Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin.

This is the audio version of each episode of the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English.

You can watch every episode at the Empirefiles.tv.

For the last 25 years, people from all over the U.S. have converged at the gates of the Fort Benning U.S. Army base in Georgia.

They come with thousands of crosses, inscribed with different names, many of them children and

elderly, each memorializing a death at the hands of right-wing governments in Latin America

in the second half of the 20th century.

It was an era of fascistic political repression,

where it didn't matter if you were an unarmed university

student or a peasant with a rifle.

Anyone who questioned those in power was butchered.

Largely hidden from the American public,

several high-profile incidents in El Salvador in 1980

turned a spotlight on unparalleled political violence.

Oscar Romero, the beloved Archbishop of San Salvador, a city of almost 2 million Catholics,

was deemed a subversive by El Salvador's military dictatorship.

On March 24, 1980, while still at the church pulpit, just after delivering Mass,

Archbishop Romero was murdered in front of hundreds by a government sniper.

250,000 people attended his funeral.

There, more snipers from the National Army began firing on the peaceful crowd and detonated bombs.

Upwards of 50 civilians were killed.

It showed how brazenly the right wing would act,

...