One bright sunny March morning in 1980, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was saying mass at a church hospital in San Salvador when a bullet from a sniper rifle ripped through his heart.

Romero started life and ministry as a conservative. But after his friend Father Rutilio Grande was assassinated to discourage other faith leaders from supporting Salvadoran peasants, Romero underwent a political and theological conversion. Picking up where Grande left off, Romero embraced a “theology of liberation,” a perspective that espouses God’s preference for the poor and oppressed. His visibility as archbishop elevated his voice and the credibility of his critique of the conditions faced by peasants in El Salvador.

A month before his assassination, Archbishop Romero wrote President Jimmy Carter requesting a halt to US military assistance to the right-wing Salvadoran government and its allied paramilitary death squads. Over 250,000 people attended Romero’s funeral, echoing his demands for justice. Tragically, they were swimming against the historical current. A campaign of terror and murder, often orchestrated or at the very least condoned by the United States, continued across the country.

In the wake of Romero’s murder, Elliott Abrams, the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, said, “Anybody who thinks you’re going to find a cable that says that Roberto D’Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool.” In fact, two US embassy cables said precisely that, naming D’Aubuisson as the one who ordered his personal bodyguard to carry out Romero’s assassination. In denying the evidence, Abrams helped him get away with murder. With Abrams’s support, US military assistance to the Salvadoran government was dramatically increased that year.

This month, President Biden nominated Elliott Abrams to join the State Department Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Abrams’s history is not secret: in 2019, Representative Ilhan Omar grilled him before Congress. Abrams served for twelve years as part of the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush  administrations. During that time, seventy-five thousand Salvadorians were killed. Abrams called US policy in El Salvador a “fabulous achievement.” Recounting the 1981 massacre at El Mozote, Omar asked, ‘“Do you think that massacre was a ‘fabulous achievement’ that happened under our watch?”

In the village of El Mozote, the army’s Atlácatl Battalion herded women and children into a church convent and opened fire with US-supplied M16 automatic rifles before burning the building down. They committed other atrocities as well, and by the end over nine hundred people were murdered. Of them, 140 were children, their average age six. One survivor recalled seeing a dead mother and her dead baby lying in bed. On the walls, scrawled in blood, were the words: “Un nino muerto, un guerrillero menos”: “One dead child is one less guerrilla.”