"Something Vile in This Land"

Panic and death defile a peacemaker's funeral

The sealed gray casket of assassinated Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero rested on the steps of San Salvador's huge Metropolitan Cathedral, a wreath of red roses at its head. Mexican Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, the personal delegate of Pope John Paul II, had just finished a eulogy, praising Romero as a "beloved, peacemaking man of God" and prophesying that "his blood will give fruit to brotherhood, love and peace." Suddenly, the outdoor funeral service in the center of El Salvador's capital was transformed into a tableau of horror: exploding hand bombs, wild gunfire, terrified crowds stampeding in panic. Before it was over, 35 people had been killed; 185 others had been hospitalized with serious injuries. "It was pure savagery against defenseless, humble people," lamented a mourner, Bishop Eamon Casey of Galway, Ireland. "There is something vile in this land. Very, very vile."

The service was held to honor El Salvador's most outspoken champion of nonviolence and human rights, shot dead during a Mass six days earlier by a lone assassin who was suspected of being an ultrarightist gunman. What turned the funeral into El Salvador's bloodiest episode this year was an explosion, either a genuine hand bomb or a "leaflet bomb" that flings handbills in the air. It occurred at the edge of Plaza Barrios where an estimated 50,000 mourners were gathered for the outdoor service for the archbishop. Armed leftist militants, primed for possible rightist provocation, apparently panicked at the blast and began firing wildly, sending the crowd surging toward the sanctuary of the cathedral. Some witnesses claimed that gunfire also came from soldiers in the government's National Palace across the square.

"The shooting intensified as the crowd around me heaved forward and tried to surmount a 10-ft. steel picket fence," reported TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich, who found himself caught in the melee. "A woman trying to get over was partially impaled on one of the sharp spikes of the fence. My hand was pierced on another. Babies were being thrown over the fence to the relative safety of the other side. At the narrow entrance to the cathedral about a dozen women, most of them elderly, were being trampled.

"Near by a man had the back of his head and his hands blown off when a bomb he was holding exploded. The air was filled with smoke from the explosives. Hundreds of people hugged any protective cover they could find or lay flat on the pavement. As I was carried along with the crowd pressing into the side door of the cathedral, I saw young militants rolling over on their bodies to make their way across the street, some with small-caliber guns in their hands. The bedlam was horrifying."

A number of foreign bishops, in El Salvador to attend the funeral, carried Romero's coffin out of harm's way into the cathedral, where it was sealed into a crypt in the east nave. The crowd huddled inside the church for more than an hour, well after the shooting stopped. Then clergymen, mothers with infants and terrified nuns emerged slowly in single file, with their hands on their heads as a precautionary signal to possible snipers.

The violent funeral, like Romero's assassination, was a tragic demonstration of how even the church has become a political battleground in predominantly Roman Catholic El Salvador. Of the country's five surviving bishops, only one had seen fit to attend Romero's funeral. The others, described by one priest as "very, very conservative," had been vehemently opposed to Romero's bold stands against the country's repressive oligarchy, which would welcome a military dictatorship. The country's priests are also divided between active, largely urban adherents of so-called liberation theology, and conservative, mostly rural guardians of the status quo.

A newly divisive issue is the question of who will succeed Romero as Archbishop of San Salvador. Vatican prelates are suggesting that the Pope, who has indicated he would like to depoliticize Latin American priests, is inclined to choose "a safe person, not as politically involved as Romero and able to get along with whatever regime emerges." But there is no one of real stature in the El Salvador hierarchy who matches that description. Thus some prelates believe the Pope may play it even safer and simply name an apostolic administrator to step in until hostilities have subsided.

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