Abstract

Themes of Christian martyrdom were central to popular political mobilization in El Salvador, as in much of Latin America, during the 1970s and 1980s. The story of Christ's sacrifice provided a powerful narrative for explaining injustice and political violence, a frame for interpretation as well as action during the twelve-year Salvadoran civil war, which ended in 1992 by a negotiated settlement. In the first part of this article we trace the politics of martyrdom and sacrifice through the war. The final sections of the article examine the place of narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in post-civil war El Salvador. While most Salvadorans today continue to experience high levels of inequality, poverty, and violence, the narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice that animated the revolutionary movements and liberation theology of the 1980s have lost much of their resonance. We suggest that the dispersion of both the perceived sources of, and the imagined solutions to, injustice contribute to the diminution in the importance of Christian narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in El Salvador today