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Article Excerpt
A MONTH BEFORE HIS DEATH, OSCAR ROMERO, ARCHBISHOP OF SAN Salvador, El Salvador told an interviewer, "If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.... May my blood be the seed of freedom and the signal that hope will soon be a reality" (Romero, 1987: 461). Romero was shot through the heart as he said Mass, killed on the orders of a Salvadoran military colonel who organized both clandestine death squads and the far-right political party that has ruled the country since 1989. The archbishop became a martyr for Catholics and other believers throughout the world. Romero died in the early days of the conflict between the Salvadoran government and the revolutionary FMLN (the Spanish abbreviation for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front), a conflict that eventually consumed about 80,000 lives. The vast majority of the dead were civilian victims of the Salvadoran army, whose brutal counterinsurgency war was heavily supported by the United States.
Twelve years after the death of the archbishop, as the peace accords that ended the civil war were beginning to go into effect, an enormous banner with an image of Monsenor Romero was draped from San Salvador's cathedral: "Monsenor, you came back to life in the people." These words were intended to mark the end of the violence of the war and to inaugurate a period of peace, democracy, and national reconciliation that would honor Romero's mission and his sacrifice. Yet the years since the end of the war have hardly been peaceful. El Salvador has one of the highest homicide rates in the western hemisphere, and violence associated with street crime in particular has emerged as a central preoccupation for many Salvadorans since the war's end. Income inequality and poverty rates remain high, particularly for those in the countryside, where traditional agricultural production has declined precipitously. In the western coffee-growing regions, decimated by the worldwide drop in prices, poverty and hunger have risen to levels unseen in decades. The economic problems and violence contribute to an enormous flow of migrants out of the country, most to the United States via Mexico, but others headed to different parts of Latin America, Canada, Europe, and Australia.
In these conditions, we ask in this paper where we might locate Romero's return and, more generally, what is the place of martyrdom, so central to the discursive organization of the civil war, in the present. We trace the themes of martyrdom and sacrifice across two distinct periods of Salvadoran history: the civil war of the 1980s and the postwar era since 1992. As the situation in the Salvadoran civil war shows, themes of martyrdom and sacrifice can help to organize political struggle by providing frames for interpreting social and political landscapes and addressing issues of violence, loss, and mourning. We highlight several distinct functions of martyr narratives in Salvadoran politics since the late 1970s. First, conceptions of martyrdom and sacrifice provide meaningful frames for agency, orienting and motivating individual and collective action as political struggle. Through risk and sacrifice, people are connected to a common good. This connection places individual sacrifices into a context in which they are painful but meaningful as part of a struggle that transcends any particular individual.
Notions of martyrdom also position people in relation to history. They situate the present in narratives of past and future and locate people in relation to sacred history, inserting current events into a religiously and morally meaningful narrative of sacred time. Martyrdom identifies divine power and intentions as acting in human history, at the same time it provides a goal or horizon toward which history is moving: the kingdom of God. For progressive Catholicism, this is given additional resonance by associating Jesus with individual actors, such as Romero and other assassinated priests, and with the collective "people" (pueblo) that acts out God's will in history.
Because they provide a sense of meaning and context to particular deaths, popular understandings of sacrifice help organize people's relations with loss and with the dead. Martyrdom narratives locate individual and collective experiences of suffering and injustice within a particular historicity. They anticipate the deaths of those who struggle against unjust power, and so anticipate loss, while simultaneously marking death as something other than loss as such. The martyr remains; death is continuous with the life of the martyr. The martyr is mourned; her loss is felt and suffered, yet she is not let go. This process recalls Freud's investigation of two distinct responses to the loss of a loved one, mourning and melancholia. Mourning in this formulation is the necessary and healthy path, in which loss is recognized and the living "move on," eventually releasing their investment in the lost person or object. This contrasts with melancholia, the pathological form of dealing with loss in which the mourner refuses to relinquish her attachment to the dead or the lost, instead incorporating the loss within her ego. Melancholia constitutes a form of "mourning without end" that leaves the living virtually immobilized (Eng and Kazanjian, 2003; Freud, 1986). The complicated dynamics of martyrdom defy this classic Freudian contrast. In the context of martyrdom as it was elaborated in liberation theology, the living move on, and do so accompanied by the martyred dead. The refusal to relinquish attachment to the dead motivates continued activism as well as the emotional survival of those who remain.
Finally, martyrdom is tied to particular conceptions of power. The worldly forces that persecute and kill martyrs are specific, locatable, and identified with structures of sin and injustice. These relationships underline the association of the martyrs and their allies with divine causes and intentions, and help make their struggles and sacrifices meaningful. The theme of martyrdom is most politically and morally resonant, in other words, when people identify unjust power and experience those injustices as the source of their own suffering and oppression. Under other conditions of suffering, however, martyrdom and sacrifice are less persuasive. Specifically, when the powers that kill are dispersed and difficult to identify, both their identification with sinful forces and their victims' identification with God's cause become more tenuous.
Since the war's end in El Salvador, although conditions of suffering remain high for many, it is difficult to identify the locations of injustice, the structural sources of inequality and suffering, and even the agents of violence. We understand this dispersion of power as part of more general transformations in practices of governance in much of Latin America. The shift in strategies of domination under conditions of military rule to the operations of power in conditions of formal democracy, although never as neatly distinct as the language of "shifts" and "transitions" suggests, parallels a global shift from the centralized power of sovereign rule to decentralized modes of inciting social subjects to govern themselves. Whether seen as part of a long-term historical movement characteristic of late modernity (Foucault, 1978; Rose, 1999), or more narrowly because coups and dictatorships diminish investor confidence (Weyland, 2004), we associate both the new modes of rule and new conditions of suffering with the establishment of neoliberal economic policies beginning in the 1980s and the formal processes of democracy with the peace accords. For the purposes of this paper, the most significant aspects of this shift are the dispersion and decentralization of power, and the concomitant loss of a central, identifiable source of negative power; the deterritorialization of the poor, particularly the agricultural workers who previously grounded, quite literally, the projects of liberation theology and revolution; and the depoliticization of violence, most often understood today as problems of nature, fate, or criminality rather than part and parcel of patterned and structured systems of injustice.
We find martyrdom in these new conditions to be articulated most typically as a discourse of commemoration, performing a relationship to history very different from that evident during the war. Today, themes of sacrifice emerge most consistently in narratives around migration, stories of individuals sacrificing for family and individual attainment often linked to entrepreneurial goals. In this paper we track the transformation of martyrdom and sacrifice in popular and religious discourse in El Salvador. We dedicate our attention to the meanings and practices of martyrdom and sacrifice during the civil war of the 1980s with an eye toward presenting an account of the conditions of political uncertainty and dispersion facing Salvadorans today.
HISTORICAL ROOTS
As in much of Central America, political rule in El Salvador has long been marked by the use of violence by the state against workers and peasants. In 1833, soon after independence, indigenous people led by Anastasio Aquino attacked Spanish installations in various parts of the country to protest government repression and the tribute demanded by local authorities. When the rebellion failed, the military executed Aquino and displayed his head in a cage. A regular pattern of agricultural booms and busts developed that continued into the twentieth century. At various times, and in different parts of the country, indigo, balsalm, henequin, cotton, and finally coffee production saw periods of very high profitability that were often accompanied by the displacement of subsistence farmers and the concentration of land (Lauria-Santiago, 1999). As Patricia Alvarenga documents, a repressive apparatus was created in the last decades of the nineteenth century alongside changes in labor and property relations and agrarian reform that...
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