I am grateful for the July 15 article, “Latino pastors serve anxious Latino congregations.”
However, references in the article to the history of the El Salvador Civil War and murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero were regrettably vague. A more precise history tells us much about today.
What happened in El Salvador in the 1980s, better put, was a United States-funded war waged by a military-led government and paramilitaries against a leftist insurgency. The vast majority of the 75,000 lives lost were peasants and Catholic clergy killed by government-supported forces. One such victim of the government was Romero, shot in the chest in March, 1980, by a paramilitary agent while celebrating Mass.
Why does this history matter now?
Almost half a million Salvadorans fled to the US over the 1980s, where they were deemed illegal by the Reagan administration. Many Americans, including church members, defied immigration law to offer these refugees sanctuary.
Many young Salvadoran migrants in California joined gangs, then were deported back to an El Salvador saturated with weaponry left over from the war. The resulting international gangs, along with persistent poverty, created the lethal conditions that spurred more migration to the U.S. in the last two decades.
Bert Kreitlow, Waukesha
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: US policies and weapons created lethal conditions in El Salvador during 1980s | Letters
Reporting by Letters to the Editor / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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