By 1989 the Central American state of El Salvador had been split by civil war for a decade. Throughout the war, one group that had been particularly targeted was those priests who, influenced by the ‘preferential option for the poor’ that was a key tenet of liberation theology, had stood alongside the impoverished majority of the population. On the night of 16 November 1989, six Jesuits working at the University of Central America, as well as their housekeeper and her daughter, were taken from their beds by armed men and shot, their bodies left in the garden of their residence. This issue of The Way marks the twentieth anniversary of the deaths of the El Salvador martyrs. Marking this anniversary offers an opportunity to consider the wider question of martyrdom, a category currently controversial in so far as it is claimed by, or assigned to, suicide bombers and ‘freedom fighters’ across the globe.
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