This film presents a completely one-sided and often false portrayal of the situation in El Salvador in the late 1970s and 1980s. It offers no context whatsoever, and like so much propaganda out of Hollywood, the movie completely ignores Marxist revolutionary violence in Central America at the time. One is reminded of the movie Outbreak, in which the US Army is portrayed as the villain by Hollywood, when in truth Army doctors saved people from a vicious virus outbreak, as Richard Preston documented in his excellent book, The Hot Zone. It was in fact communist guerrillas who said they would murder anyone found with voting stamp dye on their hands during the El Salvador elections portrayed in the movie. But in a truly heroic act of defiance El Salvadorans stood in long lines for hours to vote under the threat of death by the guerrillas -- not, as the movie would have you believe, the Savadoran army. Similarly, in 1990 Nicaraguans voted against the communist junta led by Daniel Ortega. After watching the movie Romero you would never know these things, but the facts can be easily verified in authoritative historical sources. Of course, as you might expect, the US is another villain in the movie like the brutal El Salvadoran army, and the communists are of course just trying to help the people in a terrible situation. The movie only hints at the role "Liberation Theology" played in the thinking of some Catholic theologians at the time. All in all, this movie is hardly worth the effort and only worth it as a study in propaganda, despite the overtly religious context of the movie. Unless you believe Central America would have been better off under communism, watch this movie with a great deal of skepticism.
