Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 7662 Plough Quarterly • Winter 2015 Thus the orders to kill Father Ellacuría and his colleagues came from the highest levels of the Salvadoran military and may have been approved by the country’s president, possibly with the knowledge of US military officials. For the Salvadoran government, the killings were extraordinarily risky; if they came to light they would implicate the entire military command structure and embarrass the United States. Why take such a high-stakes gamble in order to kill one priest and a handful of associates? Evidently, the Salvadoran government viewed Ignacio Ellacuría and the University of Central America (UCA) as a serious threat to the United States’ continued backing. The govern­ ment was well aware that if the US Congress became concerned about human-rights abuses by its Salvadoran ally, it might withdraw its crucial support. Inconveniently, Ellacuría and his fellow Jesuits at the UCA were scrupulously documenting the government’s systemic viola- tions of human rights and its vicious repression of Salvadoran civil society. What’s more, they publicly advocated peace negotiations with the rebels in order to put an end to the cycle of violence. To the country’s governing elites, Ellacuría and his colleagues were jeopardizing the US support they needed to win a definitive victory over a leftist insurgency. They were trai- tors, and deserved to be treated as such. The UCA Jesuits, by contrast, believed that it was their duty as Christians and Catholics to speak up for human rights and to advocate for a negotiated peace. Their vision was grounded in the teaching of the “preferential option for the poor” issued by the 1968 conference of Latin American bishops meeting in Medellín, Colombia, in response to the recently concluded Vatican II council. This “preferential option,” they believed, required Christians to share God’s special love for the poor and downtrodden as illustrated throughout the Old and New Testa- ments. Echoing the language of Medellín, the university’s 1979 mission statement declares that “the most explicit testimony of the Chris- tian inspiration of the UCA will be putting itself really at the service of the people in such a way that in this service it allows itself to be oriented by the oppressed people themselves.”7 There was an influence on the Jesuits’ work more immediate than Medellín’s teaching of social justice: the example of the martyr Arch- bishop Óscar Romero. Ellacuría would speak of the UCA Jesuits’ “commitment to do in our university way what [Archbishop Romero] did in his pastoral way.”8 His colleague Jon Sobrino, a UCA Jesuit who survived the 1989 killings because he happened to be away from campus that night, argues that Ellacuría and the UCA learned to fulfill their mission by watching Romero run the San Salvador arch- diocese from the perspective of a preferential option for the poor. Thus the Jesuits of the UCA and Óscar Romero formed a company of martyrs bound together by a common conviction that the gospel must become good news to the poor. No outcome could have seemed less likely to anyone who knew of the active antagonism with which Romero’s and Ellacuría’s relationship began. Their remarkable story is told in the fol- lowing pages, starting at the beginning. Óscar Romero, Guardian of Orthodoxy The Central American Jesuits began reorganiz- ing their work in the early 1970s in an effort to embrace the Medellín call to stand with the poor. They understood this to mean actively supporting the rights of campesinos and civilian movements promoting social, eco- nomic, and political reform and the end of military rule. Ellacuría and the UCA worked 7 “Las funciones fundamentales de la universidad y su operativización,” Plant- eamiento universitario 1989 (UCA Editores, 1989), 47. 8 Ignacio Ellacuría, “La UCA ante el doctorado concedido a Monseñor Romero,” Escritos teológicos, III (UCA Editores, 2002), 102; reprinted from ECA no. 437 (1985): 168. Children mingle with insurgents in rebel-held territory in El Salvador, 1988. Copyright © Donna De Cesare,1988 1970–1974