10 2307@40972074

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador
Author(s): Anna L. Peterson and Brandt G. Peterson

Source: Social Research, Vol. 75, No. 2, Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Denial (SUMMER
2008), pp. 511-542
Published by: The New School
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Anna L. Peterson and
Brandt G. Peterson
Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and
Political Memory in El
Salvador
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 free-
dom 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 clan-
destine 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 revo-
lutionary 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 Monsefior Romero was draped
from San Salvador's cathedral: "Monsefior, you came back to life in the
people." These words were intended to mark the end of the violence of
social research Vol 75 : No 2 : Summer 2008 511
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 hemi-
sphere, 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, particu-
larly for those in the countryside, where traditional agricultural produc-
tion 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 martyr-
dom, 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 polit-
ical landscapes and addressing issues of violence, loss, and mourn-
ing. We highlight several distinct functions of martyr narratives in
Salvadoran politics since the late 1970s. First, conceptions of martyr-
dom 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 reli-
512 social research
giously 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 particu-
lar 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 strug-
gle 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 constitutues 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 elabo-
rated 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 under-
Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 513
line the association of the martyrs and their allies with divine causes
and intentions, and help make their struggles and sacrifices meaning-
ful. 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 suffer-

ing 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 condi-
tions 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 central-
ized 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 dimin-
ish 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, iden-
tifiable 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.
514 social research
We find martyrdom in these new conditions to be articulated
most typically as a discourse of commemoration, performing a relation-
ship 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 trib-
ute 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 tended overwhelmingly to benefit
larger landholders while forcing many of the poor to rely on share-
cropping and day labor as they lost access to land (Alvarenga, 1994).
Protests against agrarian reform and dislocation of peasants in the
1880s and 1890s encountered state security institutions increasingly
empowered to contain workers.
In the case of coffee, serious commercial production began to
grow in the 1880s and expanded dramatically in the first three decades
of the twentieth century. Between 1916 and the early 1930s the amount
of land dedicated to coffee increased from 61,000 hectares to 100,000
hectares (Gould and Lauria Santiago, 2008: 6). The loss of subsistence
farmland created an itinerant rural population that provided seasonal
labor on large estates. By the early 1920s, an elite whose wealth was
grounded in agriculture and finance established itself, while the popu-
lation of rural poor with little or no access to land expanded signifi-
cantly.
The pattern of protest and repression was repeated, in shocking
and horrific proportions, in the 1932 massacre known as la matanza. In
December 1931, a military junta overthrew recently elected reformist
president Arturo Araujo. The next month, about 5,000 mostly indig-
enous people, organized by the Communist Party, launched an uprising
centered in the western provinces of Sonsonate and Ahuachapan. The
rebels took over and destroyed several town halls and killed 15 to 20
people, including landlords, national guardsmen, and a retired general.
The military government responded by killing not only the insurrec-
tion's participants and leaders, including Communist Party founder
Farabundo Marti, but also huge numbers of people who had not partici-
pated in the rebellion. Ten thousand people died at the hands of the
government.
The matanza has powerfully shaped Salvadoran political culture.
The right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Republican Nationalist
Alliance, ARENA), founded by army colonel and death squad organizer
Roberto D'Abuisson, has ruled El Salvador since 1989. Formed most
fundamentally by the anticommunism of traditional elites, ARENA
begins its national electoral campaigns in Izalco, one of the sites of the
most horrific violence of 1932 because, as one ARENA president put it,
"it is here that we buried communism" (Gould, 2001: 138). Economic
and government leaders have believed that "if necessary, they could
repeat the lesson' of 1932" (Baloyra, 1982: 31).
516 social research
For survivors of the 1932 massacre and their descendants,
painful memories of the massacre were confined to private spaces,

and to a large extent were silenced or marginalized. Early journal-
istic and academic accounts of the massacre were oriented toward
elite consumption and committed to refining a narrative of the mili-

tary saving the nation from a cancerous communist menace. There
were no spaces in a national public sphere for commemoration or
the articulation of counternarratives. For survivors of the massacre
and their children, this official repression may have contributed to

psychological repression among individuals, families, and communi-
ties. Children and grandchildren of the generation decimated by the
massacre grew up hearing of the massacre as a lesson not to engage
in potentially subversive activities. This directive implicitly assigns
responsibility to the victims of the terror, even though the majority
killed had not, in fact participated in the uprising or been affiliated
with the Communist Party (Suarez-Orozco, 1992). Generations of
peasants, labor leaders, and opposition intellectuals have understood
that repression may return at any moment, regardless of one's politi-
cal actions. Throughout the twentieth century, explicitly political
violence was an ever-present threat for most Salvadorans, especially
poor people and activists. In the wake of the 1932 massacre, political
opposition in most of El Salvador went underground, and the politi-
cal spaces opened in the 1920s were effectively shut down (Gould and
Lauria-Santiago, 2008).
For decades after 1932, la matanza was narrated primarily in
accord with the needs of an elite nationalist project. The first book-
length accounts, Joaquin Mendez's Los Sucesos Comunistas en El Salvador
(1932) and Jorge Schlesinger's Revolution Comunista (1946) were fantastic
in the psychoanalytic sense, tales of savage violence and disorder perpe-
trated by communists and their dupes, threats to the national body (B.
Peterson, 2007). Much later, the poet and revolutionary Roque Dalton
would re-read the events of 1932 through the lens of heroic revolution-
ary organization. Dalton's Miguel Marmol, presented as the testimonio or
memoir of one of the Communist Party organizers of the 1932 uprising,
positioned the rebellion as a foundational moment in a left-nationalist
narrative that set the stage for the revolutionary project of Dalton's
generation (Dalton, 1987). Notable in both right- and left-wing versions
of la matanza is a shared evaluation of the victims as having died -
having been sacrificed - for a national cause that would continue.
For the right, of course, that national cause was order. The right-wing
understanding of national order and progress would be constructed
against communism as a threat, a disease against which the body poli-
tic must be inoculated (Candelario, 2003). For the left, the victims of the
massacre were rendered, somewhat abstractly, as el pueblo, the people,
the subjects of what in the 1970s and 1980s would be understood as
national liberation.1 However, mass death in 1932 was not described
in terms of martyrdom, for reasons including the political culture of
both left and right during that period and, perhaps most important, the
absence of a progressive religious discourse that could link historical
events with divine purposes.
RELIGIOUS ROOTS
The deaths of Archbishop Romero and thousands of other Christians

killed by the Salvadoran government and death squads gain mean-
ing because of narratives, values, and expectations with deep roots in
Christian history. Most important is the story of Jesus's life, death, and
resurrection, which provides a lens for making sense of subsequent
violence. One of Christianity's distinctive features, as Mexican theolo-
gian Carlos Bravo notes, is that it worships a god who dies in appar-
ent defeat (Bravo, 1990). This history resonates with activists who face
uphill battles against more powerful enemies. It enables them to view
setbacks and painful losses not as evidence that their cause is either
unjust or ill-fated but rather that they are on the correct path, following
in fact the trajectory of Jesus - who told his disciples to expect diffi-
cult times. "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before
it hated you
518 social research
cuted me, they will persecute you" (John 15:18, 20). Worldly success
does not correlate with moral righteousness.
The sacrifices of early disciples, following the crucifixion of Jesus,
reinforced the association between true faith and persecution. Their
deaths served as signs of the last days, as witness to the true faith,
and, not least, as imitation of the model of self-sacrifice set by Christ
himself - imitatio Christi. The value given to sacrifice helped make perse-
cution inevitable and even desirable for early Christians, and even
transformed suffering into a mark of true faith. "All who desire to live a
godly life in Christ Jesus can expect to be persecuted," asserts the second
letter of Timothy (3:12); the writer goes on to suggest that in fact believ-
ers can attain the kingdom of God only through affliction. During the
second and third centuries CE, believers came to understand persecu-
tion not as a threat to avoid, but as a sign of the new age, to be accepted
with stoicism and even joy.
Christian definitions of martyrdom have been expanded at vari-
ous times and places, including Central America during the 1970s and
1980s. While popular narratives disagreed about some issues, especially
whether those who used violence could be termed "martyrs," they
concurred about several main points. First, martyrs were those on the
side of social justice and against the military and powerful classes. This
went along with the redefinition of Christianity that took place in much
of Latin America following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The
council, a meeting of bishops called by Pope John XXIII, produced a wide
range of documents addressing internal and external issues, including
new, favorable, interpretations of human rights, political democracy,
and ecumenism. The council also called for changes in pastoral and
liturgical practices and for increased lay participation in the church,
which it defined not as the hierarchy but as the "people of God" (Abbot,
1966).
While setting a new tone and emphasis for the global church,
Vatican II also encouraged regional and national churches to consider
the Council's conclusions in light of their own circumstances.
Following that suggestion, the Latin American Bishops' Council
(CELAM) met in 1968 in Medellin, Colombia, to reflect on the church
in "the present-day transformation of Latin America in the light of
the council" (CELAM, 1979). The bishops denounced the "institution-
alized violence" of poverty throughout the region and affirmed the
church's commitment to work for the political and economic transfor-
mations necessary to achieve the social justice demanded by the Bible
and the Catholic tradition. They also called for new pastoral meth-
ods, with greater attention to poor neighborhoods and rural villages.
This encouraged the growth of comunidades eclesiales de base (grassroots
Christian communities, or CEBs) as a more democratic and partici-
patory form of pastoral organization in which laypeople discussed
biblical texts in light of their own experiences. Medellin also gave
momentum to the emerging theology of liberation, which provided a
biblically grounded critique of social injustices and economic inequi-
ties in Latin America.
The pastoral and theological innovations inspired by Vatican II

and Medellin helped shift Latin American Catholicism toward a new
emphasis on social justice and popular participation. However, the
practical implications of these developments varied in different coun-
tries. In El Salvador, the progressive Catholic vision was embraced
most fully in the Archdiocese of San Salvador, first under the leader-
ship of Archbishop Luis Chavez y Gonzalez, who served from 1939 to
1977. Chavez had promoted early reforms during the 1950s and early
1960s, and after Vatican II he issued pastoral letters applying the coun-
cil's goals and concerns to the archdiocese. Because of Chavez's efforts,
recalls a Salvadoran diocesan priest, "The documents [of Vatican II and
Medellin] were like the air that we breathed at this time" (Vega, 1990).
A group of young priests formed in 1970 to discuss their work "within
the historical movement forward of the poor in our country," and that
same year Chavez organized a "National Pastoral Week" to discuss and
strengthen pastoral innovations (Archdiocese of San Salvador, 1976;
Erdozain, 1981).
520 social research
Vatican II, Medellin, and local progressive initiatives were crucial
to understandings of martyrdom for two reasons. First, a growing
commitment to human rights, political democracy, and economic equal-
ity brought Christian activists into conflict with political and economic
elites, and the military forces that defended them. This meant that for
the first time in Latin American history, Catholics became targets of
political violence for their work "on behalf of the faith." These experi-
ences of repression provided "data" in need of interpretation by both
laypeople and Christian intellectuals. Second, this interpretation was
provided by precisely the ideology - progressive Catholicism - that had
helped spark the violence. Progressive Catholicism asserted that true
Christianity demands defense of the weak, in imitation of Jesus's minis-
try. Just as Jesus was persecuted and ultimately killed by the oppressors
of his time, so contemporary Christians are at risk of persecution by
powerful people who benefit from the unjust and un-Christian social
order. And the deaths of these martyrs, like the death of Jesus, contrib-
ute to the ultimate realization of the reign of God on earth.
MARTYRDOM AND SACRIFICE IN EL SALVADOR: THE LATE

1970S AND 1980S
Following the political crisis of 1931-1932 and the matanza, Salvadoran

politics was characterized by authoritarian rule, in which economic
elites determined policies enforced by an obedient military. Resistance
was rarely open, and crushed brutally when it erupted. Not until the
late 1960s did a new cohort of opposition movements emerged, largely
organized by students, peasants, and trade unionists and fueled by
economic problems that made life increasingly difficult for the poor
majority, especially in the countryside. After blatant electoral frauds in
1972 and 1977, many opposition activists turned away from hopes for
peaceful paths to change, and armed revolutionary movements began
gathering steam. Support for these organizations grew as the military
junta intensified repression. This violence, in turn, pushed even pacific
opponents of the regime into alliances with armed revolutionary
groups, which united in 1980 as the Farabundo Marti Front for National
Liberation, or FMLN.
Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, army units and para-
military death squads killed, captured, and "disappeared" thousands
of activists, producing well-known images of soldiers machine-gunning
unarmed demonstrators, terrified peasants being hauled away by
helmeted National Guardsmen, and mutilated cadavers in body dumps.
El Salvador in the 1980s, as anthropologist Leigh Binford writes, "stood
in a metonymic relationship with murdered nuns, headless bodies, and
mangled corpses" (Binford, 1986: 116).
The government attacked civilians in part because they were
easier targets than the well-trained and canny fighters of the FMLN,
whom the U.S. government recognized as the most effective guerrillas
in the hemisphere. Salvadoran government soldiers, many of whom had
been forcibly recruited and who valued surviving more than winning
the war, often avoided confrontations with the guerrillas. A certain stra-
tegic logic also justified attacks on civilians. Salvadoran officials, along
with their U.S. sponsors, recognized the left's strong popular backing.
As an analyst for the Commission on U.S.-Latin American Relations
wrote in April 1990, "Given the army's vast superiority in numbers and
firepower, the FMLN could not survive - let alone operate as widely and
freely as it does - without a substantial civilian base of support" (Peltz,
1990: 36). This meant that the only way to eliminate the guerrillas - the
"fish"- would be to drain the "sea" in which they thrived: their dense
network of ideological and logistical support.
Repression of civilians and increasing political polarization
helped radicalize many Catholic activists, whom the military govern-
ment increasingly saw as a major threat. Open repression of Catholic
activists began in early 1977, with the expulsion of Colombian priest
Mario Bernal. In response, Salvadoran Jesuit Rutilio Grande declared:
I'm afraid that if Jesus of Nazareth came back, coming

down from Galilee to Judea, that is from Chalatenango to
San Salvador, I daresay he would not get as far as Apopa,
522 social research
with his preaching and actions. They would stop him in
Guazapa and jail him there. . . . They would accuse him of
being a rabble-rouser, a foreign Jew, one confusing people
with strange and exotic ideas, against democracy, that is,
against the minority. Ideas against God, because they are a
clan of Cains. They would undoubtedly crucify him again
(quoted in Berryman, 1984: 120-21).
By making reference to the story of Jesus's life, Grande linked

contemporary activists to the "rabble rouser" Jesus and the govern-
ment to Cain. Grande also placed contemporary Salvadoran events into
sacred history - Galilee and Judea become Chalatenango (an impov-
erished rural area in northeastern El Salvador) and San Salvador. The
speech raises the theme of crucifixion, but in a speculative way, since
the reality of widespread political killings had not yet shaken the oppo-
sition. In February 1977, Grande's primary concern was the freedom to
criticize, to organize, to "tell the truth."
Less than a month after he gave the speech quoted earlier, Grande
was assassinated, along with an elderly man and young boy who were
riding in his jeep when it was ambushed on a country road near his
parish of Aguilares. Grande's killing, the first murder of a priest in
Salvadoran history, marked a turning point in Salvadoran political
discourse. The killing had a special impact on Oscar Romero, a close
friend, who had been named archbishop of San Salvador a month
earlier. Grande's murder prompted Romero to re-evaluate other acts
of political violence and, increasingly, to defend opposition activists as
martyrs rather than terrorists. As political violence intensified in the
months and years following Grande's murder, martyrdom and sacrifice
became prominent themes in opposition political discourse and values.
They helped ordinary people make sense of the killings of popular lead-
ers and beloved pastoral agents as part of a larger historical process in
which good, and God, would ultimately triumph.
These interpretations rested heavily on biblical references, espe-
cially the story of Jesus's life and death. One of the most important
themes was the notion that the "true church" will always be perse-
cuted. This notion was reinforced by biblical passages such as John
5:20, which Archbishop Romero summarized thus: "Jesus Christ said
it: 'If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you'" (quoted in
Brockman, 1989: 32). Laypeople frequently made similar claims, such
as a participant in a parish event in 1990 who asserted, "If we're perse-
cuted like Christ, it's because we're doing what's right and we're not
mistaken." Another man argued, similarly, that "If the church is alive,
there are always problems. If it's stagnant, there's peace."2 The wide-
spread belief that political repression was a consequence of correct
faith and action encouraged activists to understand their suffering as
both a political necessity - the cost of achieving their goals - and as a
religious good: participation in Jesus's travails.
Contemporary sacrifices paralleled Jesus's also in leading to the
same end results. Just as Jesus's death was followed by his resurrec-
tion, progressive Catholic activists asserted that their sacrifices would
contribute to a rebirth, not in individual bodily terms but in a collec-
tive, moral sense. Again, Archbishop Romero crystallized popular
understandings. "If a Christian has to die to be faithful to his or her
only God," he asserted, "God will resurrect him or her" (La Iglesia en
El Salvador, 1982: 68). Romero elaborated this notion in the interview
cited earlier:
I have frequently been threatened with death. I should

tell you that as a Christian, I do not believe in death with-
out resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the
Salvadoran people. . . . Martyrdom is a grace that I do not
believe I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life,
may my blood be the seed of freedom and the signal that
hope will soon be a reality (Romero, 1987: 461).
Salvadoran activists embraced Romero's conviction that sacrifices

would contribute to the realization of their hopes for a new society. This
524 social research
hope, and other convictions associated with the discourse of martyrdom,
were diffused in a variety of ways. One of the most powerful was the
eucharist (Lord's Supper), which Christians have long understood as a
celebration of Jesus's martyrdom and a preparation for their own. "If we
daily drink the cup of the blood of Christ," wrote Cyprian, "it is in order
to be ready to shed our blood for Christ as well" (quoted in Lesbaupin,
1987: 47). More recently, ritual reenactments of the last supper in Central
America have helped deliver the message that sacrifice, suffering, and
temporary defeat are inevitable parts of struggles for justice.
Another important ritual for the spread of popular understand-
ings of sacrifice is the via crucis, the re-enactment of Jesus's path to the
cross. During a via crucis, held in many parishes every Friday during Lent,
participants walk a path marked by various stations, each representing
a stage in Jesus's passion. Celebrations of the ritual during the 1970s
and 1980s often made parallels between Jesus's fate and contemporary
political events. (The presence of government soldiers at many of these
events reinforced the parallels.) For example, at the first station, where
Jesus is condemned to death, one popular via crucis guide asserts that
like Jesus, "Today many are unjustly condemned to death
accused for telling the truth" (Via Crucis, 1990: 5). At the seventh station
of the via crucis, when Jesus falls for the second time, the guide provides
a clear message for activists: despite losses and defeats, their cause will
prevail, in no small part because of their sacrifices
[Jesus] doesn't feel defeated, and he doesn't abandon his

commitment. Jesus knows that what's wrong isn't falling;
the real evil is in not getting up. Even though we fall a thou-
sand times, a thousand times we have to raise ourselves up
to follow our commitment to give life and happiness to our
brothers and sisters (Via Crucis, 1990: 17).
In addition to rituals such as the mass and via crucis, popular

understandings of martyrdom were articulated and diffused through
misas populares, folk songs written to accompany the mass, which were
in wide circulation throughout Central America in the 1970s and 1980s.
The misas and other popular religious songs, including many written by
parishioners in honor of murdered priests or layworkers, powerfully
conveyed central images and values of the political opposition. A song
for Father Alirio Macias, assassinated in 1979, claims that "Catarina
[Macias's church] is the new Calvary / on its lands a cross is raised /

together with the body of Father Macias / who died because he followed
Jesus." A song called "Father Rafael Palacios," for another murdered
priest, includes the following lyrics: "Like Christ they beat you with a
ferocious rope / with insults they whipped you to silence your voice /
You walked to the Calvary like Jesus walked . . . / the machine gun was
your cross" (El Pueblo Canta, n.d.: 542, 551). Although the locale and the
weapons change, the meaning for believers remains the same.
Not only do activists repeat Jesus's death, these rituals suggest,
but Jesus himself continues dying in their struggles. Old and new sacri-
fices blend together, as do sacred and mundane histories. "You are
abandoned on the cross / massacred by the powerful / Today you also
spill your blood / in the blood of our fallen," asserts the Misa Salvadorefia
(Salvadoran Mass) (El Pueblo Canta, n.d: 159). The dialectic between sacred
and secular history flows in both directions. Just as contemporary believ-
ers enter into sacred history, divine events and characters "irrupt" into
present events. When the powerful attack activists today, not only do
they kill people like Jesus, but they crucify Jesus himself again. Thus
popular rituals affirm the continuity of the struggle between good and
evil: the battle for social justice in Central America today involves forces
that were at work in the death of Jesus 2,000 years ago. This dialectical
relationship between sacred and secular history reinforces the power
and significance of each.
Connections to Jesus's passion endowed political killings with
a transcendent meaning and provided compelling justification for
political opposition. Protest became a sacred struggle; abandoning the
cause meant abandoning one's faith; holding firm in the face of danger
526 social research
guaranteed divine rewards. The most important reward is a future life,
which in Central American narratives of martyrdom had little to do
with individual bodily resurrection but rather focused on a collective
rebirth through the creation of a better society.
This interpretation served not only political but also psychologi-
cal purposes. Studies of the effects of political violence have shown
that victims with a clear political or religious interpretive frame-
work and value system recover more quickly and with less lasting
damage. Research in Chile, for example, found that people with well-
articulated political commitments recovered from imprisonment,
torture, or the death of loved ones more rapidly and completely than
their apolitical peers. Conversely, people without a political context
suffered more when relatives were imprisoned or killed, and had the
hardest time coming to emotional resolutions regarding the death
or disappearance of the loved ones (Weinstein et al., 1987: 82, 188).
Similarly, Terrence DesPres argued that a sense of political purpose
helped concentration camp survivors to endure during World War
II: "Political consciousness and contact with others in the struggle
against Nazism were necessary conditions of success; it was this that
gave people a sense of purpose in life behind barbed wire and enabled
them to hold out" (DesPres, 1976: 121).
Similar convictions helped many Salvadorans survive and
continue struggling despite the brutality of the civil war. Even after
over a decade of intense political violence, therefore, activists drew on
frames of martyrdom to make sense of and use, politically, the murders
of six prominent Jesuit priests in November 1989, in the wake of a
major FMLN offensive. They were killed for the same reasons as Grande,
Romero, and countless other victims of the Salvadoran military, activ-
ists asserted, and their deaths formed part of a continuous project
leading toward the ultimate triumph of God's cause. Even Archbishop
Arturo Rivera y Damas, who succeeded Romero, placed the killings
of the Jesuits in this larger context. Asked who had killed the priests,
Rivera answered, "It was those who murdered Archbishop Romero and
who are not satisfied with 70,000 dead" (Sobrino, 1990: 30). Obviously,
the same persons did not kill all the war victims. For Rivera and many
other Salvadorans, however, the same agents of power ultimately
caused their deaths.
According to this narrative, even though the same forces contin-

ued attacking the true church, ultimately this church would triumph
despite, or because of, the sacrifices of its best (most Christ-like)
representatives. For example, laypeople from Jayaque, where Ignacio
Martin-Baro, one of the Jesuits, had often celebrated Mass, wrote him
a letter that asserted: "People like you never last in this life. But we
know very well that, with everything that has happened, the church
will never give up. We are going to continue your example because
God wanted it that way" (Canton de Jayaque, 1990: 90). The inspira-
tion to continue struggling had continuing political import, as the
FMLN's Radio Venceremos underlined when it compared the dead
Jesuits to a tough flower, the izote, that reproduces itself very quickly
after being cut. The murdered priests, asserted the radio, "are like
the flower of the izote, stubbornly reluctant to die, stubbornly reluc-
tant to stop existing, stubborn in its intent to continue living" (Radio
Venceremos, 1990: 51).
The killing of the Jesuits sparked international outrage and helped
push the Salvadoran government to negotiate with the FMLN, under
United Nations sponsorship, in April 1990. After intense negotiations,
an agreement was announced on December 31, 1991. Representatives of
the guerrillas and the government signed the peace accords on January
16, 1992, and the cease-fire began on February 1. The war formally
came to an end in December 1992, when the last guerrillas and targeted
government soldiers entered civilian life.
MARTYRDOM AND SACRIFICE SINCE 1992
The peace accords sought not only to end the armed conflict, but to
structure a new El Salvador, to build what UNCESCO called "a culture
of peace." As the report of the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador
528 social research
proposed, the end of the war would be a transition "from madness
to hope" (Betancur et al., 1993). Key to this process were the demili-
tarization of the FMLN and its incorporation as a legal political party.
The accords also called for the "purification" of government forces,
including the disbanding of several especially notorious units and the
removal of over 100 officers associated with human rights violations.
Some former combatants joined the National Civilian Police force while
others returned to civilian life with the help of land-transfer program
and educational opportunities.
The restructuring of the institutions most overtly linked to the
war took place within the context of longer-term restructuring of the
economy, which has in general involved the decline of the agricultural
export sector, increasing dependance on dollars from Salvadorans in
the United States and elsewhere outside of El Salvador, privatization
of state and public enterprises, deregulation of finance, and the fixing
of currency's value to the US dollar, followed by the adoption of the
US dollar as national currency (Segovia, 2002). With the decline of the
agrarian sector, the wealthy moved their capital into other sectors,
notably finance and transportation, while the rural poor become
poorer, many leaving the countryside to work in Salvadoran cities
(often as maids and security guards or in construction), in maquiladoras
or foreign-owned factories, or leaving El Salvador altogether to seek
work in the United States or, less often, Mexico, Canada, Europe, or
Australia. The remittances sent home by Salvadorans residing abroad
are a major source of income for many of those who remain at home,
and possibly the largest single source of foreign income for the nation
(World Bank, 2003).
For many Salvadorans, both rural and urban, working- and
middle-class, supportive of the FMLN and not, the democracy and
peace promised by the end of the war is lived as a world of uncertainty,
violence, and frustration (Hume, 2004). The war has been the measure
against which postwar violence and suffering are registered; it remains
a touchstone for personal memory for those who survived it (a rapidly
diminishing part of the population, whose average age today is 21).
One might imagine that when measured with reference to 12 years in
which more than 75,000 people were killed; in which extrajudicial assa-
sinations, torture, and disappearances were regular tactics of counter-
insurgency; during which hundreds of thousands were displaced, the
postwar period could only be understood as a massive improvement.
This was certainly the hope of the United Nations mission that oversaw
the settlement of the war, and was the sentiment of United Nations
General Secretary Boutros Boutrous-Ghali, who declared in 1995 that El
Salvador has taken "giant strides away from a violent and closed soci-
ety" (UN, 1995: 7). Yet many Salvadorans who lived through the war feel
that conditions in the present are actually worse than during the war.
They force us to ask, as Ellen Moodie puts it, "what kind of 'peace' was
agreed to" (Moodie, 2006: 66).
This is in large part attributable to a sense of frustration and
disappointment among FMLN fighters and their supporters. The FMLN
slogan in the weeks following the signing of the accords was "we won
the peace" (ganamos la paz). While joy at the end of the fighting was
widespread, for many the slogan implicitly suggested the rejoinder
"but we didn't win the war." For those who had sacrificed so much,
for so long, in the name of the radical transformation of the national

order, the negotiated settlement was not a clear victory. The sense that
the revolutionary struggle lost its meaning appears to have spread in
the years since the accords, in which conditions of poverty, suffering,
frustration, and uncertainty continue to prevail for most Salvadorans
(B. Peterson, 2006; Moodie, 2006).
Irina Carlota Silber chronicles a sense of "disillusionment and
deception" in the former FMLN-controlled territory of Chalatenango

province, an area where both of us have lived and worked as well
(Silber, 2000: 290). "In conversations of daily life," Silber writes, "when
people visit their neighbors and kin, ride the bus, sit at local tiendas, or
participate in events, it is not rare to hear discussions on how they have
received nothing but sadness and loss from their wartime participation"
530 social research
(Silber, 2000: 289). Silber cites an organizer and former activist who
reasons that this sadness stems from the unsatisfactory resolution of
the armed conflict: "it is because folks did not join or support an armed
struggle for a negotiated peace. They participated in order to overthrow
institutionalized power and put in place a socialist project" (Silber,
2000: 291). This sentiment was echoed by Amadeo Martinez, an indig-
enous rights and human rights activst and lawyer, and former FMLN
organizer and clandestine militant. "When the peace accords arrived,"
Martinez recalls, "a lot of us didn't want that, because we knew that
we weren't fighting to institutionalize a party but for our objectives,

which went beyond just getting to legalize the FMLN. Well then, after
the peace accords many of us were left disillusioned. Because really this
wasn't our objective" (Martinez, 2002). Echoing Martinez, a campesino
from Usulutan poses an ironic question: "We shed blood all these years
in order to buy land at market prices?" (Wood, 2000: 209)
In the rural villages and working-class barrios that sacrificed so
much during the war, this sense of disappointment is acute. "People
struggled for 12 years for a different society," a peasant leader in
Chalatenango province explains. "The Peace Accords don't fulfill those
yearnings." The settlement, one of his neighbors adds, "fell short in
relation to [our] dreams."3 That dream - the Utopian horizon for which
so much blood was shed - was a new society, which would be politically
democratic and free of repression. Most important, it would be egalitar-
ian, it would protect the most vulnerable, and its members would be
unified around their shared values. This solidarity, much more than
free elections, judicial reform, or new political parties, define the vision
for which thousands of Salvadorans fought and for which many died.
As one former combatant put it, "we were all going to be equal" ("todos
ibamos a ser iguales") (Rivera et al., 1995: 39; A. Peterson, 2005).
The contrast between this Utopian dream and the hard reality
of postwar society shapes the way Salvadorans think about the sacri-
fice and death that preceded. Another former combatant expresses her
disappointment in a postwar collection of testimonio:
The war didn't bring me any profit, just losses. ... I don't
have anything. I don't have a way to pay for the land, so I
can't work there; furthermore, I don't have a house, I mean
I am frustrated. I expected that for what they had done
they were going to give us something. That you wouldn't
lack a house, where you would have water; and land where
you could plant your corn. I feel frustrated. Because only
the dead aren't worried about anything (Rivera et al., 1995:
246).
Frustration in the postwar period also reflects the reality of

continuing experiences of violence, suffering, and death that remain
commonplace in postwar El Salvador. In fact, the rate of violent deaths
has been higher in the postwar period than it was during the conflict.
The homicide rate has consistently been among the highest in the
region. The overall rate of violent death in El Salvador grew during the
first years after the peace accords to reach 130 deaths per 100,000 in
1996, matching the wartime average. This figure has declined signif-
icantly in the decade since, yet remains high. The homicide rate for
2006 was 55.3 per 100,000, the highest in Central America (see <http://
www.ocavi.com/>).
Salvadorans associate violence today with criminality, often with
gangs, and/or with happenstance, nature, or fate. The news is full of
stories of robberies turned violent, car-jacking, kidnaping, murders of
bus drivers who refuse to pay protection money, revenge killings, and
traffic events, often involving pedestrians. Traffic deaths are higher in
El Salvador than the average for low- and middle income countries, and
death from malaria and dengue fever, from gastrointestinal and respi-
ratory ailments, likewise are pervasive risks, especially for the nearly
half of the population living in conditions of poverty. The sense that
violence is an omnipresent and arbitrary threat, unmappable and so
unavoidable, pervades everyday life. Unlike martyrs during the war,
those who die in these conditions do not knowingly choose a path
whose likely end is death.
532 social research
Liberation theology has continued to provide a critical analyti-
cal voice in these conditions. Priests and laypeople associated with the
Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana "Jose Simeon Cafias," home to
the six priests killed by the military in 1989, have produced a large body
of written work on the meanings of martyrdom in times of peace and on
"what to do in times of neoliberal disenchantment" (Carta a las Iglesias,
1995). The present is likened to the peace of Constantinople, a false
peace of accommodation following the establishment of Christianity,
in the fourth century CE, as the official religion of the Roman Empire -
and the loss, according to some, of the prophetic and communitarian
character of the early church.
The martyrs of the Salvadoran conflict remain fundamental
figures in this work. They are invoked not simply as heroes of the past,
but as bearers of Utopian possibility who remain with the faithful,
orienting their work in the present.
[The] martyrs must be something always present in the

Church. This is how the Church maintains its confrontation
with the world. Because the fact is that the Satanic spirit
of the world remains present in Latin America, remains
present everywhere. The rich continue to prosper at the
expense of the poor; the powerful continue to abuse their
power; and the arrogant continue crushing the crucified of
this Earth. One needs only to read the newspaper, to listen
to the radio, to watch television. In El Salvador, to give only
one example, there are more than 280,000 families with-
out homes. What do we Christians do when faced with this
situation? What do we do when confronted with so many

human rights violations? (Castillo, 1994, 120).
The answer, most often, is the same as it was during the war: to
denounce injustice, to speak truth to power, to maintain a fundamental
alliance with the poor and suffering. However, suffering today is often
experienced as a by-product or side-effect, an accident, while unjust
power is difficult to locate, a challenge heightened by the fact that,
formally if superficially, Salvadorans exercise popular sovereignty in a
democratic system.
It is perhaps exacerbated as well by the radically refigured hori-
zon of possibility for most poor Salvadorans. While essentially Utopian
possibilities animated the sacrifices made during the war, today the
horizon is at once more concrete and mundane; it is the possibility
of emigration to the United States, an option chosen by thousands of
Salvadorans every year.
During the years of government repression and war, martyrdom
figured the sacrifice of one's life for the national good, for el pueblo,
within a temporal frame oriented to a future of justice and peace for
all. One of the most prevalent discourses of sacrifice since the war's
end, that of the migrant, retains some of these features of martyrdom,
but rearticulates them with a different vision of the good and a differ-
ent temporal frame. Those who leave El Salvador to work in the United
States without documents make large sacrifices to pay for the difficult
and dangerous trip. Salvadorans currently pay between five and six
thousand dollars to coyotes who provide transportation and other logis-
tical help. This is an enormous sum for those who wish to migrate, who
usually make the journey because the feel they do not have enough
money in the first place. Typically, individuals pool funds from family
members, often in the United States; they may spend their first years in
the host country working to repay this loan.
Migrants face risks on the road ranging from electrocution
in freight yards and assault by gangs to deportation from Mexico or
the United States and dehydration in the desert of the border region.
Women and girls have been forced into prostitution, famously in the
southern Mexican border town of Tapachula. Salvadorans have lost
limbs riding freight trains and have been robbed and killed by gangs
in Mexico, both Salvadoran and Mexican. The hazards of the journey
are figured in narratives of sacrifice for the family, of the poor but resil-
ient Salvadoran fighting to get ahead. A good example is a friend of the
534 social research
authors, now working in residential construction in the Midwest. This
young man, who left two grade-school children with his parents, plans
on spending two to three years in the United States to make enough
money first, to pay back the loan for the coyote, and then to bankroll a
small store or other business.
Sacrifice here is organized around two keywords of neoliberal

values - family and enterprise - in contrast to the liberation theology
values of elpueblo and the Kingdom of God. Similarly, the image of Christ
as a model for sacrifice, one who fought injustice and suffered with and
as the people during the civil war has been displaced in narratives of
sacrifice associated with migration by a more common and traditional
understanding of Christ as the Good Shepherd. Indeed, Jesus El Buen
Pastor is the name of a shelter for injured Central American migrants
in Tapachula, Mexico. The shelter has received financial support from
foreign governments including the United States and Canada. It has
been lauded by Mexican President Vicente Fox (who awarded the shel-
ter's founder the Mexican National Prize for Human Rights in 2004)
and Maria Shriver, wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger,
among others (La Prensa Grdfica, 2007; La Jornada, 2005). Jesus El Buen
Pastor provides a crucial service for Central American migrants, who
urgently need concrete assistance on their journey north. However, the
shelter embodies a vision of Christian charity that is basically apoliti-
cal, in sharp contrast to the image of Christ as martyr to injustice elabo-
rated in Salvadoran liberation theology.
THE DEAD WALK WITH THEM
During the early postwar years, popular discourses of martyrdom and

sacrifice focused on the heroic struggles of those who had made peace
possible. Salvadoran revolutionaries and progressive Catholics strove
to keep the martyrs' sacrifices alive in various ways. Throughout the
campus of the University of El Salvador, for example, murals refer to
popular struggle. Most of these engage in forms of commemoration, and
many employ the language of martyrdom directly. In a similar vein, the
Universidad Centroamericana Jose Simeon Canas, home to the Jesuits
killed in 1989 and a chapel dedicated to their memories, as well as the
Monsenor Romero Pastoral Center, continues to invoke martyrdom
in its engagement with struggles for human rights and social justice.
In both settings, heroes and martyrs continue to provide authority to
progressive discourse and organizations, but in ways that differ signifi-
cantly from earlier periods. Martyrdom in the postwar periods can be
characterized most often as a discourse of memory, replacing the call to
arms of the war years.
Although this discourse of memory is evocative, its power to moti-
vate activism and inspire hope has waned in the present conditions
of insecurity and death in El Salvador. Salvadorans today confront, as
Ellen Moodie puts it, "an enormous chasm. A culture of loss" (Moodie
2006: 66). This culture of loss - the experiential and interpretive spaces
of death - is organized not with reference to locatable power, but is
instead dispersed through social phenomena that are recorded as acci-
dents, or as the results of individual conditions, subjective choices
made in a calculus of costs and benefits, of risks. There is a distinction,
in Foucault's terms, between the state that kills - an act of sovereign
power, authorized within a rationality of extending and confirming
the power of the sovereign, of the state - and, on the other hand, a
state that lets die (Foucault, 2007: 147). Thus the neoliberal state, always
proclaiming its own retreat as a social good, is co-produced with a
refraining of death as accidental, as natural, as peripheral to the project
of politics, to neoliberal practices and strategies of rule. Here the libera-
tionist Catholic notion of structural sin - of social ills that are caused
by clearly identifiable responsible agents- no longer holds (Gutierrez,

1973). Now suffering is no longer part of a collective struggle, their
agents are no longer identifiable oppressors, and death is most often
rendered as simply what is. In these circumstances, it becomes hard
to orient toward the future or understand the present in terms of an
historical trajectory. The problem for activists is to find a narrative can
take up this death, make sense of it, and give it meaning.
536 social research
During the war, narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice ably
performed these tasks (A. Peterson 1996, 1997). These concepts
connected individuals to larger collectivities, tied specific events to
larger historical frames, and identified particular agents of loss and
suffering. In so doing, conceptions of martyrdom and sacrifice framed
survivors' relations with their dead, giving them meaning that
made the losses more bearable. In the postwar situation, however,
death and loss do not fall so clearly into the religiously and politi-
cally meaningful category of martyrdom. They are not part of a larger
purpose-driven narrative, linking sacred and secular history. Rather,
they appear as random and arbitrary events, without clear meaning
or a message that Salvadoran activists can take up. Theirs is a Utopia
unarmed, in the words of the title of Jorge Castaneda's book about
the Latin American left in the 1990s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, and other events of the 1990s,
according to Castaneda, it is hard for Latin American activists to
conceive even "the very notion of an overall alternative to the status
quo" (Castaneda,1994: 240-241).4 The outstanding lesson of Latin
American history, however, should be that history is open: surprises
and new things are indeed possible. And even the most disillusioned
Salvadoran would be quick to insist that the martyrs help keep that
history open; that even if the road ahead is not clear, the dead walk
with them.
NOTES
1 . As Jeffrey Gould notes, for left and right alike the deaths of the victims
of the 1932 massacre were read as sacrifices to the creation of a racially
unified, mestizo national subject as well, a reading that contemporary
indigenous activists have worked to undermine (Gould, 2001).
2. These quotations come from a meeting attended by Anna Peterson in
the parish of San Antonio Abad, San Salvador, in March 1990.
3. Interviews conducted by Anna Peterson, Guarjila, Chalatenango, El
Salvador, January 5, 2002.
4. Castafieda echoes British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's famous
declaration, after the Soviet Union disintegrated, that "There is no
alternative" to neoliberal capitalism (Singer, 1999: 1). Another neolib-
eral hero, Francis Fukuyama, made a similar point: "We cannot
picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the pres-
ent one, and at the same time better" (Fukuyama, 1993: 46). Thatcher
and Fukuyama, of course, evaluate this dearth of alternatives very
differently than do Salvadoran peasants and workers.
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Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador

Author(s): Anna L. Peterson and Brandt G. Peterson

A MONTH BEFORE HIS DEATH, OSCAR ROMERO, ARCHBISHOP OF SAN

social research Vol 75 : No 2 : Summer 2008 511

512 social research

Finally, martyrdom is tied to particular conceptions of power. The

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 513

Since the war's end in El Salvador, although conditions of suffer-

514 social research

As in much of Central America, political rule in El Salvador has long

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 515

516 social research

painful memories of the massacre were confined to private spaces,

elite consumption and committed to refining a narrative of the mili-

and their children, this official repression may have contributed to

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 517

The deaths of Archbishop Romero and thousands of other Christians

518 social research

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 519

The pastoral and theological innovations inspired by Vatican II

520 social research

MARTYRDOM AND SACRIFICE IN EL SALVADOR: THE LATE

Following the political crisis of 1931-1932 and the matanza, Salvadoran

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 521

I'm afraid that if Jesus of Nazareth came back, coming

522 social research

By making reference to the story of Jesus's life, Grande linked

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 523

I have frequently been threatened with death. I should

Salvadoran activists embraced Romero's conviction that sacrifices

524 social research

[Jesus] doesn't feel defeated, and he doesn't abandon his

In addition to rituals such as the mass and via crucis, popular

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 525

[Macias's church] is the new Calvary / on its lands a cross is raised /

526 social research

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 527

According to this narrative, even though the same forces contin-

MARTYRDOM AND SACRIFICE SINCE 1992

528 social research

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 529

for so long, in the name of the radical transformation of the national

deception" in the former FMLN-controlled territory of Chalatenango

530 social research

we weren't fighting to institutionalize a party but for our objectives,

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 531

Frustration in the postwar period also reflects the reality of

532 social research

[The] martyrs must be something always present in the

situation? What do we do when confronted with so many

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 533

534 social research

Sacrifice here is organized around two keywords of neoliberal

THE DEAD WALK WITH THEM

During the early postwar years, popular discourses of martyrdom and

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 535

by clearly identifiable responsible agents- no longer holds (Gutierrez,

536 social research

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador 537

Alvarenga, Patricia. Cultura y etica de la violenda: EX Salvador, 1880-1932. San

Baloyra, Enrique. El Salvador in Transition. Chapel Hill and London:

Binford, Leigh. The El Mozote Massacre: Anthropology and Human Rights.

Brockman, James. Romero: ALife. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989.