Reply #5: Here's some material which addresses this:

[Judi Lynn]

El Salvador: Ghosts at the Polls

By Don North
June 24, 2009


“If they kill me, I shall arise again in the Salvadoran people,” said Archbishop Oscar Romero 29 years ago, just two weeks before he was gunned down by a sniper while saying mass.

~snip~
Romero’s assassination by a rightist death squad in 1980 marked the beginning of a 12-year civil war between government forces and the guerrillas of the FMLN, the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front, which now holds power as a political party.

In my new documentary “Yesterday’s Enemies,” I open with a song by Kris Kristofferson from 1983, the first year I reported from the war zone around the Guazapa volcano in central El Salvador. “They killed so many heroes, but the dreams they left behind them ain’t as easy as a man to blow away,” the lyrics said.

That appears to have proven true with Archbishop Romero, whose spirit seemed to hover above this year’s election campaign, both as inspiration for Funes and the FMLN and as a reminder of the grisly history behind ARENA, the longtime rightist governing party.

In 1993, a United Nations truth commission determined that ARENA’s founder, Major Roberto D’Aubuisson ordered the assassination of Romero, who had emerged as a powerful voice protesting the repression of the country’s many poor and dispossessed.

Much as Romero became the inspiring symbol for El Salvador’s Left, D’Aubuisson, a boyish-looking former intelligence officer who ran death squads on behalf of El Salvador’s wealthy oligarchy, became the face of El Salvador’s Right.

After Romero’s murder, D’Aubuisson death squads (often government soldiers dressed in plain clothes) systematically slaughtered leftist politicians, labor activists, students, intellectuals and clergy. Eventually, the opposition retreated to the countryside and took up arms as guerrillas under a coalition known as the FMLN.

Backing Repression

Fearing the spread of leftist revolution in Central America, the Reagan administration brushed aside complaints about the government’s human rights abuses and threw U.S. support behind the Salvadoran military in what often was a scorched-earth campaign against the guerrillas and their suspected civilian sympathizers. El Salvador’s civil war killed an estimated 75,000 people.

Though notorious as a death squad commander, D’Aubuisson in 1982 founded the rightist ARENA (National Republican Alliance), which grew to be El Salvador’s dominant political party even after the civil war ended in 1992, the same year D’Aubuisson died of throat cancer.

In 1993, the United Nations truth commission found that Salvadoran government military units and death squads had been responsible for 85 percent of human rights abuses during the war. Rebel FMLN forces were blamed for 5 percent, while 10 percent were declared undetermined.

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/062409a.html

Archbishop Romero, assassinated:

Published on Thursday, March 24, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Oscar Romero, Presente!
by John Dear

~snip~
On March 23, Romero exploded with his most direct appeal to the members of the armed forces:

�I would like to make an appeal in a special way to the men of the army, to the police, to those in the barracks. Brothers, you are part of our own people. You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters. And before an order to kill that a man may give, the law of God must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to fulfill an immoral law. It is time to recover your consciences and to obey your consciences rather than the orders of sin. The church, defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, the dignity of the person, cannot remain silent before such abomination. We want the government to take seriously that reforms are worth nothing when they come about stained with so much blood. In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuously, I beg you, I ask you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!�

The next day, March 24, 1980, Romero presided at a special evening mass in the chapel of the hospital compound where he lived, in honor of someone who had died one year before. He read from John�s Gospel: �Unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains only a grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit �(Jn. 12:23-26). Then he preached about the need to give one�s life for others as Christ did. Just as he concluded his sermon, he was shot in the heart by a man standing in the back of the church. Romero fell behind the altar and collapsed at the foot of a huge crucifix depicting a bloody and bruised Christ. Blood covered Romero�s vestments and the floor of the church, and he gasped for breath. He died within minutes.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0324-21.htm

Archbishop Oscar Romero
The Last Sermon (1980)
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/faculty/amcguire/romero.h...