Chasing Oscar Romero's Killers

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🗓️ 18 February 2017

⏱️ 83 minutes

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Summary

The Salvadoran Civil War is one of the most brutal conflicts in recent history. The United States funded far-right, quasi-fascist forces who had no qualms with bathing the country in blood in the name of anti-communism. Few incidents illustrate this better than the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the country's top Catholic leader, whose brief period speaking out on behalf of the poor and against the military led to his murder while giving mass. Matt Eisenbrandt is the author of Assassination of a Saint: The Plot to Murder Óscar Romero and the Quest to Bring His Killers to Justice, a fast-paced, often heartbreaking look into a uniquely depraved period of the Cold War. Eisenbrandt is a former attorney at the Center for Justice and Accountability, which brought a case in the United States against Romero's killers. Here, he walks through the history of the Salvadoran conflict and the attempts to pursue the architects of the archbishop's assassination in both the United States and El Salvador.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Jackman Radio. I'm Micahutrich, associate editor at Jacobin.
0:14.0	For the last century or so, El Salvador has been a brutally unequal society.
0:20.0	It's long been a place defined by U.S. imperialism, resource extraction, and disregard for democracy
0:26.2	and for human rights.
0:28.6	The U.S. has propped up brutal regimes in El Salvador and throughout Latin America and looked the other way as those regimes crushed any dissent for a long time. But in the late 1970s and 1980s, Salvadorans organized resistance on a massive scale, both through the Farabundo-Marti
0:45.7	National Liberation Front, an umbrella group of Marxist guerrillas, and through civil
0:50.2	society resistance, especially in the Catholic Church. This included
0:54.0	El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero. Romero was assassinated in 1980, almost
1:00.0	certainly by the far-right fascist forces that ran the country. No one was ever brought
1:04.7	to justice for his assassination until a trial began in the United States in 2003.
1:10.0	Matt Eisenbrandt was an attorney on that case.
1:13.7	He's also the author of a new book, Assassination of a Saint,
1:16.9	the plot to murder Oscar Romero and the quest to bring his killers to justice.
1:21.0	In a recent conversation, Matt walks through a broad swath of
1:24.5	Salvadoran history, the radicalization of the Catholic Church there,
1:28.1	Romero's political transformation in subsequent assassination, and the trial that attempted to track down his
1:33.7	assassins more than 20 years later.
1:35.8	I started working at the Center for Justice and Accountability in 2002,
1:40.7	and at that time, CJ. was actually already working on
1:46.4	at least one really important El Salvador case
1:49.9	that went to trial right around the time that I started there against two former ministers of defense.
1:57.0	And so, you know, CJ already had a bit of a focus on El Salvador.
	...

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