On Sunday, March 15, 2009, a general election took place in El Salvador, the Saviour. After twenty years in the violent political wilderness that is El Salvador, Mauricio Funes of the leftist FMLN party and former guerilla rebel, led his followers to victory over the incumbent Arena Party. The Arena Party, (arena, sand in Spanish, or in this case, dirt) was the foul offspring of such kindly fellows as Jose Duarte and Roberto D’Aubuisson.

Roberto D’Aubuisson, fan of Adolph Hitler, trained at the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia, where many would-be Latin American dictators either learned or refined the tricks of their trade. Described by Robert White, the American ambassador to El Salvador as a ‘psychological killer”, he was nonetheless befriended and encouraged by the odious duo of the late Senator Jesse Helms and the not late enough, Preacher Pat Robertson.

D’Aubuisson, nicknamed “Blowtorch Bob,” after his favorite form of torture, was founder of the Arena Party. The Arena Party rose out of the ashes he had created from the death squads that tortured and murdered thousands of his opponents and innocents in the 1970s and 80s. The losing candidate for Arena, Rodrigo Avila is an admirer of D’Aubuisson, a former national police chief, and a one-time sniper for the death squads.

The Saviour hasn’t been doing much saving in El Salvador recently. If he has, he’s been saving the wrong people. Apparently, Jesus, like his merciless father, moves in mysterious ways. El Salvador remains one of the world’s most dangerous places, dominated by the usual suspects; rich landowners, foreign interest, the catholic church, and corrupt government. 

During the misery that was El Salvador in the 1970’s and 1980, emerged an unlikely advocate for the poor, tormented people of the country, the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero. While there were a number of local priests who tried to stop the injustice and carnage, and were often killed for their efforts, the Salvadorian church hierarchy improved its lot with the Vatican by towing the government line. Divine advancement was best achieved by cooperating with the vicious thugs in power in San Salvador, and their willing accomplices in Rome.

Oscar Romero was a rare exception, someone higher up the supplicant chain who had the courage to take on the aristocracy, someone who tried to stop the killings, the torture, the illegal seizure of land, the rape of a nation.

Romero became a proponent of Liberation Theology begun in Brazil in the 1950s to address issues of poverty and social injustice in Latin America. He was a high-ranking voice and leading defender to the otherwise defenseless citizens of El Salvador. He was the thin bread line between the gluttons in power and the hungry, homeless peasants of his country.

An ocean away, amidst the glitter of his ornate palace, a determined and hard man sat on a golden throne. Neither the palace nor its contents would fit through the eye of a needle. John Paul II, forged in the fire of Nazi and Communist Poland, was continuing his campaign to end the tyranny of the USSR. Had he glared at Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, or Leonid Brezhnev, it’s unlikely his stern gaze would have made a difference. But the Soviet Empire was in the process of decline. A few years, hence, rotting from the inside, aided by the unlikely rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the pragmatism of Ronald Reagan, John Paul II would help tear down concrete walls and iron curtains all over Eastern Europe. He is rightly a  hero to his native Poland, its neighbors, as well as to many followers and lovers of freedom around the world. His unyielding strength of personality helped a people slip the yoke of tyranny and was a determining factor in bringing down the USSR. Moscow was always the center that could not hold, but that does not diminish the catalyst that was John Paul II.

One day in 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero knocked on the doors of the Vatican to plead his people’s case to the people’s pope. As Romero was to discover, it’s not an easy task to get an audience with god’s second in command, well maybe fourth in command, depending on how the trinity is counted. While the killings continued in El Salvador, Romero cooled his heels in the Pope’s antechamber. It was like having to buy a few drinks at the bar while waiting for your table in a half-empty restaurant. After several days, Romero finally got his meeting. It was not the reception he anticipated. He had expected papal intervention on behalf of the long-suffering pueblo of El Salvador, instead he received a fatherly pat on the head. He was advised to behave himself, follow church doctrine, renounce liberation theology, and be more cooperative with Blowtorch Bob.

Romero was stunned. He had come for dignity and justice for an agonized nation. But Karol Wojtyla saw only his old foe, communism. Where Romero wanted the theology and practice of liberation, Wojtyla ordered him to support the brutal fascism desecrating his country.

Humiliated by his spiritual and vocational leader, Archbihsop Romero returned to San Salvador. He had traveled to Rome with hope but returned with nothing but more prayer for the despairing population.  Less than a month after being patronized by the Pope, while once again beseeching help from a higher yet indifferent power, Oscar Romero, the promise, and inspiration for millions in El Salvador and Latin America, was shot dead by one of Roberto D’Aubuisson’s assassins. It was a mass killing of one.

What Romero didn’t fully comprehend about Pope John Paul, was that like most leaders of a major world religion, Karol Wojtyla was an ideologue. It’s hard not to be ideological when you’ve been proclaimed the protagonist of a great myth. John Paul II was the Joe McCarthy of the Vatican. He saw godless communism everywhere, and though he had lived through the horrors wrought by the nazis, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, acknowledge other forms of tyrrany when he saw them.

Whether practiced by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pinochet, Pol Pot or D’Aubuisson, there was not a dime’s edge of difference to the masses between communism and fascism. What mattered was that it was all totalitarianism. That the pope, blinded by church dogma and hatred of communism, refused to accept that totalitarianism was a crime against humanity, no matter its name, is tragic and deplorable.

Jerry Seinfeld and friends went to jail for refusing to assist a stranger being robbed. John Paul II became a global rock star while facilitating the systematic torture and slaughter of thousands throughout Latin America.

The Pope’s attitude towards Latin America, fortified in its obstinacy by the current Grand Wizard, Joseph Ratzinger, was in keeping with the long tradition of the catholic church. It has always enjoyed an intimate relationship with dictatorial and repressive regimes, accepting a seat at the table of gluttony and in return, threatening the wrath of god to keep the faithful and fearful in line.

John Paul, who handed out sainthoods like dispensations, started and accelerated the canonization for Josemaria Escriva, granter of spiritual cover to the foul Francisco Franco, long-time dictator of Spain. Escriva was also sainted for his founding of Opus Dei, the most reactionary and zealous sect of catholic conservatism, headquartered in Pamplona. The bulls should never be forgiven for missing this guy.

John Paul later canonized Archbishop Romero, though it seems not to have been motivated by guilt. In 1983, three years after the assassination of Romero, he publicly scolded a priest, Ernesto Cardenal Martinez, who had the audacity to be serving in the left-wing Sandinista government. The Sandinistas had replaced the American puppet and murderous prick, Anastasio Somoza. John Paul however was siding with the US in trying to overthrow the Sandinistas. He didn’t want clergy, who worked closely with his flock, to promote evil communist goals like reduction of violence, amelioration of poverty, social justice, and land reform.

John Paul II vigorously campaigned against liberation theology, purging the clergy who supported its practice. He brought in Vatican hardliners, dogmatic lackeys, and sympathizers of hideous juntas, regimes which murdered or disappeared thousands of people in El Salvador and across Latin America.

Many saw was what happening in El Salvador as a vicious crime against humanity. There were protests from the same people who would cheer the fall of soviet communism, pleadings from those who knew tyranny when they saw it, no matter what disguise it wore, songs from activists who had done their bit for the world twenty years earlier.

But it was John Paul II, not Noel Paul Stookey, who most impacted the fate of these trusting millions. It was the guy with the hot line to the saviour, who ignored the plight of his truest believers.

Nowhere else in the world does the catholic church have more sway over the lives of so many people. Nowhere could the steely stare of John Paul II have done more; alleviated more harm, inspired more hope, instilled more fear in deadly despots, than in Latin America. Instead, he chose to sack the shepherds and let the wolves among his flock. His Vatican supported abhorrent actors and gave license to appalling horror.  

Despite the resources of the world at his fingertips, despite his own experience of the horrors of fascist tyranny, despite the evidence that eyed him accusingly for decades, John Paul II could not move past his ideology. Had he placed more value on the word of men, and less on the word of god, he could have spared the lives of thousands of desperate souls who had nowhere else to turn. Many Latinos, fearing god the punisher, or trusting his son, El Salvador, placed their unquestioning belief in an earthbound spokesman. They believed, and were allowed to believe, that they themselves were at fault for their misery. They went to their graves for it. The shoes of the fisherman are red with their blood – all the better look for the guy wearing them now.

According to his faith, before he could enter the next world, John Paul II would have paused briefly at a checkpoint where St. Peter would have asked him how he had lived his life. He should have first stopped in at The Hague. The people there had a few questions of their own.

Copyright © 2009 Paul Heno