August will mark the 107th birthday of the late Archbishop Óscar Romero, the slain conscience of El Salvador. Gunned down while saying Mass, Romero was murdered for denouncing U.S.-backed atrocities during his country’s civil war.
El Salvador: Priests, Massacres, and U.S.-Trained Death Squads
In March 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero — a towering moral leader and voice of the oppressed — wrote a solemn letter to U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He implored the administration to stop sending military aid to El Salvador, warning that American weapons had already been used to murder civilians and would continue to be used to suppress those struggling for justice.
Nine years later, in 1989, soldiers from the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in San Salvador. It was 1:00 a.m. when they forced their way into the Jesuit residence, dragged six priests from their beds, and shot them in the head.
Among the dead was Ignacio Ellacuría, a philosopher and liberation theologian who had spent years advocating for peace and justice in El Salvador’s brutal civil war. The soldiers murdered the housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her 15-year-old daughter Celina as well—shot in cold blood to eliminate witnesses.
The killers left messages on the walls, using spray paint to blame the murders on leftist guerrillas. But the evidence was clear: the Atlacatl Battalion had been trained, armed, and politically supported by the United States, under the umbrella of Cold War anti-communism. The U.S. government sent more than $4 billion in military aid to the Salvadoran regime during the 1980s, despite overwhelming documentation of massacres, disappearances, and torture.
The Jesuits were not combatants. They were intellectuals, priests, and peacemakers. But they were dangerous to the Salvadoran military because they spoke for the poor, exposed the crimes of the regime, and promoted a theology of liberation that directly challenged the structures of U.S.-backed imperial capitalism.
Their solidarity was not abstract. It was an active alignment with campesinos, laborers, and the oppressed, and a direct confrontation with militarism, exploitation, and neocolonial control.
Their crime was solidarity with liberation efforts.
The Atlacatl Battalion was not an ordinary military unit. It was an elite counterinsurgency force created, trained, and advised by the United States. Its methods reflected this training: not just to kill, but to terrorize. In 1981, the same battalion committed the El Mozote massacre, one of the worst atrocities in modern Latin American history.
Soldiers entered the rural village of El Mozote, separated men from women and children, interrogated and tortured them, then executed them en masse. The men were shot and dumped in a field. The women were raped, some burned alive, others dismembered. Over 130 children, some as young as two years old, were shot in the head, beheaded, or hacked with machetes. Infants were thrown into the air and impaled on bayonets. Bodies were burned and dumped into mass graves.
In several villages, including El Mozote and nearby La Joya and Los Toriles, soldiers decapitated victims and mounted their heads on wooden spikes placed in public view.
This was an act of psychological warfare intended to terrorize surviving villagers into submission and to mark the territory as cleansed.
When questioned years later, survivors recounted the screams, the soldiers' laughter, and the smell of burning flesh. The death toll at El Mozote alone reached nearly 1,000 civilians. The battalion’s work was methodical, brutal, and designed to send a message. Any village suspected of sympathizing with the left would be annihilated.
The United States continued training and supporting the unit long after these crimes became known.
The U.S. intervened in El Salvador to crush movements for land, dignity, and self-determination. What Salvadorans demanded — a life free from exploitation — threatened the foundations of U.S. control in the region: cheap labor, obedient governments, and open markets. So Washington funded terror, trained death squads, and armed a regime that could do what U.S. hands could not do directly.
Destabilization of El Salvador was not the consequence — it was the strategy. Entire communities were erased to preserve an order in which the wealth flowed north and the graves filled south.
And still, the people resisted. What they stood for was unremarkable: food, freedom, peace. But to an empire, that was unforgivable.
Gaza: Bombs, Blockades, and American Firepower
Fast forward three decades to Gaza. The United States sends Israel $3.8 billion annually in military aid, along with bunker-buster bombs, artillery shells, and diplomatic cover in the UN Security Council.
These weapons are used not just against militants, but against entire neighborhoods, hospitals, universities, and refugee camps. The death toll plausibly ranges in the hundreds-of-thousands, but due to communication blackouts, destruction of morgues, and mass graves, the true number may indeed be beyond 100,000.
These are not merely casualties of war — they represent the systematic targeting of a civilian population, increasingly recognized by legal scholars and human rights organizations as an unfolding genocide.
Mosques are bombed mid-prayer. Hospitals are reduced to rubble. UN schools are struck while sheltering civilians. Journalists, doctors, and humanitarian workers are systematically killed. In some cases, families are obliterated in a single airstrike, their names erased in an instant.
Just as in El Salvador, religious leaders in Gaza are killed not despite their peaceful roles, but because they give moral voice to a besieged people. Imams are targeted. Islamic scholars are buried under rubble. They are seen not as spiritual leaders but as ideological threats. Faith that nurtures resistance is treated as combat.
In both cases, the gruesomeness is not incidental. It is the point. In El Salvador, death squads left mutilated corpses in public plazas, severed heads impaled on wooden stakes, and bodies dismembered with machetes.
These acts were designed to terrorize communities into silence. In Gaza, the bodies are pulverized by U.S.-made 2,000-lb bombs. Children are decapitated, incinerated, and left to rot under collapsed buildings. Israel’s defense ministry justifies these attacks as "precision strikes," a phrase that once masked the work of Salvadoran military advisors trained by the CIA.
The methods differ. The moral structure does not.
The Logic of American Backing
Why does the United States generate, install, and strengthen such regimes? Why fund governments that murder priests and bomb civilians?
The answer lies not in confusion or error, but in strategy. U.S. foreign policy has long operated on a simple principle: maintain global conditions favorable to American capital and geopolitical dominance. In El Salvador, leftist guerrillas threatened a regional shift toward land reform, labor rights, and redistribution. The Jesuits, though nonviolent, shared that vision. Washington viewed it as a virus.
Support for El Salvador’s military dictatorship was justified as part of the Cold War, a struggle against communism. But the deeper motive was to suppress grassroots movements that might reclaim economic resources for their own people. The United States feared a “second Cuba” in Central America. It preferred dictatorship to redistribution.
In Gaza, the language has changed. The Cold War is over. Now the justification is “security” and “counterterrorism.” But again, the deeper motive is to uphold an ally that serves as a forward outpost for U.S. interests in the Middle East. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world because it provides regional dominance, intelligence cooperation, weapons testing, and access to the Eastern Mediterranean. Its alignment with American strategic goals is unwavering.
Palestinians, like the Salvadoran peasants before them, are inconvenient. Their resistance disrupts the illusion of control. Their continued survival and political consciousness challenge the idea that Western-backed order is sustainable. Their religious leaders, like the Jesuits, offer language, community, and moral clarity to that resistance. And so, they are bombed.
Empire’s Consistency
The United States does not always kill with its own hands. It prefers to create, train, arm, and fund the killers. And it shields them. It calls the massacres “unfortunate” or “complicated.” And it suppresses the memory until the next operation begins.
What El Salvador teaches us is that atrocities are not bugs of American foreign policy. They are features. When power is threatened, when land or labor or faith begins to organize against domination, violence follows. It is outsourced, deniable, but unmistakable.
The murdered priests and the bombed imams stand in the same tradition. They are not casualties of war. They are the first targets of empire, because they dare to translate suffering into moral clarity. They remind the world that the poor are not voiceless. They are silenced.
The Atlacatl Battalion and the Israeli Air Force serve the same purpose. To remove those voices before they spread.
The empire has no theology. It has no scripture. Its only liturgy is violence. And its altar is built with the bones of the innocent.