NEWS FEATURE: Martyr Romero: No Honored Prophet in His Hometown

c. 2000 Religion News Service CIUDAD BARRIOS, El Salvador _ While many Salvadorans are commemorating the 20th anniversary of Oscar Romero’s assassination this week by attending public ceremonies, forums, lectures, vigils and even art exhibits, the late archbishop’s hometown seems to be turning its back on its most famous son. So says the director of […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

CIUDAD BARRIOS, El Salvador _ While many Salvadorans are commemorating the 20th anniversary of Oscar Romero’s assassination this week by attending public ceremonies, forums, lectures, vigils and even art exhibits, the late archbishop’s hometown seems to be turning its back on its most famous son.

So says the director of a small community radio station named in honor of Romero. Carlos Zuleta is not surprised by what he considers Ciudad Barrios’ less-than-honorable treatment of the late archbishop, assassinated in 1980 by death squads aligned with the Salvadoran military. Romero remains an unpopular figure among many of El Salvador’s elite.


“You are in the cradle of Romero,” Zuleta said earlier this week. “But to speak of him or to defend him can be dangerous in this town.”

Zuleta compares Romero to Jesus and the Hebrew prophets _ figures who were also despised in their own home communities.

“No one is a prophet in their own land,” said Zuleta, 45, a self-professed “dreamer” who works as an auto mechanic when not overseeing the small but committed volunteer staff of Radio Monsignor Romero. Zuleta and the staff recently have been the targets of death threats and harassment.

For the past two years, the 20-watt station has served the community of Ciudad Barrios and the surrounding department, or state, of San Miguel (population 35,000), with an eclectic mix of rock, salsa and ranchero music, homilies, pastoral and biting political commentary _ all done, Zuleta said, in the spirit of the late archbishop, whose memory is being honored this week by thousands of Salvadorans and international visitors for his outspoken championing of the Salvadoran poor.

But it is not the nostalgic strains of ranchero music, occasionally broadcast live with local musicians, that has some residents of Ciudad Barrios upset. Nor is it the fact that the station has a minuscule music collection and sometimes can be heard better in neighboring Honduras than down the street. Rather, the station has landed in trouble for its not-so-subtle barbs at the local power structure.

The Christian Democratic Party, which Zuleta claims “is neither Christian nor democratic,” controls the local political machine. Zuleta and his team of fellow broadcasters, including a social worker and two bakers, have taken aim at longstanding social inequities in this coffee-growing region, but more recently, at what they say is an inattentive and poorly run municipal administration.

In a regular program satirizing local politics, the station “changes the names, but people know who we’re talking about,” and that’s what appears to have caused a round of recent death threats, said Zuleta, a man with sad eyes but an exuberant smile who seems never happier than when he is before the microphone, introducing guests and earnestly evoking the station’s motto: “Desde El Corazon de Nuestro Santo Martir” (From the heart of our martyred saint).


Support from the station’s thousands of listeners have heartened Zuleta. He has received kind words but, he makes clear, no financial assistance, from the local Catholic church.

But it is not just his station’s recent troubles that dismay Zuleta. Walking the hot, dusty streets that Oscar Romero knew as a youth before going off to attend seminary in San Salvador and Rome, Zuleta said he is puzzled by the town’s seeming indifference to the assassination commemorations this year.

A comparison with the capital of San Salvador, a four-hour drive from Ciudad Barrios, is not kind to Romero’s hometown, Zuleta said.

In San Salvador, many are treating the commemorations, which extend through the weekend, as practically a holy week. The highlight was to be a public Mass celebrated Friday (March 24) by Archbishop Fernando Senz Lacalle of San Salvador and Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles.

To an outsider, Ciudad Barrios’ record seems a bit mixed. It is true that the old church where the young Romero performed his first Mass has fallen on gross disrepair. But the site of the Romero family home is honored with a shiny gold plaque, and carefully crafted murals of the late archbishop adorn a newer church in the center of town. Pilgrims from throughout the region have traveled to Ciudad Barrios in August of each year to honor Romero’s birthday.

Still, unlike San Salvador, no special ceremonies commemorating Romero were planned in Ciudad Barrios.

Except, of course, for Radio Monsignor Romero. But then Zuleta said he believes the station keeps the true spirit of the archbishop alive with its populist programming. After all, Romero himself was something of a radio man. His homilies, broadcast each week from the cathedral in San Salvador, electrified El Salvador, made him even more popular among the poor and despised among the wealthy.


DEA END HERLINGER

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