second Vatican Council committed the Catholic Church to take seriously its mission to preach the Gospel to the poor. Many priests in Latin America began to reflect with their congregations on what the Gospel meant in their situation. They began to ask why they were exploited, and how they could act to shape a more just society. In El Salvador this local organising led to conflict and to a violent response. As part of the Government’s counter-insurgency tactics catechists and villagers were murdered. Theologically conservative priests like Jesuit Rutilio Grande and Archbishop Oscar Romero saw what was happening to their people, called it for what it was, and were themselves killed.

Before the killings the Jesuits were advised to hide from the death squads. They decided it would be safe to stay at the University because it was surrounded by the army. But the decision to kill them, taken at

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Slain El Salvador Jesuits paid price for their advocacy

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