This essay explores the ways in which economic policy might promote peace. It begins by considering what conditions are essential to a peaceful community. Here, I draw on the varied tradition that equates peace with human development. Such a conception is explicitly articulated in the writings collectively known as Catholic Social Thought (CST). It can also be clearly inferred from other quarters, for example, in the writings of the economist Amartya Sen (1999), the Dalai Lama (1999), and in various United Nations Human Development Program reports. Do current economic arrangements support human development and, hence, peace? What changes in economic arrangements help bring us closer to authentic development?

This paper argues that liberationist ethics can contribute method and content to religious discourse on peace and war. The christological grounding for this ethic forces us to take more seriously the will toward peace as capable of being progressively realized in the face of structural sin. Moreover, it seeks to address a Christian audience first that may then join others in prophetic denunciation of cultural attitudes that embody social sin by masking structural violence. Directives for state action may be modified through cultural actors; the state is not usually the immediate addressee. Liberationists move through the social to the political dimension, thus avoiding a tendency to absorb political functions.

Liberation theology's account of how Latin America's rich (the small upper class) exploited the poor (its majority lower class) described things perfectly in El Salvador. On behalf of the crucified majority, Ellacurfa prophetically denounced, for over twenty years, the oppression of the crucifying oligarchy of El Salvador. This paper concerns a part of that denunciation, the part of it for which I, as a North American, as a citizen of the United States, have some responsibility.