This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
I’d wager that whether you are new to Sojourners or a longtime subscriber, you probably have a deep admiration for the late Salvadoran archbishop and liberation theologian, St. Óscar Romero. And if you don’t, then you’re about to.
Romero, who was the archbishop of El Salvador from 1977 to 1980, was a priest at a time when anti-communist death squads encouraged people to practice their patriotism by killing priests. These death squads, it should be noted, were often armed and financially supported by the United States. During this time in El Salvador, priests, nuns, and missionaries were regularly murdered and brutalized for standing in solidarity with the poor, criticizing economic injustice, and condemning the government’s militarism. Romero eventually met the same fate as other priests and nuns in his country, as he was shot by a gunman on March 24, 1980 while celebrating Mass at Hospital de la Divina Providencia. No one has ever confessed to or been prosecuted for his killing.
Nearly 50 years later, questions continue to swirl about who killed him, why his death sparked the Salvadoran Civil War, to what extent the U.S. was involved in his murder, and what his murder reveals about the U.S. government’s strategy of installing and supporting regimes that brazenly commit human rights violations.
Jasmine Romero (no relation), a journalist and executive producer at NPR, attempts to answer these questions and more in a new podcast series — Sacred Scandal: Nation of Saints — which is dedicated to the slain Romero and the fallout surrounding his assassination. If you’ve ever dreamt of a podcast that combines true crime, liberation theology, political analysis, and narrative reporting, then I’m here to tell you that this podcast is your dream come true.
In our interview, Romero and I talked about why she was drawn to this story even though she is not religious, what she discovered about herself and liberation theology through her reporting, and why she sees a parallel between former President Joe Biden’s response to Gaza and the late Jimmy Carter’s response to El Salvador.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: I want to start with a fun question. Which Oscar has better eyebrows: Oscar the Grouch or Óscar Romero?
Jasmine Romero: Oh, that’s so unfair. And it puts me in a particularly difficult situation because I work for Sesame Street. Oh man, I’m gonna go with Oscar Romero, because Oscar the Grouch, I think, can defend himself.
In the podcast, you mention that you didn’t grow up hearing about Óscar Romero. What made you want to investigate his assassination and the context surrounding his assassination?
I think this is the case with a lot of the Salvadoran diaspora. Because, and I know that I got a lot of messages from people after I published my show where they said essentially the same thing, I think a lot of people who came out of the Salvadoran Civil War really were trying to leave that period behind. Your parents sort of have this feeling that they’re protecting you from something, or that that life is behind them. I didn’t know anything about the Óscar Romero story, I didn’t even know anything about my family’s involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War. All I knew was that they had come to the U.S. and were trying to build a new life.
It wasn’t until I got into my 30s that I just got really curious about that time period and what factors led to them coming and started asking my parents questions. At some point, the connection was made in my brain after seeing these murals around LA of this guy, who is clearly a Salvadoran icon, and how do I not know who this person is? It’s a thing that I often feel. El Salvador is a very small country, but we have our people everywhere. But if you ask somebody, “Who is a famous Salvadoran?” There’s not really a whole lot of people that people know. Óscar Romero is, like, one of the few figures that has really broken through in terms of cultural relevance. So, that’s what started me on my journey. And then it obviously took me to some pretty wild places.
Did you grow up religious?
Well, I grew up Catholic. My great-grandma would take me to Mass every Sunday. It was kind of a thing that got transferred from sister to sister. So my older sister used to go, and then once I got old enough she was like, “Now you have to go with grandma.”
And I don’t know if the sermons were in Latin or if they just felt like they were in Latin. I was a little kid and I was just, like, Why am I here? What’s happening? There’s a lot of robes and smoke and candles. I didn’t really understand. I think my family is more culturally Catholic than they are practicing Catholic.
How did reporting on this story help you learn more about yourself?
I think we live in a time when politics and religion are more intertwined than ever. I have become more and more politically interested. I’ve always felt drawn to issues of social justice and wanted to create a more equitable society for everyone. I think Óscar Romero’s transformation — his reticence to go into politics and then his eventual realization that the only way to really be a true practitioner of his faith was to go into the political realm, that there was no way to separate those two things really resonated with me.
I don’t think of myself as a particularly religious person. I think religion is a very useful tool for thinking about how to live your life and what values to model your life after. But I think I have a lot in common with the way that Óscar Romero viewed liberation theology and the way that it informs the way that we should view the world. I think I’m very aligned with Óscar, even though I don’t predict that I’ll be attending Sunday Mass regularly anytime soon.
I’ve considered getting an Óscar Romero tattoo, which you would think is something that someone who’s very religious would do. He just really inspired me.
Did learning about Óscar Romero and liberation theology help you see a different version of Christianity?
I think so. And it really gave me a different perspective on people who dedicate their lives to practicing their faith or being a part of the church. I spoke to a lot of clergy members and nuns, and I think you have this sort of preconception of what these people are going to be or why they chose what they chose. Learning about the Jesuits, learning about the four American church women who went down to El Salvador, it’s just a very different and purer relationship to have with your values.
Just learning about the way that they viewed the world, how much joy they had in living and being with people. I think you often think of priests and nuns as being very reserved, being turned inward, and thinking about their relationship with God in a very direct and linear way.
At what point did you decide that it was a good idea to talk about the five Jesuit priests at Central American University in El Salvador as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I thought that was hilarious. I loved that you talked about Ignacio Ellacuría as Master Splinter.
Thank you. One of the things that was difficult about this show was that it’s an incredibly depressing topic. So, I was constantly looking for ways to create levity within the show, like opportunities for humor and also ways to contextualize these people outside of the preconceived notion of stuffiness. They were really rad dudes who had varied interests, and each had a thing that they specialized in. It seems like they were just really fun. That was one of the things that I was constantly looking for: How do I humanize these people so that we take them off of this pedestal of “perfect human beings” and allow people to see themselves within [these priests]? And through that, [my hope was to encourage] people to see that they themselves could be doing more to live out their values in the same way.
Considering Romero’s transformation from pawn to the rich to priest for the poor, did creating this series give you hope that it’s possible for people to change?
Yes, but I’ll caveat that. I think it’s really hard for people to change their minds without having a personal experience. It’s really a fun narrative tool to say that Rutilio Grande was murdered, and Óscar Romero had a lightning bolt moment where he immediately changed his perspective.
That’s not quite true, it’s cleaner to say that, but if you look at his writings, it was definitely a thing that was on his mind, it was an idea that was developing over time. I think that [Grande’s murder] probably crystallized it for him or at least made him realize, “I have to take action.”
And that sermon that he gives after Grande is murdered is really the first time that he publicly announces, “Hey, this is what my values are.” So, I think it’s really hard for people to change without something personally happening to them. I think about that a lot in the context of school shootings.
It’s very hard to understand the grief of a parent whose child was needlessly murdered in a school until it happens in your community. And then it changes you. I think it’s James Baldwin who said something like, every bombed town is my hometown.
That’s how I feel about it. Not that this is a Octavia E. Butler novel, but I feel like I have hyper empathy for people. I feel very acutely when something happens to someone. Like the plight of the Palestinians, to me, feels so reflective of what happened in El Salvador.
And when I see that I’m like, “Can’t people see the parallels?” Like, those people are your people. We’re all people. Every child is someone’s child.
I think for those of us afflicted with hyper empathy, viewing the callousness of the world is difficult. But I think it’s just human nature for it to be difficult to have empathy for someone when it’s an experience that you’ve never had. So yes, I believe that people can change, but I think it requires practicing an empathy that most people find uncomfortable because it is uncomfortable to go through the world and to feel for everyone and everything. I hope that people can extend their own empathy and see themselves in others.
Considering some of the hagiographies that have recently been published about Jimmy Carter, I think some people would be surprised to know that he was president at a time when the U.S. was actively trying to destabilize Latin America in order to “fight communism.” What did you learn about U.S. involvement in Latin America during this time and what have been some of the long-term effects of the U.S.’s activity in the region?
When I spoke to Terry Karl, who has such a wealth of knowledge about that time period and about El Salvador — she was on the phone with the Jesuits the day before they were murdered [in 1989] — we talked about Jimmy Carter [in 1980] and she was like, “Oh, he knew, he knew that this was going to happen.” Now do I have proof of that? No. And this is just like an offhand comment that she made, but if anyone is going to know that it would be Terry Karl. So, I think Carter was very aware of the situation. Frankly, I think Pope [Paul VI, in the first two years of the Carter presidency] was very aware of the situation. And I don’t think anyone was surprised that Romero was assassinated.
I got a lot of really not-very-nice responses to the piece that I wrote for NPR about Jimmy Carter. And I thought I was actually pretty restrained about Carter’s involvement and sort of his responsibility. I certainly am no fan of [Ronald] Reagan. But because of the way our political system works, there’s very much this feeling of, if you are a supporter of Democrats, and you support the Democratic cause, then you cannot criticize anything that they do because the other side is so much worse.
I really felt that from people as, during this election cycle, when it came to the issue of Gaza. Both things can be true: Republicans and what they want to do in Gaza may be terrible and what happened in Gaza within a Democratic administration was also horrific.
I think a lot of the hand wringing around Carter’s legacy is just really frustrating. And you know, we’re not talking about ancient history. This is history that Latin America is still recovering from; it still informs the present.
If you look at the latest news where President Trump and President Bukele have made an agreement where the U.S. is going to ship prisoners to El Salvador — I don’t even know what kind of laws that violates. There is no precedent for these kinds of times.
You know, this is how the MS-13 problem in El Salvador began. You know, you live in these cycles of history and people feel so fired up about the present, and so they feel such clarity about the present and there’s just this amnesia about the recent past. Like I said in my piece, I’m really curious how history views Biden and his relationship to Gaza, because I think that’s the thing that is going to haunt his legacy for a very long time.
The way I found out about your work was through the piece you wrote on NPR, “Jimmy Carter is no saint in my house.”
“It’s early January and we’re a few weeks away from the inauguration of a new Republican president following a single-term Democrat who has been criticized for providing an extraordinary amount of military and financial aid to a foreign government accused of human rights violations. Sound familiar? No, I’m not talking about President Biden and his administration’s support of Israel. It’s January 1981, President Jimmy Carter is on his way out and the foreign government his administration is supporting is El Salvador’s.”
What inspired you to make that connection?
By the time I was finishing Sacred Scandal, I was working on a show called, This Is Uncomfortable. The host, Reema Khrais, her family is Palestinian, and this was after Oct. 7. And at some point, it was just almost impossible for her to work with how devastating it had been for her family. It was just an unfathomable amount of loss and to know that that loss was directly paid for with my tax dollars is a devastating place to live.
It’s a thing that I felt constantly through Sacred Scandal. There’s this idea that American patriotism means turning a blind eye to the things that your government does that you don’t like. I find that so confusing. Patriotism means protesting and upholding the values that you believe that this country stands for. And our meddling and interfering around the world not only causes the waves of immigration that we still see, it is also the soil in which our prosperity grows.
We thrive because other places are kept under our boot, and you see that very clearly in Latin America. You see this very clearly in the history of someone like Henry Kissinger. As someone who lives both nationalities, who is very proudly American and Salvadoran, it is an incredibly difficult place to live to know that your tax dollars are going to someone else’s misery and to some future calamity. These cycles are not a thing of the past. They continue to happen. And our children will be dissecting what our government today is doing, which is what my whole project was.
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