Atourist arriving in Mexico City in the early summer of 1968 would have found the capital awash in color, an air of expectation and optimism everywhere palpable as the country finalized last-minute preparations for the Olympic Games, scheduled to commence that October. Yellow, blue, and pink banners framing a white dove of peace lit up major thoroughfares. Throughout the city, numerous commercial billboards had been replaced with photographs of cultural and physical activity related to the Games; in one corner, was the omnipresent peace dove. Other enormous images laced the skyline: caricatured line drawings of school children, a family portrait, anonymous faces in a crowd. “Everything is Possible in Peace,” the new billboards proclaimed in a multitude of languages—set against a background of hot pink and vibrant yellow. Along a designated “Route of Friendship” that extended across the southern part of the city, large abstract sculptures of brightly painted concrete by artists of international renown could be observed in various stages of completion. The country's official logo for the Games—“MEXICO68”—whose evident Op Art influence was designed to evoke a moving, modernist feel, was omnipresent; so too were the hundreds of young edecanes (event hostesses), whose uniformed miniskirts and pantsuits were emblazoned with a graphic representation of the logo. The viewer could scarcely have avoided the sensation of a city, a country on the verge of something spectacular.

In December of 1980 three women religious and a lay missioner from the United States were brutally raped and murdered by the Salvadoran military. This outrage brought international attention to the violence in El Salvador and led to a temporary halt in US military aid. The sisters were neither the first nor the most violently killed—8,000 people were massacred in 1980 and 45,000 between 1980 and 1984—but their rape and murder, the murder of Archbishop Romero in March of 1980, and that of six Jesuit priests in 1989 were consistently cited as evidence of the sheer brutality and impunity of the Salvadoran military regime. Killing priests and bishops and raping and murdering nuns signified quite simply that “nothing was sacred.”

El Salvador, the smallest but most densely populated country of Central America, experienced one of Latin America's bloodiest civil wars, accompanied by widespread human rights violations. State repression was especially brutal against opposition groups such as peasant associations, unions, students, and religious people. Twenty-five church people were murdered and many religious workers were persecuted, expelled, or tortured. Several U.S. missionaries were among those murdered or expelled victims. Although the number of religious victims is relatively small in comparison to the tens of thousands of people who were killed in the three civil wars of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, the murders of religious personnel had a profound impact on the religious community in Central America, and particularly in El Salvador. This impact also reached religious groups in the United States. Given the traditional alliance between the Catholic Church and the political and economic elites throughout most of Salvadoran history, the murders of religious leaders by government or government-linked forces symbolized a remarkable shift.