IN 2016, our church in San Salvador was preparing to host a group of young adults on a “mission trip” from the United States. Just prior to their travel, the U.S. government suspended the Peace Corps program in El Salvador due to security concerns related to gang violence. As the host church, we decided the mission trip should be canceled too. In 2015, the murder rate in my country peaked at 103 per 100,000, making it the most dangerous country in the world.
Over the last seven years, El Salvador has seen a rapid drop in its murder rate. In early 2023, President Nayib Bukele claimed that the country had accumulated 365 nonconsecutive days with zero homicides since he took office in June 2019. While it’s impossible to independently corroborate Bukele’s claim, it’s undeniable that Salvadorans are experiencing a new sense of safety and “peace.” That sense of peace, however, has come at a grave cost.
As of January 2023, El Salvador had the highest incarceration rate in the world. Approximately 61,000 people, including 1,082 minors, have been swept up in mass arrests since March 2022, when congress allowed Bukele to suspend constitutional rights. Salvadorans no longer have rights to free assembly, due process, access to lawyers, and previously protected freedoms. Nearly two percent of the Salvadoran adult population is in prison in conditions that fail to meet the U.N.’s minimum standards for imprisonment. Cristosal, a civil society human rights organization in El Salvador, has documented the death of 153 prisoners in state custody between March 2022 and March 2023, all detained during the same period. Of those, 29 died violent deaths and 46 “probable violent deaths” or under “suspicions of criminality,” reported Cristosal. More reports continue to roll in of the deaths of incarcerated people who also show signs of torture.
As a Salvadoran who has lived in the U.S. for six years, I’ve gained fresh perspectives on what’s happening in my country — and what it means to be a Jesus-follower in the shadow of empires. A poll taken in early 2023 showed that 91 percent of Salvadorans approved of Bukele’s approach. This is a remarkable approval rating — particularly given that 82 percent of the population identifies as Catholic or evangelical Protestant. How has it happened that a significant portion of Christians approve of the politics of control, abuse, and centralization of power? Bukele’s popular support by Christians, I believe, relates to our inclination to internalize and perform the mechanisms of the empire.
BIBLICAL STORIES PROVIDE examples. In 1 Samuel 8, the small tribal federation of Israel, whom God had led out from the oppression of powerful nations and cycles of violence, now asks to be placed under the “ways of the king” and to be “like other nations.” Despite the prophet Samuel’s warnings that the “ways of the king” were exploitative, abusive, and centralized, the people were “determined to have a king” that “fights [their] battles.” Even God gave up trying to convince them otherwise. Our biblical ancestors wanted to imitate the empires that had oppressed them. The people rejected the ways of God.
El Salvador also has existed under the shadow of the empires of Spain, Britain, the U.S., and, most recently, China. This imperial structure is intrinsic to El Salvador’s history. But the relationship between empires and their client nations, such as El Salvador, is not limited to economic and political interventions, but also includes cultural colonization.
Imperialistic perceptions of the world run deep in the roots of our collective imagination and dreams, even if they are only the utopian promise that “one day we will be like them.” President Bukele consistently uses the levers of cultural colonization to unify his popular movement. He tells them that “El Salvador can be a world power” and that “we can be like them.” Like the Israelites, Salvadorans are tempted to ask for the “ways of a king” who will “fight the people’s battles” even when that king will also control us, abuse us, abolish our freedom, and dismantle any institution that would hold him accountable.
AS A CHRISTIAN, I know that control, abuse, centralization of power, and lack of transparency are not the ways of Jesus. I cannot, as a Christian, approve of them, promote them, or support them in any way.
As a Salvadoran, I also know how tempting it is to do so. It’s tempting to succumb to revenge to retaliate for El Salvador’s painful history. It’s tempting to celebrate or sacralize the violence taken against those who have hurt or killed our families. It’s tempting to let our collective fear and pain shape our Savior into one who will be militaristic and merciless. It’s tempting also because we inherited an imperialized version of Christianity from our oppressors. From the Spanish conquest to U.S. evangelization missions, the “imperial and colonial Jesus” has inevitably pervaded our belief systems and praxis. Empire thinking runs deep into our faith too. Bukele knows this. Oppression is always more palatable when it is wrapped in the language of faith.
And yet, prophetic voices that resist the ways of the empire have preserved and enlivened Salvadoran history and church. There has always been a tiny seed of faith within the “crucified peoples” of history, as theologian Ignacio Ellacuría put it, that rises up as witness to the resurrection, despite deathly empires.
Empires are gonna empire, I remind myself. While Christians may use the levers of government to advance the common good, and individuals within governments may act under the influence of the ethics of Jesus, a “Christian nationalist government” should be considered an oxymoron and pursuing it, a departure from the way of Jesus. Instead, Salvadoran — and perhaps all — Christians should ask how we can de-imperialize our faith and our communities. In the name of Jesus, we can exorcise those demons of the empire — that make a home within the church, within us — that trick us into trusting and promoting authoritarians and abusers.
To be faithful to the testimony of Jesus in El Salvador today, we must listen to the voices that Archbishop Óscar Romero and other Salvadoran martyrs heard and followed. Just as they found Jesus standing in solidarity with the victims of imperialistic violence (Matthew 25:31-40), so we too must stand there.
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