Salvadorans Honor Slain Archbishop

Facing death threats for his criticism of his country’s repressive right-wing government, Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero once said: “As a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people.”

That message was echoed Thursday across Los Angeles in speeches, on posters and on silk-screened T-shirts as churches and community centers commemorated the 25th anniversary of the assassination. His death March 24, 1980, at the hands of a sniper, as the prelate said Mass, is considered a turning point in El Salvador’s troubled path toward political reform.

“He ceased to live in body, but his voice, his ideas, lived in all of us,” said Arturo Lopez, a pastoral assistant at Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights and a Salvadoran immigrant. Lopez spoke Thursday as the church prepared a special evening Mass to honor Romero. Some parishioners wore T-shirts bearing Romero’s image and words.

“Everything he said in his homilies, it was fulfilled,” Lopez said. “He said, ‘Seek negotiations without violence,’ and we found negotiations without violence, eventually. But not without first losing more than 75,000 Salvadoran brothers and sisters.”

On Sunday, Lopez and five of his church’s parishioners will leave for a week in El Salvador working with aid organizations and attending Romero commemorations. Similar delegations are expected in the small Central American country from around the world.

The Dolores Mission group will take with it many small squares of paper on which fellow parishioners at the church have been writing petitions and prayers to Romero. As the Vatican prepares to consider the slain leader for sainthood, “the petitions will be a help to the beatification process,” Lopez said.

Lopez was 16 when Romero was killed. At the time, he was routinely stopped on the streets of the capital, San Salvador, by government forces who threatened him for his church work and accused him of being a rebel and guerrilla fighter. “It was psychological torture,” Lopez recalled. “Every day, you would think, ‘This could be my last.’ ”

Three years later, like tens of thousands of others before and after him, Lopez fled El Salvador for Los Angeles. Many began working with churches and organizations in the U.S. to help end the strife in their country, while others sought to shed light on U.S. support of right-wing paramilitary groups, widely accused of human-rights abuses during the 12-year civil war.

Today, Los Angeles County has the largest population of Salvadorans outside that country. Although 2000 census figures place the immigrant Salvadoran population in the county at a little more than 250,000, Eduardo Gonzalez, executive director of the Clinica Romero, said at least 1 million people of Salvadoran descent lived in the region.

The health clinic, founded in 1983 in honor of Romero, held a commemorative event Thursday at St. Anne’s Maternity Home near Koreatown. Attendees heard from two Salvadoran expatriates who survived torture at the hands of right-wing paramilitary groups.

“It was a Saturday at 5 in the afternoon when they came to kidnap me,” said Maria Guardado, 70, who left El Salvador in 1983 after working with several unions and campesino groups. “They tortured me for three days -- until Msgr. Romero claimed me.... There were few of us who survived. I am a witness to the miracles of Msgr. Romero.”

Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa and Nora Vargas, director of Mayor James K. Hahn’s immigrant affairs office, also spoke at the event. The City Council declared Thursday a day of remembrance for Romero.

Throughout the day, Romero was remembered as an embodiment of charitable values.

“He’s not just for Salvadorans,” said Father Michael Kennedy of Dolores Mission. “He’s for everyone. Romero provided a paradigm that the church is at its best when it walks with the people at the base.”