Liberating People Through Theology

I have a book on my shelves that I’ve had since seminary: Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, by Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J., and Jon Sobrino, S.J. It was published in 1993, a fact attested to by the preface by Sobrino, who opens with acknowledging the martyrdom of Ellacuria, Juan Ramon Moreno, Amando Lopez, Segundo Monte’s, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, and their cook, Julia Elba, and her daughter, Celina. They were murdered in the residence of Archbishop Romero Center (now Saint, but this was in 1990) atCentral American University Jose Simeon Canas, on November 16, 1989.

That is from the preface to the Spanish edition of 1990. My copy is the English edition, 1993. I mean as a microcosm remembrance of the violence visited upon people in Central America in the late decades of the 20th century, violence condoned by the United States in the name of opposing communism. 

American-trained officers also directed the rape and murder of four American church women in El Salvador early in 1981. The heroic US ambassador who swore that the killers would never get away with their crime, Robert White, was fired days after Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency. Later Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that the women might have been killed in “an exchange of fire.” That was a signal to Salvadorans that the United States would help cover up the truth about such killings.

President Reagan steadfastly supported the Salvadoran military despite overwhelming evidence of its crimes. So did Haig and other senior officials in the Reagan administration. It is a parody of justice that their legacy remains honorable while triggermen who did their bidding are demonized.

Writing about one of the former Salvadoran officers now targeted by American justice, two former Reagan administration officials recently asserted, “He was there when the US needed him.” They know. One of them, Edwin Corr, was ambassador to El Salvador at the height of the killing campaign in the mid-1980s. The other, Elliott Abrams, was assistant secretary of state. Their commentary was insightful but did not go far enough.

The Salvadoran justice system has every right to prosecute Salvadoran officers who tortured and murdered during the 1980s. For the United States to feign outrage at their crimes, however, is unfair. Those officers were pawns in a game directed from Washington. True justice would target the people who conceived, blessed, and financed El Salvador’s counterinsurgency campaign. Executioners’ faces are always well hidden, but in this case, they speak English, worked in Washington during the 1980s, and remain respectable cocktail-party guests.

There is, of course, no real prospect that the American masterminds of El Salvador’s killing campaign will be brought to justice in this world. Next best would be for Americans to accept a measure of responsibility as a nation. That might lead us to pause before giving blank checks to regimes we know to be murderous.

Just to say, briefly, that it was in this context that liberation theology was born. If I need to tell you more, I would direct you to Didion’s Salvador. “The preferential option for the poor,” the phrase most associated with liberation theology, and thought to make more Marxism than Xianity, comes out of that context. No one in gov, from the U.S. on down, gave a wet snap for the poor; except that they not become communists. Not in this hemisphere, anyway. Cuba was already too much.

LOL. Will Trump send the Navy Seals in to arrest the 95 year old man? https://t.co/m2eIL40Hl6

— Spiro’s Ghost (@AntiToxicPeople) May 19, 2026

And still is. 

The last decades of the last century are still with us, in other words. And liberation theology, supposedly expunged and extirpated by the twin forces of the CIA’s School of the Americas, where the worst monsters of Central America were trained, and Pope John Paul II, with his experience of communism and disgust with it, which led him to despise the economic message of liberation theology. But it persisted, even as it disappeared. It changed the conversation. It’s the conversation we’re all having now.

We are not all liberation theologians. But we are all still grappling with their ideas, whether we embrace them, or reject them, or are somewhere in between. We are having the conversation they started. I think if that as a very Christian kind of paradox. Jesus of Nazareth started a conversation the world is still having. Some ideas are like that; not t everybody likes them, but they can’t be ignored. It’s a peculiarity of the ideas that would improve us, if we let them.

I’m going to do some reading and reflecting. But can’t promise I’ll do the reflecting here; or ever be systematic about it all. I just wanted to mention the new thesis. Like most of my ideas, I’ll probably just let it drift into the background.

One never know, do one?