Octavio Ortiz

Fr. Octavio Ortiz Luna (March 22, 1944 – January 20, 1979) was a Roman Catholic priest in El Salvador who was assassinated on January 20, 1979. He served under Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez. His murder was characterized by Romero as part of a systematic persecution of the Catholic Church and oppression against efforts to reform a military dictatorship there to guaranty human rights for the poor masses.

Biography

Fr. Ortiz was born on March 22, 1944 in a town called Agua Blanca in the Municipality of Cacaopera, in the northeastern Salvadoran province of Morazán. Fr. Ortiz was born to peasant parents, Alejandro Ortiz and Exaltación de la Cruz Luna. The Ortiz-Lunas lost four other children, in addition to Octavio, to the bloodshed of the Salvadoran Civil War.

Fr. Ortiz prepared for the priesthood at the San Salvador's Seminario San José de la Montaña. He was ordained a priest by Msgr. Romero. Fr. Ortiz was Romero's first priestly ordination. Thereafter, Fr. Ortiz was sent to minister to the parish of El Despertar in the San Salvador neighborhood of Mejicanos.

Fr. Ortiz took a special interest in young workers, whom he offered spiritual retreats and seminars. Apparently, Ortiz had been leading such a retreat the night before his assassination. At dawn on January 20, 1979, government troops burst into the retreat center, killed Fr. Ortiz and four youths, and arrested the rest. The government would claim that the retreat center was a guerrilla base. Archbishop Romero called the allegations "lies." It is suspected that the government placed the bodies in positions that would support the official version of events. The bodies were placed on top the house roof and with gun machines. The assassination has never been investigated. In a final insult, Fr. Ortiz' head was repeatedly run over by a military vehicle so that the priest could not have an open casket funeral. Romero would later say that Ortiz "gave his face to Jesus."

gollark: > If you oppose compromises to privacy on the grounds that you could do something that is misidentified as a crime, being more transparent does helpI mean, sure. But I worry about lacking privacy for reasons other than "maybe the government will use partial data or something and accidentally think I'm doing crimes".

gollark: Also, you can probably just treat privacy as a "terminal goal" like all the other weird drives us foolish humans have, but I think there are good reasons for it based on other stuff.

gollark: Are you missing some negatives or something? I'm failing to parse that.

gollark: I don't understand what you're saying.

gollark: If you want to retain privacy, it is not very useful to just give up all privacy and become uninteresting.

References

Peterson, Anna L. (1997). Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion. SUNY Press. p. 64. ISBN 9780791431825.

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