Pope Francis has announced the beatification of a Jesuit priest killed by government forces in El Salvador in 1977 because he spoke out for fair wages for farm workers

The exact spot is marked by a simple, plain memorial, next to a paved road that brightly-coloured buses take to travel between the small Salvadoran town of Aguilares and the even smaller village of El Paisnal. Today, it is lined by small factories, the area recently urbanised, but back in 1977 this was more of a track through sugarcane fields and countryside. Here, in the early evening of 12 March, Fr Rutilio Grande was ambushed in his car and assassinated by Salvadoran security forces, along with two passengers – 72-year-old Manuel Solorzano and Nelson Lemus, just 16 – to whom he was giving a lift.

This cold-blooded murder of a priest – the first but by no means the last in the long, bloody civil war in El Salvador that ended in uneasy peace in 1992 – is said to have caused Grande’s friend, the newly-appointed Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, to find his voice in speaking up fearlessly for those without voices, and against the violence and injustice that polluted their country.