The
President of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes, announced that his country’s Tourism
Ministry will promote an “Archbishop Romero City Tour” of San Salvador as part
of a larger effort to promote tourism in El Salvador. Funes made the announcement in the Crypt of
the San Salvador Metropolitan Cathedral where Romero is buried, one of the ten
locations to be featured in the Romero tour, visited by U.S. President Barack Obama last year. Funes said that additional
announcements would be made in Italy in October, and in London in November, regarding the initiative.
The tour
is a two-day excursion to ten locations associated with, or relevant to, the
life or legacy of Archbishop Romero.
They are: (1) the Metropolitan Cathedral, where Romero served as
Archbishop between Feb. 1977 and Mar. 1980, and where he is interred today, (2)
the Divine Providence Hospital, where Romero lived and in whose chapel he was
murdered on March 24, 1980 ; (3) the Sacred Heart Basilica, where Romero delivered
his famous last Sunday sermon on March 23, 1980 (in which he said, “Stop the Repression!”); (4) the historic El Rosario Church in downtown San Salvador,
where Romero occasionally preached, also; (5) the Romero Center at Central American
University, the site of the 1989 Jesuit Massacre. The remaining sites in and around San
Salvador are more peripheral in their Romero relevance but they provide a good
cultural context. They are: (6) the
National Palace, which abuts the same plaza as the Cathedral—it was in disuse
as a government building by the time Romero became archbishop; (7) the Divine Savior Monument in Western San Salvador, where a statute stands as the leading
monument to Romero in El Salvador; (8) the
Anthropological Museum nearby. The last
two sites are further afield: (9) the Romero sanctuary run by the Chacón sisters in Santa Tecla, and (10) Paseo
El Carmen, a tourist promenade in Santa Tecla with no relevance to Romero that was probably thrown in to give those taking the tour a chance to
do some shopping.
In his
presentation, Pres. Funes said that Archbishop Romero is “an unequivocal symbol
of El Salvador—a symbol of a country that wants to overcome its conflicts and
difficulties, and which is working to become a nation that lives in peace, with
equity and with complete democracy.” The President said that Archbishop Romero, “[i]s recognized throughout the world because
of his incorruptible spirit and for his preferential option for the poor,” and
that his government, which has called Romero its “point of reference” for
animating policies that promote social justice, wishes to further pay tribute
to his “emblematic figure” with a tourism promotion that keeps his memory
alive. The president touted El Salvador
as a tourist destination, pointing out that El Salvador has fallen out of the
world’s ten most dangerous countries list in the last year, due to a marked
drop in gang violence (even though he made the announcement the same day that
the U.S. Treasury Department announced that the Salvadoran street gang, MS-13,
would be designated an international crime group subject to certain financial
penalties. Nonetheless, Funes
highlighted a drop in the murder rate from 69 to 26 per hundred thousand
inhabitants, associated with a gang truce sponsored by private negotiators,
including the Catholic Church, which Funes supports. The president also highlighted a recovery in
tourism, with an increase of visitors of 19% over the last four years, and 6.5%
in the last year, alone.
The
initiative highlights a consistent commitment to symbolic tributes (critics
would say lip service) to Romero during the Funes administration. In addition to declaring him his government’s
point of reference, Funes has apologized in the name of the state for the
Romero assassination and accompanied Pres. Obama on a tour of Romero’s grave. Many of the Romero sites were already tourist
attractions, so critics may sense some opportunism in hitching the fortunes of
other tourist sites to Romero’s wagon.
But, on balance, the official imprimatur should also raise the profile
of the Romero sites.
