Óscar Romero

Óscar Arnulfo Romero was made Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977 because the government and the wealthy families expected a quiet bookish man who would not make trouble. Three weeks later his friend Rutilio Grande, a priest who had organized farm workers, was shot dead on a country road, and Romero went to the body and did not go back to being quiet. Each Sunday he read out from the pulpit the names of the killed and the disappeared of that week, and the broadcast was the most listened-to program in the country. On 23 March 1980 he appealed directly to the soldiers: no soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God, and in the name of God, stop the repression. The next evening a gunman shot him through the heart as he stood at the altar of a hospital chapel. Dozens more were killed when the funeral crowd was fired upon. A United Nations commission later found the order had come from a death-squad leader.