c. 2006 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) A generation ago, as Americans recovered from defeat in Vietnam and discovered new dangers in the Persian Gulf, American agents quietly funded and trained a far-right government in El Salvador, whose “death squads” slaughtered citizens and preserved elite coffee-growing families.
On March 24, 1980, one of those U.S.-trained gunmen took aim down the aisle of a church in San Salvador. When Archbishop Oscar Romero, a bold prophet for justice and equality in an impoverished land ruled by a brutal few, raised the eucharistic host, the assassin shot him in the heart.
In the ensuing 12-year civil war, U.S. military advisers, assassins trained at the Pentagon’s infamous School of the Americas, and massive U.S. funding enabled El Salvador’s right-wing government to use anti-communism as a cover for killing more than 70,000 citizens.
If American citizens wonder today why much of the world holds us in contempt, despite our noble ideals and tradition of domestic freedom, we need to remember “Blowtorch Bob” D’Aubuisson, onetime head of El Salvador’s murderous regime, and a host of repressive governments that our nation has propped up.
We need to remember oligarchic economies that sent coffee, bananas, precious metals and oil to the United States, made a few families wealthy and kept the masses huddling in poverty.
The residents of those countries certainly remember. They know they are poor, and they know why. In El Salvador, every child knows the story of Oscar Romero and death-squad raids on defenseless villages. In neighboring Guatemala, they remember U.S.-funded torture and genocide.
And so it goes around the world. Not everywhere, but in enough places that American tourists are treated rudely and often attacked, American businesses are resented, and anti-U.S. terrorists have no trouble recruiting. The end of the Cold War hasn’t evaporated those memories. Current U.S. policies are perceived overseas as more of the same.
This is confusing to many Americans. We don’t know our own history well enough. We don’t always see how our policies aggravate hostilities toward us. It shocks us to know how others see us. It feels unfair, because we don’t see ourselves that way, and it feels ungrateful.
When a Habitat for Humanity team visited El Salvador this summer, an American hearing El Salvador’s story for the first time asked her host, “Why, then, do you welcome us?” He answered, “Because we know that it was your government, not your people, who did these things.”
Americans abroad rely on that understanding, just as we rely on the world to speak English. But we should know better. In a democracy like ours, people get the government they deserve. Toppling governments and training rightist thugs didn’t arise in a vacuum.
We accepted Cold War rhetoric and its delusional division of humanity into two camps. We accepted a prosperity built on exploitation of the many. We accepted autocratic regimes whose alliances with us are now a breeding ground for terrorism.
Today we send missionaries to rebuild villages that we helped to destroy and to bring economic aid to people whose travail brought us comfort.
Missionaries find that the world sees us more clearly than we sometimes see ourselves. Other peoples respect our ideals and yearn for our freedoms, and yet they also know first-hand our history of violating those ideals.
The global stage will continue to spin a tragic tale for us until we the people reclaim our ideals, reject mayhem and exploitation carried out in our name, and resolve to be better citizens of a complex and changing world.
KRE/JL END EHRICH
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org)
