The responses to the murders were intense but vastly different. Ray Bonner, a former correspondent for The New York Times, tells The Takeaway, “It’s hard to overdramatize how important this was and how shocking it was.” He explains, “There had been 10,000 murders in El Salvador that year … But nothing caused a reaction like the killing of these American churchwomen.”
Reactions from Catholics around the world were twofold. Liberal Catholics, who believed in the tenets of Liberation Theology, were galvanized to support the oppressed people of El Salvador and those on the ground helping them, says Origins. Conservative Catholics thought the killings were somewhat justified or at least inevitable since they considered the missionaries to be communists, which — in their eyes — made the women criminals.
The U.S. took a similar stance. Bonner explained to The Takeaway that, at the time, the U.S. considered El Salvador “the frontline in the war against Soviet expansion and Soviet communism.” The U.S. had a long-running policy of supporting authoritarian governments as long as they were pro-U.S. Because of that, the U.S. had been funding El Salvador’s right-wing military government, supplying them with money, weapons, and training, according to The Atlantic. In an interview with CNS (via Global Sisters Report), Chalatenango’s Bishop Oswaldo Escobar Aguilar points out the tragic irony. He explains that the women “were victims, we could even say, of the weapons of their own country.”
