Today we might assume that the presence of churchgoers in the movement was a moderating force. But in the 1970s and ’80s, religious people who had spent time in countries to the south were bringing the teachings of liberation theology back with them. This movement, born in Latin America, insisted on reinterpreting Christian doctrine through the lived experience of the region. For the majority of people there, this was an experience of subjugation and impoverishment. Arguing that Christianity demanded a “preferential option for the poor,” religious workers used grassroots Bible-study groups as a means of radical consciousness-raising, and they organized parishioners into “base communities” dedicated to challenging oppression. Right-wing militaries took this challenge very seriously. By the end of the ’70s, leaflets were being circulated in the Salvadoran countryside reading “Be a patriot, kill a priest.”

Liberation theologians were not afraid to employ Marxist analysis in determining the root causes of exploitation and deprivation. Among the priests who joined the Sandinista government after the overthrow of Somoza, one renowned liberationist, the poet Ernesto Cardenal, became minister of culture, and another, Miguel d’Escoto, a Maryknoll priest, became foreign minister. Although not aligned with the guerrillas, Monseñor Romero — who was declared a saint by Pope Francis in 2018 — believed that a person could not follow the example of Jesus without denouncing injustice. Like Martin Luther King Jr., Romero was well aware that his commitments might lead to martyrdom. Yet he nevertheless gave voice to an uncompromising vision of solidarity: “One who is committed to the poor must risk the same fate as the poor,” he stated. “And in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, to be tortured, to be captive, and to be found dead.” Just weeks before his murder, he insisted, “If they manage to carry out their threats, I shall be offering my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador.”

With the recent return of figures such as Abrams and Bolton to the public stage, this analysis remains relevant. And yet it also does not seem fully fitting today. In the Trump era, the administration’s stance toward Latin America has followed a jumbled set of cues, but has tended toward xenophobic isolationism. In March, Trump announced that he was cutting US aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. “We’re not paying them anymore,” he stated, “because they haven’t done a thing for us.”

This is a far cry from the era when conservatives manufactured elaborate schemes to ensure that funding would flow unimpeded, so they could shape the region to their design. For the current occupant of the White House, El Salvador is not a sign of freedom won but a symbol of another kind: it represents the places and peoples that America must wall out. Should a more coherent isolationism become the defining stance of the Republican Party, El Salvador will be emblematic of the distance traveled between Reagan and Trump.