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El Salvador's Civil War
A reminder of one of many massacres that occurred during the Civil War in El Salvador, Central America
Date 1980–1992 Location Central and Eastern El Salvador Result Chapultepec Peace Accords of 1992; restructuring of Salvadorian Armed Forces, the National and Treasury Police are dissolved (new civilian-overseen police created); FMLN becomes a political party, its combatants are exonerated
Belligerents
Salvadoran government forces	FMLN FDR
Commanders and leaders
Roberto D'Aubuisson Álvaro Magaña José Guillermo García José Napoleón Duarte Alfredo Cristiani	Cayetano Carpio† Leonel González Schafik Handal Joaquin Villalobos Nidia Díaz
Strength
50,000+	6,000–15,000
Casualties and losses
7,000 dead	20,000 dead
70,000–80,000 (total dead); 8,000 disappeared

The Salvadoran Civil War (1980–1992) was a conflict in El Salvador between the military-led government of El Salvador backed by the United States government, and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition or 'umbrella organization' of five left-wing guerrilla groups. Significant tensions and violence already existed in the 1970s, before the full-fledged official outbreak of the civil war—which lasted for twelve years. El Salvador's Civil War was the second longest civil war in Latin America after the Guatemalan Civil War.

The conflict ended in the early 1990s. An unknown number of people disappeared, and more than 70,000 were killed.

Background

Following World War II the United States assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system. American leaders tried to reshape the world to fit U.S. needs and standards. Throughout Latin America US policymakers worked to expand U.S. influence. They perceived American security and continuing prosperity as being dependent upon the maintenance of a strong international economy with free access to markets and raw materials.

sought a favorable climate for US business and private investment, encouraged US access to raw materials (especially oil and other strategic minerals), resisted "excessive industrial development," and they condemned government intervention and interference in the economy. According to these officials economic nationalism injured U.S. business.

American leaders, in general, opposed major industrialization plans of the Third World nations and rejected foreign aid programs based on public loans to promote economic growth. Instead they advocated...a mercantilist approach to economic growth in these areas. They wanted to integrate these Third World economies into their U.S.-dominated free trade system.

--CIA Chief Historian, Gerald K. Haines, 1989

Inter-American Economic Affairs: Five years of the Alliance for Progress: an appraisal

During that period the distribution of income became even more unsatisfactory as the gap between the rich and poor widened appreciably. During most of the period a very heavy proportion of the disbursements went to military regimes which had overthrown constitutional governments, and at the end of the period, with almost half of the population under military rule, a significant portion of the aid was going not to assist "free men and free governments" but rather to hold in power regimes to which the people had lost their freedom.

These people will not accept this kind of existence for the next generation. We would not; they will not. There will be changes. So a revolution is coming— a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough— but a revolution which is coming wether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.

--Senator Robert F. Kennedy

The underdeveloped world's growing dissatisfaction over the gap between rich and poor nations will create a fertile breeding ground for insurgencies. These insurgencies have the potential to jeopardize regional stability and our access to vital economic and military resources. This situation will become critical as our Nation and allies and potential adversaries become more and more dependent on these strategic resources.

Our superpower political and military status is dependent upon our ability to maintain the economic base derived from our ability to compete in established and developing economic markets throughout the world. If we are to maintain this status, we must have unimpeded access to these markets and to the resources needed to support our manufacturing requirements.

--U.S. General Alfred M. Gray, Jr., Commandant of the Marine Corps (1987-91)

During World War II, U.S. planners understood that the United States was going to emerge as a world-dominant power and they organized and met in order to deal with this situation. The 'War and Peace Studies' group of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the U.S. State Department declared that in the postwar world the United States would seek "to hold unquestioned power." "It must accept world responsibility. The measure of our victory will be the measure of our domination after victory." Council President Norman Davis, asserted in May 1942 that it was probable "the British Empire as it existed in the past will never reappear and that the United States may have to take it's place." General George V. Strong expressed the opinion that the United States "must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to Pax-Americana." Memorandum E-B19 concluded with a statement on the essentials of United States foreign policy, summarizing: "the component parts of an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States within the non German world."

The blueprint that they developed is what they called "Grand Area" planning. The Grand Area was a region that was to be "strategically necessary for world control." At a minimum, the Grand Area was to include the Middle East, the Western Hemisphere and the Far East. The purpose of the Council's recomendation was: "to set forth the political, military, territorial, and economic requirements of the United States in it's potential leadership of the non-German world area including the as well as the Western Hemisphere and the Far East."

The Economic and Financial group outlined the "Main Lines of Approach" for "US Economic War Aims" within the Grand Area. They defined the "National Interest" as: "1) the full use of the world's economic resources — implying full employment and a reduction in business cycle fluctuation; and, 2) the most efficient use of the world's resources — implying an interchange of goods among all parts of the world according to comparative advantages of each part in producing certain goods." The group also stressed "The role of war aims statements", explaining that: "Statements of war aims have two functions: propaganda and definition of national interests. The latter is undoubtedly the more difficult and is of basic importance, as a failure of propagandistic and promissory war aims to correspond to the accepted view of national interests might jeopardize the entire peace settlement. Therefore, our national interests must first be defined so that promises incompatible with it may be avoided."

The CFR had proposed that economic means would play a key role in integrating the Grand Area into a U.S.-dominated "mercantilist" world system. The Economic and Financial group decided that international economic and financial institutions were needed to assure the proper functioning of the proposed "world economic order." Recomendation B-23 (July 1941) stated that worldwide financial institutions were necessary for the purpose of: "stabilizing currencies and facilitating programs of capital investement for constructive undertakings in backward and underdeveloped regions."

The planners and analysts concluded that: "In the light of this discussion, and assuming that the United States and Great Britain have a somewhat similar interest in a more closely integrated world economic order, certain general suggestions may be made as to the emphasis of future statements of war aims, and points especially to be avoided. 1. National self-determination should be qualified and limited. National freedom retains its great appeal and probably cannot be omitted from any statement of war aims, but a more closely integrated world economic order will almost certainly require some restrictions on sovereignty."

Secretary of War Henry Stimson in May 1945 explained how the United States must eliminate and dismantle regional systems dominated by any other power, particularly the British Empire, while maintaining and extending Washington's system, later known as the "Washington Consensus". He explained with regard to Latin America as follows: "I think that it's not asking too much to have our little region over here which never has bothered anybody."

The United States forced Latin America to accept what was called the "Economic Charter of the Americas", which would work for the "elimination of economic nationalism in all its forms," in direct opposition to the Latin American stand. As the State Department's political advisor, Laurence Duggan warned: "Economic nationalism is the common denominator of the new aspirations for industrialization. Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country's resources should be the people of that country."

In a general statement in 1949 of what came to be known as the "dependency theory", the U.S. State Department's Office of Intelligence Research (OIR) observed that: "the economic development of countries, adapted to the shifting market of the industrial countries of the northern hemisphere and handicapped by a system of large landed estates, was so unbalanced as to prevent the emergence of an economically strong and politically conscious middle class." "Probably the most striking political development in the other American republics during the past half-century is the wide acceptance of the idea that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people."

President Eisenhower's National Security Council warned that: "There is a trend in Latin America toward nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses of the population. Concurrently, there is an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses, with the result that most Latin American governments are under intense domestic political pressures to increase production and to diversify their economies. A realistic and constructive approach to this need which recognizes the importance of bettering conditions for the general population, is essential to arrest the drift in the area toward radical and nationalistic regimes." While aiming to arrest this drift toward nationalism, The United States must] "encourage them by economic assistance and other means to base their economies on a system of private enterprise and, as essential thereto, to create a political and economic climate conducive to private investment, of both domestic and foreign capital, including: Opportunity to earn and in the case of foreign capital to repatriate a reasonable return," and "protection of our raw materials."

In March 1950, the State Department's expert on Soviet Affairs, George Kennan explained how "our" raw materials would be protected: "The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but ... we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful since the Communists are essentially traitors. It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists." According to US planners, "the ideology of Communism which superficially at least can be associated with a rising tide all over the world wherein the common man aspires to higher and wider horizons." Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had lamented that the United States suddenly faced the "tyranny of the weak"— "the increasing power of Latin Americans, Africans, and Southeast Asians to determine the global environment in which North Americans lived."

As Congress prepared to pass the first funds for President Kennedy's 'Alliance for Progress', Senator Albert Gore warned: "I am not sure that we will not widen the gap between the very few, very rich, and the great mass of the majority which, according to Mr. Dulles, contains a majority support for Castro in Cuba." Gore was said to be prophetic. "Alliance for Progress funds in massive amounts went to U.S.-owned firms and to the Central American oligarchs that controlled banks and mercantile businesses, as well as the best tillable land."

The Salvadoran insurgency originated in the 1970s, during which time economic and political tensions in El Salvador were on the rise. These tensions were fueled by increasing economic inequality resulting from the US imposed 'Alliance for Progress,' the problems generated by the 1973 oil crisis, massacre of National University of El Salvador students that were rallying on the streets near the bridge by the Social Security Institute Hospital (1973) and the pressure generated by the thousands of refugees from the 1969 war with Honduras. Fraudulent presidential elections in 1972 and 1977, the failure of the regime's token land reform program in 1976 and the repression of left-leaning political parties generated widespread discontent with the government, leading broad-based political groups to organize mass demonstrations demanding fair elections and improved social conditions. The military government responded to the consequent growing unrest and agitation with state-of-siege declarations, the suspension of constitutional rights, and paramilitary death squads. Security forces often indiscriminately executed unionists, clergy, independent farmers, and university officials. Government forces and paramilitary death squads reportedly killed 687 civilians in 1978 and an additional 1,796 the following year. These actions further alienated the population and prompted many in the Catholic Church to denounce the government violence.

With tensions mounting and the country on the verge of an insurrection, the Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno (Revolutionary Government Junta) overthrew the government in a bloodless coup in October 1979. Following the coup, the junta made promises to improve living standards in the country, hold free elections, and put an end to human rights violations. In addition, the United States began offering large-scale military and economic support to the government following the overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua which heralded the loss of an important strategic ally in the region. The initiatives of the junta were met with stifling opposition by factions within the military and the wealthy elite, which resisted any measures that would be conducive to a redistribution of power. The failure to implement these reforms resulted in widespread discontent with the government and subsequently provoked the five main guerrilla groups in the country to unite into the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

U.S. ambassador Robert White, who often used the phrase "Pol Pot left" to refer to the Salvadoran armed and passive opposition, was more accepting of them after he had left El Salvador and resigned from the Foreign Service. He then told a congressional subcommittee "The guerrilla groups, the revolutionary groups, almost without exception began as associations of teachers, associations of labor unions, compesino unions, or parish organizations which were organized for the definite purpose of getting a schoolhouse up on the market road. When they tried to use their power of association to gain their ends, first they were warned and then they were persecuted and tortured and shot." The U.S. response in the late 1970's, he noted, had been to "reaffirm support for the economic and military elites." "Now there are a substantial number who are fighting, indeed some of the leaders, are fighting because their towns were attacked and they were driven into the countryside and they cannot give up, because if they would give up they would be killed."

Increased insurgency was met with increased reprisals and retaliation against both the guerrillas and suspected civilian sympathizers by government forces. In 1980, which marked a turning point in the scale of the repression, the Salvadoran Army and three main security forces (National Guard, National Police and Treasury Police) murdered at least 11,895 people according to Socorro Jurídico Cristiano. Most of the victims were peasants, trade unionists, teachers, students, journalists, human rights advocates, priests, and anyone working in the interest of the poor majority. More people were killed in El Salvador in 1980 than in all other nations of Latin America combined.

In response to the increased government repression and death squad killings, the Archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Romero called upon the Carter Administration to cut off US military aid to the government. When the United States refused to cut off military aid, Archbishop Romero called upon members of the Salvadoran army and security forces to defy their orders and stop the killings. Shortly afterwards, Romero was assassinated. At Romero's funeral a week later, government snipers in the National Palace and the periphery of the Gerardo Barrios Plaza in front of the National Cathedral killed some forty-two mourners.

In 1981, repression and attacks against the populace by the Salvadoran Army and security forces in both urban and rural areas escalated to unprecedented levels, with the death toll for the first six months of the year nearly eclipsing the total for the entire previous year. Over the course of the year, an estimated 16,000 Salvadoran civilians were killed by government forces.

In late-1981, the newly-created Atlacatl Battalion was deployed in the Morazán Department in the northeastern part of the country, a major stronghold for the FMLN. On December 11, 1981, the Atlacatl Battalion occupied the village of El Mozote and massacred up to 1,000 unarmed civilians in what became known as the El Mozote Massacre. Despite having been initially denied by the Reagan Administration, details became more widely known and the event became recognized as one of the worst atrocities of the conflict.

1979 coup d’état and civil unrest

On 15 October 1979, the civil-military Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno (Revolutionary Government Junta) — JRG — deposed President General Carlos Humberto Romero. Inspired by left-wing politics, and wishing to project a moderately-civilized Salvadoran world image, the JRG — Col. Adolfo Arnaldo Majano Ramo, Col. Jaime Abdul Gutiérrez Avendaño, Guillermo Ungo, Mario Antonio Andino, Román Mayorga Quirós — governed El Salvador from 1979 to 1982; his government effected some land reform (Decree No. 43, 6-XII-1979) restricting landholdings to a hundred-hectare maximum, nationalised the banking, coffee, and sugar industries, and disbanded the paramilitary private death squad ORDEN.

In 1980, José Napoleón Duarte, the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) leader, joined the JRG as provisional-head-of-government until the March 1982 elections, but the JRG was internally divided, vacillating about how strongly to manage the FMLN's armed insurrection and the military's institutional pressure against the JRG's moderates, seen as Marxist sympathizers; U.S. ambassador Robert E. White summarizes contemporary Salvadoran society:

The major, immediate threat to the existence of this government is the right-wing violence. In the city of San Salvador, the hired thugs of the extreme-right kill moderate-left leaders, some of them well-trained Cuban and Nicaraguan terrorists, and blow up government buildings. In the countryside, elements of the security forces torture and kill the campesinos, shoot up their houses and burn their crops. At least two hundred refugees from the countryside arrive daily in the capital city. This campaign of terror is radicalizing the rural areas, just as surely as Somoza's National Guard did in Nicaragua, also backed by the USA Government. Unfortunately, the command structure of the army and the security forces either tolerates or encourages this activity. These senior officers believe, or pretend to believe, that they are eliminating the guerrillas.

According to Americas watch, Duarte " little influence but the armed forces, which were slaughtering Salvadoran civilians by the tens of thousands in 1980 and 1981, with an effective public relations spokesman."

Assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero

While it is clear that our Church has been the victim of persecution. It is not that just any Priest or just any institution has been persecuted. It is that segment of the Church which is on the side of the poor and has come out in their defense that has been persecuted and attacked. Here we once again encounter the key to understanding the persecution of the Church: the poor. It is again the poor who permit us to understand what has happened. That is why the Church has come to understand what persecution of the poor is. The persecution comes about because of the Church's defense of the poor, for assuming the destiny of the poor.

--Archbishop Óscar Romero, 1980

In February 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero published an open letter to President Carter in which he begged him to cut off military aid to the Salvadoran military regime. He advised Carter that "Political power is in the hands of the armed forces. They know only how to repress the people and defend the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy." Romero warned that US support would only "sharpen the injustice and repression against the organizations of the people which repeatedly have been struggling to gain respect for their fundamental human rights." On 24 March 1980, the Archbishop was assassinated while giving a mass — a month after his request, and the day after he called upon members of the Salvadoran soldiers and security force members (National Guard, Treasury Police, and National Police) not to follow orders of their commanders to kill Salvadoran civilians, especially farm workers in connection with the newly announced Phase I of government agrarian reform. At his funeral a week later, government-sponsored sniper(s) in the National Palace and/or posted on the periphery of the Gerardo Barrios Plaza in front of the National Cathedral, were responsible for the shooting deaths/trampling massacre of some forty-two mourners.

On 7 May 1980, former Army Major Roberto D'Aubuisson was arrested with a group of civilians and soldiers at a farm. The raiders found documents connecting him and the civilians as organizers and financiers of the death squad who killed Archbishop Romero, and of plotting a coup d’état against the JRG. Their arrest provoked right-wing terrorist threats and institutional pressures forcing the JRG to release Maj. D’Aubuisson. In 1993, a U.N. investigation confirmed that Maj. D'Aubuisson ordered Archbishop Romero assassinated.

Rise of armed insurgency

I used to work on the hacienda. My job was to take care of the dogs. I gave them meat and bowls of milk, food that I couldn't give my own family. When the dogs were sick, I took them to the to the veterinarian...When my children were sick, the gave me his sympathy, but no medicine as they died. To watch your children die of sickness and hunger while you can do nothing is violence to the spirit. We have suffered that silently for too many years.

--Gabriel, lay minister of one of the base Christian communities in the FMLN zones, 1984

In May 1980, the Salvadoran revolutionary leadership met in Havana, forming the consolidated politico-military command, the DRU — Dirección Revolucionaria Unificada (Unified Revolutionary Directorate). In October, they founded the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (comprising the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional and the Frente Democrático Revolucionario ) honoring insurgent hero Farabundo Martí, whom the Salvadoran National Guard killed in 1932.

In preparing for a mass insurrection against the U.S.-sponsored military government of El Salvador, the FMLN's feasible military victory was a two-pronged strategy of economic sabotage and a prolonged guerrilla war-of-attrition fought with rural guerrillas and urban civil political support; thus, in the 1980–1982 period political violence increased when mass political groups metamorphosed into guerrillas. On 10 January 1981, the FMLN's first, major attack established their control of most of Morazán and Chalatenango departments for the war's duration.

In that same month, New York Times foreign correspondent, Raymond Bonner asked Duarte, "why the guerrillas were in the hills"? Duarte, responded: "Fifty years of lies, fifty years of injustice, fifty years of frustration. This is a history of people starving to death, living in misery. For fifty years the same people had all the power, all the money, all the jobs, all the education, all the opportunities." The response surprised Bonner who did not expect Duarte to offer any justification for the revolution. What surprised Bonner even more was "what he had not said": "He had said nothing about Castro or Cuba. He had not mentioned the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. There was no talk of the Cold War or the Soviet Union. (Duarte would raise those themese later, when they reflected the views of the Reagan administration in Washington.) What Duarte was saying was that the revolution had been caused and fueled by the conditions in El Salvador."

Bonner also investigated the guerilla's human rights record and how much popular support they received from the population. Bonner writes: "One means of trying to assess the level of popular support is to examine the military situation. "In order to conduct a successful revolutionary war popular support must be achieved," Col Waghelstein wrote in his master's thesis for Cornell University. Or to paraphrase Mao, guerrillas are fish that swim in peasant waters. Without peasant support the guerrillas would die — especially in El Salvador, a tiny country with no jungle. Nonetheless, the Salvadoran guerrillas have not only survived but have steadily grown stronger." In contrast, "It's not for a lack of weapons, not for a lack of airplanes, not for a lack of ammunition" that the Salvadoran Army hasn't defeated the revolution, a senior Mexican diplomat observed in 1982. "There's one simple reason: They have no support of the people. The people support the revolution." A U.S. diplomat agreed: "Obviously they have tremendous popular support or they couldn't do what they are doing." "A government's continuity in power is just as dependent on popular support as is the insurgent," Waghelstein concluded in the final paragraph of his thesis. The Salvadoran government's continuity in power has been maintained by the United States since 1979."

On the human rights question, Bonner observes: "It's not that the guerrillas are reluctant to kill. But as a priest who did not support the armed revolution — two of his catechists had been killed by the guerrillas because they were also members of ORDEN — explained the guerrillas killed selectively: soldiers; policemen; members of ORDEN. The government forces, he said, killed randomly. "Maybe they'll kill ten, and one guy was a guerrilla."

U.S.–Salvadoran counterinsurgency strategy

In 1961, the U.S. government began aiding domestic repression in Latin America. In that year, under pressure from the Pentagon, the Latin American military role was changed from "hemispheric defense" to "internal security"; U.S. assistance programs were retooled to strengthen the hold of the local military forces over there own people. For 20 years, the Pentagon has lavished training and equipment on the Latin American military, both at bases in the United States and at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the former Panama Canal Zone.

Under guise of "civic action" programs, Latin American officers have been encouraged to meddle in government and civillian affairs. There has been little screening to weed out the drug racketeers and war criminals, and no indoctrination in civilized standards of warfare. Senior officers indistinguishable from the war criminals hanged at Nuremberg after World War II have passed through the Inter- American Defense College in Washington. Neither in training programs nor thereafter does the Pentagon insist on compliance with the Geneva conventions regarding humane treatment of prisoners and non combatants. Equipment is given without strings.

For the United States, which lead the crusade against Nazi evil, to support the methods of Heinrich Himmler's extermination squads is an outrage.

Behind the Death Squads: An exclusive report on the US role in El Salvador's official terror

by Allan Nairn, 1984

Over the past twenty years, officials of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the US armed forces have:

•conceived and organized ORDEN, the rural paramilitary and intelligence network described by Amnesty International as a movement designed "to use clandestine terror against government opponents." Out of ORDEN grew the notorious "Mano Blanco," the White Hand, which a former US ambassador to El Salvador, Raul H. Castro, has called "nothing less than the birth of the Death Squads";

•conceived and organized ANSESAL, the elite presidential intelligence service that gathered files on Salvadoran dissidents and, in the words of one US official, relied on Death Squads as "the operative arm of intelligence gathering";

•enlisted General Jose Alberto "Chele" Medrano, the founder of ORDEN and ANSESAL, as a CIA agent;

•trained leaders of ORDEN in surveillance techniques and use of automatic weapons, and carried some of these leaders on the CIA payroll;

•provided American technical and intelligence advisers who often worked directly with ANSESAL at its headquarters in the Casa Presidencial;

•supplied ANSESAL, the security forces, and the general staff with electronic, photographic, and personal surveillance of individuals who were later assassinated by Death Squads. According to Colonel Nicolas Carranza, director of the Salvadoran Treasury Police, such intelligence sharing by US agencies continues to this day;

•kept key security officials—including Carranza, Medrano, and others—on the CIA payroll;

•instructed Salvadoran intelligence operatives in the use of investigative techniques, combat weapons, explosives, and interrogation methods that included, according to former Treasury Police agent, "instruction in methods of physical and psychological torture";

Witness To War: An American Doctor in El Salvador, by Dr Charles Clements

Raul Hercules (Guerrilla leader) summoned me to his secret command post for the sector. With my curiosity running high, I was introduced to their radioman, 243 who was monitoring the enemy walkie-talkies with a U.S.– made Bearcat Scanner. As he manipulated the dials to pick up the various frequencies used by the government troops, I heard distinctly American voices issuing coded directives to the troops as well as asking questions of the Salvadoran commanders. Raul Hercules asked me if they were, indeed, asesores norteamericanos (North American advisors), and I said yes and left.

..These men obviously were, at the very minimum, acting in a command and control function. They could not have been any more than a mile or two from us. They and the Salvadoran soldiers were advancing steadily northward against delaying actions by the companeros. The rest of us, maybe four hundred civilians in all, already were in flight up and around the volcano to the northeast and Palo Grande.

General Robert Porter, Commander in Chief, United States Southern Command, told Congress in 1968 that United States military assistance and AID public safety projects in Latin America were "an insurance policy protecting our vast private investment in an area of tremendous trade and strategic value to our country."

In the "Rockefeller report on Latin America," the National Security Council warned: "If the United States cannot maintain a constructive relationship in the Western Hemisphere, we will hardly be able to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world." As National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger put it: "If we cannot manage Central America, it will be impossible to convince threatened nations in the Persian Gulf and in other places that we know how to manage the Global Equilibrium."

In El Salvador, the US State Department, the CIA, the Green Berets, and the Agency for International Development (AID) all participated in the effort to suppress dissent. Under US government AID programs (USAID), "public safety missions" organized, trained, armed, financed and advised local police forces in Latin America as standing death squads. The United States was "developing within the civil security forces ... an investigative capability for detecting criminal and/or subversive individuals and organizations and neutralizing their activities," wrote Byron Engle, director of the AID Public Safety Program, in a 1967 memo to his staff. "This requires a carefully integrated effort between the investigative element and the regular police, paramilitary or military force, operating separately or in conjunction with each other." Engle, himself a former CIA official, referred to 33 countries, including El Salvador, in which the Public Safety Program was operating. The US State Department instructed it's security forces: "The police will normally be those who first sense internal order problems and first detect discontent among people. They are the eyes and ears of the government and should serve as one of the major means by which the government assures itself of acceptance by the majority. Effective policing is like 'preventive medicine.' The police can deal with threats to internal order in their formative states. Should they not be prepared to do this, 'major surgery' may be required in the sense that considerable force would be needed to redress those threats."

The U.S. Army School of the Americas placed great weight on ideological conditioning and "steeped young Latin American officers in the early-1950-era anti-Communist dogma that subversive infiltrators could be anywhere." On the lessons taught, U.S. Army Major Joseph Blair, a former director of instruction at the school who served from 1986-89, said: "The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse, you use false imprisonment, you use threats to family members, you use virtually any method necessary to get what you want... and killing. If there's someone you dont want you kill them. If you cant get the information you want, if you cant get that person to shut up or to stop what they're doing you simply assassinate them, and you assassinate them with one of your death squads."

The Santa Fe Report, prepared for the Council for Inter-American Security and presented in 1980 to the Republican Platform Committee by a team of ultraconservative advisors, states that "U.S. foreign policy must begin to counter (not react against) liberation theology as it is utilized in Latin America by the 'liberation theology' clergy. Unfortunately, Marxist-Leninist forces have utilized the church as a political weapon against private property and productive capitalism by infiltrating the religious community with ideas that are less Christian than communist." "Sources at the say that when Honduran and Colombian soldiers go through the urban-combat exercise with blanks in their weapons, half the time the village priest (played by a U.S. Army chaplain) is killed or roughed up," Newsweek reported. An official set of School of the Americas talking points in 1999 declares: "Liberation Theology — in Latin America..was defeated with the assistance of the U.S. Army."

On September 20, 1996 the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals that were used at the US Army School of the Americas and distributed to thousands of military officers from 11 South and Central American countries, including Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama, where the U.S. military was heavily involved in counterinsurgency. These manuals advocated targeting civilians, extrajudicial executions, torture, false imprisonment, and extortion.

In "Teaching Human Rights Violations", a Washington Post editorial commented on its report, "US instructed Latins on Executions, Torture:" The U.S. Army advocacy of terror methods reaches far beyond the question of whether or not the U.S. Army School of the Americas ought to be shut down {"Army Instructed Latins on Executions, Torture," front page, Sept. 21}. It has to do with U.S. complicity in human rights crimes." In "School of the Dictators", the Editors of the New York Times commented: "Americans can now read for themselves some of the noxious lessons the United States Army taught to thousands of Latin American military and police officers at the School of the Americas during the 1980's. A training manual recently released by the Pentagon recommended interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned. Such practices, which some of the school's graduates enthusiastically applied once they returned home, violate basic human rights and the Army's own rules of procedure. They also defy the professed goals of American foreign policy and foreign military training programs."

Beginning with the Carter Administration and continued by the Reagan and Bush administrations, the U.S. sent seven billion dollars of foreign and military aid to El Salvador in twelve years. The silent-partner role of the United States in El Salvador's Civil War became public when the National Guard raped and murdered four American nuns and a laywoman on December 2, 1980; Maryknoll missionary nuns Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, and Ursuline nun Dorothy Kazel, and laywoman Jean Donovan were on a Catholic relief mission providing food, shelter, transport, medical care, and burial to death squad victims.

President Carter ignored Archbishop Romero's plea and authorized $5.7 million in military assistance to "strengthen the Army's key role in reforms." Critics of the aid charged that "it would legitimate what has become dictatorial violence and that political power in El Salvador lay with old-line military leaders in government positions who practice a policy of 'reform with repression.'" A prominent Catholic spokesman insisted that "any military aid you send to El Salvador ends up in the hands of the military and paramilitary rightest groups who are themselves at the root of the problems of the country."

William Bowdler, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs - an architect of "dealing with subversion" in Central America - told an audience of Latin American specialists: "Our position is clear. We believe the junta's program, which is being implemented now, offers the best chance for social change, political liberalization and respect for human rights in El Salvador." The Carter Administration continued to provide military assistance to the Salvadoran armed forces, despite continuing repression of opposition groups, which was aimed at preventing at all costs "another Nicaragua."

As the assault on the population was reaching its peak, the National Guard and the paramilitary Organización Nacional Democrática (ORDEN) carried out a huge massacre at the Sumpul River on May 14, 1980, in which at least 300 civilians were slaughtered, mostly woman and children. When the villagers were attempting to escape domestic state-terror by crossing the river they were prevented from reaching the other side by the Honduran armed forces "and then killed by Salvadorian troops who fired on them in cold blood." Over 20,000 peasants that fled had been living in makeshift refugee centers on the Honduran border in conditions of poverty, starvation and disease. The army and death squads forced many of them to flee to the United States but most were denied asylum.

On January 17–18, 1981, a US congressional delegation visited the refugee camps on a fact finding mission and submitted a report to Congress. The delegation concluded that "the Salvadoran method of 'drying up the ocean' is to eliminate entire villages from the map, to isolate the guerrillas, and deny them any rural base off which they can feed."

In one of its last acts, the outgoing Carter administration increased military aid to the Salvadoran armed forces to $10 million which included $5 million in rifles, ammunition, grenades and helicopters. The administration claimed that the regime had taken "positive steps" to investigate the murder of four American nuns but this was disputed by US Ambassador, Robert E. White, who said that he could find no evidence the junta was "conducting a serious investigation."

In 1981, in a demonstration of the army-linked repression that turned criticism of the right into a capital offense, the death squad bureaucracy put a bounty on the heads of 138 leftists by publishing a list of their names and describing them as wanted traitors.

In response to enormous gains by the rebels, the incoming Reagan administration significantly increased US military assistance to the Salvadoran security apparatus. "The escalating setbacks to our interests abroad," Secretary of State Alexander Haig proclaimed when the administration took office in 1981, "and the so-called wars of national liberation, are putting in jeopardy our ability to influence world events." "When you get down to it, we are here to protect American national interests and we have to rely on local armies to help us do that," said a senior American military adviser when asked to explain the rationale behind American military assistance.

In January 1981, the United States took over the training of the Salvadoran armed forces and the strategic planning of the war. At the Salvadoran High Command, U.S. Army combat and combat support majors and lieutenant colonels prosecuted the war operationally and with intelligence.

A review of the war in 1985 by the Jesuit Central American University pointed out: "The United States has always exercised tremendous influence over El Salvador's internal affairs. But the word "influence" no longer adequately describes the extent of US control. Since 1981, the United States has operated as a kind of "super government" in El Salvador."

In an interview just 2 weeks after his inauguration, Duarte admitted: "Aid is given under such conditions that its use is really decided by the Americans and not by us. Decisions like how many planes or helicopters we buy, how we spend our money, how many trucks we need, how many bullets and of what calibre, how many pairs of boots and where our priorities should be - all of that. It is decided by the ones who give the money. And all of the money is spent over there. We never see a penny of it, because everything arrives here already paid for."

Americas Watch: Settling into routine: human rights abuses in Duarte's second year

In 1984, the US Embassy had characterized the civilians residing in FMLN zones as "masas," a term that originated with the guerrillas. According to the Embassy, these masas were "something other than innocent civilian bystanders" because it said they provided "logistical support" for the guerrillas and "mingled" with them.

As best the Americas Watch could determine, the "logistical support" consisted principally in maintaining their traditional subsistence farming, thereby providing themselves and the guerrillas with a source of food. "Mingling" consisted principally in trying to remain in or near their original communities and not joining the vast refugee and displaced person populations.

Accordingly, Americas Watch criticized the Embassy's stand. We said that calling these civilians "something other than innocent civilian bystanders" implied they were legitimate targets for attack.

We did back the guys who went after the bad guys. And defined 'bad guys' pretty broadly.

--Lawrence Korb, Assistant Secretary of Defense (1981-85)

A 1985 Americas Watch report revealed a US designed military strategy called "draining the sea". The primary target was the civilian population – displacing them in order to remove any possible base of support for the rebels. Aryeh Neier, the executive director of the Committee wrote: "This may be an effective strategy for winning the war. It is, however, a strategy that involves the use of terror tactics — bombings, strafings, shellings and, occasionally, massacres of civilians." Furthermore, in its annual report of 1985, the Committee noted that the US administration openly stated its view that Salvadoran civilians living in the liberated zones were legitimate targets for attack.

Don W. Lewis, rector of St. Edmund's Episcopal Church, San Marino, visited El Salvador as part of a six-member ecumenical delegation convened by Proyecto Pastoral, a Central American refugee support organization of the Los Angeles Jesuit community. In an article in the Los Angeles Times, Lewis observes:

"Many Americans may remember Operation Phoenix, the South Vietnamese program to identify Viet Cong, which some said was nothing more than an assassination program. Too few of us know that El Salvador had its own Operation Phoenix in 1986: a massive and brutal counterinsurgency campaign of the Salvadoran army, orchestrated by U.S. advisers and modeled after the Vietnam operation. The goal of the Salvadoran operation was twofold. First, to burn all vegetation, including subsistence crops. Second, to destroy everything else, including livestock and people who couldn't run fast enough, that might be of use to those who oppose the Salvadoran armed forces. In the Guazapa area the operation was judged a huge "success." In the first three months, 200 civilians were killed. By the end of the year, 6,000 civilians had been driven into exile and their homes, crops and livestock destroyed. Similar "successes" in dozens of other areas continue a process begun in 1980 that has left 1 million of El Salvador's 5 million people internally displaced. Another 1 million fled to the United States and Canada--a refugee rate exceeded, if anywhere, only in Afghanistan. Driving these Salvadorans into exile was not enough. It has been necessary to keep them in exile if the guerrillas are to be starved out. This the Salvadoran military has done by regular high-speed strafing runs employing American-made and American-supplied A-37 jet aircraft and by frequent forays through the target regions, killing, maiming and arresting. The human cost is high. Guarjila, a village of 500 children, 300 women and 200 men, was sprayed with machine-gun and automatic-rifle fire on the day before our delegation visited it. Others like them, including those living in fear in Los Angeles, will start to return home as soon as the United States decides that 105% of El Salvador's state budget is too much American money to spend on driving that little country's people into exile."

In January 1986, the Reagan Administration began an unrestricted $5 million program to train and equip the Salvadoran Treasury Police, National Guard and National Police, who were behind much of the death squad killing, torturing, and "disappearing" in the country. One U.S. military adviser was assigned to each of the three security forces. Other aid included trucks and police cars, car and hand held radios and other police equipment. In Washington, a Democratic congressional aide said the security force training program "might well be a violation of the law, but that law's been gotten around so many times that it doesn't mean anything any more." Americas Watch objected to the US assistance program, warning that "training the police is an extremely dangerous undertaking by the United States, which will become tarred in with the brush of the abuses committed by the security forces."

Although terror tactics such as "draining the sea" or "Operation Phoenix" (Christian Science Monitor) saved the Salvadoran military regime from insurrection, by the late 1980's, "the 51,000-man Salvadorean Army, trained, financed, and advised by the US, proved unable to check the guerrillas, estimated at less than 10,000 men."

On December 8, 1990, the Bush Administration announced that it would rush $48.1 million in military assistance to the Salvadoran armed forces which left $10 million in military aid for the rest of fiscal 1991.

Despite the documentation of ongoing human rights violations against civilians perpetrated by the military and security forces; and despite the fact that the State Department had been mandated to monitor and report abuses by both the armed forces and the FMLN; President Bush authorized the release of $42.5 million in military assistance for the government of El Salvador on Jan. 15, 1991.

Presidency of José Napoleón Duarte

The administration approached the elections with two goals: ensuring that technically credible elections were held and that the Christian Democratic candidate, Jose Napoleon Duarte, won. The administration could not conceive of an El Salvador in which the military was not the dominant actor, the economic elite no longer held the national economy in its hands, the left was incorporated into the political system, and all Salvadorans actually had both the formal and substantial possibility of political participation. In short, the US government had no real conception of democracy in El Salvador.

The underlying U.S. goal is maintaining the basic societal orders of particular Latin American countries approximately as they are ensuring that the economics are not drastically rearranged and that the power relations of the various social sectors are not turned upside down..The underlying objective is to maintain the basic order of what, historically at least, are quite undemocratic societies. The deep fear in the United States government of populist-based change in Latin America with all its implications for upsetting established economic and political orders and heading off in a leftist direction leads to an emphasis on incremental change from the top down.

The Reagan administration came to adopt pro-democracy policies as a means of relieving pressure for more radical change, but inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied.

--Thomas Carothers, who is currently the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where he is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program. While serving in the State Department, he worked with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on "democracy enhancement" programs in Latin America from 1985-1988.

The Los Angeles Times: Thousands of Salvadorans March to Protest Duarte's Economic Austerity Plan

In the biggest demonstration here in six years, thousands of workers, teachers, farmers and government employees marched through the capital Friday protesting President Jose Napoleon Duarte's economic austerity plan and calling for peace talks with anti-government guerrillas. The crowd, which stretched for dozens of blocks, was difficult to measure, but estimates ranged from 15,000 to 50,000. Either figure would make it the largest demonstration that this city has seen since the turbulent years of 1979 and 1980 and the biggest challenge to Duarte since he assumed the presidency in May, 1984.

Currency Devalued

Last month, Duarte announced a sweeping economic package, including a currency devaluation, increases in gasoline prices, import taxes, import restrictions and a few price freezes on basic goods. The plan was drawn up with the help of U.S. economic advisers, who suggested that U.S. aid might be limited if the package were not implemented.

In December 1980, Jose Napoleon Duarte became President— "exercising little influence but providing the armed forces, which were slaughtering Salvadoran civilians by the tens of thousands in 1980 and 1981, with an effective public relations spokesman," Americas Watch observes.

Ambassedor White, in a confidential 1980 cable on "El Salvador, One year After the Coup," stated that "Plainly put, the military have the power: no government can exist without their approval," and members of the security forces and army "continue to hunt down and kill suspected leftist subversives, often on the basis of flimsy evidence."

In October 1980, the director of AIFLD stated in a confidential memorandum that "Government here operates with no real popular support...In the past several months, Duarte and company have sided with the conservative military (perhaps because this group holds the key to power now), which has hurt their image among the population...The Conservative officials who look to a military solution are very much in control." Raymond Bonner adds: "No one in Washington was telling Congress or the American people this."

Elections were interrupted with right-wing paramilitary attacks and FMLN-suggested boycotts. El Salvador's National Federation of Lawyers, which represented all of the country's bar associations, declined an invitation to work with the Central Elections Council in drafting the 1982 electoral law. The lawyers said that there could not be meaningful elections while there was a state of siege, which suspended such constitutional rights as freedom of speech and press and prohibits mass demonstrations and rallies. The archconservative News-Gazette, the country's English-language weekly, endorsed the national bar association's position. "Elections are held in times of war, but not in the midst of battles, nor on the front lines, and all El Salvador is the front line in this war," the paper maintained in an editorial. "Nor do we believe that free elections can be held while the country is in a state of siege and restrictions on individual liberty and freedom of expression exist."

Maria Julia Hemandez, a leading Salvadoran human rights monitor said "These elections have been imposed by the U.S. State Department to legitimize the government so it can get more U.S. military aid. All this will mean is more deaths, more violations of human rights."

In 1984, Christian Democrat José Napoleón Duarte won the presidency (with 54% of the votes) against Army Major Roberto d’Aubuisson, of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). The elections were held under military rule and no left-leaning parties were permitted to participate in the electoral process. Lord Chitnis, spokesman for the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group which observed the elections noted that: "The election in El Salvador was so fundamentally flawed as to be invalid...First, and crucial to the whole standing of the exercise, was the fact that no politicians to the left of the Christian Democrats (PDC), and not all of them, were free to contest the election. Exclusion of the FDR made the election a contest of vague promises and inferences by two candidates who already bore a heavy responsibility for the situation in which El Salvador finds itself today. Applied to this country, the choice on offer was that between an impotent and split Conservative Party under the thumb of the military, and a murderous version of the National Front." The 1984 elections, he concluded, were held in an "atmosphere of terror and despair, of macabre rumour and grisly reality."

Fearful of a d’Aubuisson presidency for public relations purposes, the CIA financed Duarte's campaign with some two million dollars. As the authors of a University of El Salvador report noted: "In the old days, the armed forces ran the country for the benefit of the oligarchy; now the Christian Democratic Party runs the country for the benefit of the Reagan administration. By implementing an economic strategy that runs counter to the traditional doctrines of his party, Duarte has accepted a trade-off, opting for power (which is, in any case, more apparent than real) at the expense of his original programme."

"Duarte is the man who has been able to open the coffers of the Congress, and the military realizes that," the Christian Science Monitor reports: "They wont get rid of the goose that is laying golden eggs. He's the democratic facade so everybody doesnt have to worry because there's a democratic president there." Similarly, "the economic right — the extremely conservative Salvadoran private sector — are realizing that Duarte can deliver the goods." "Strangely, for a populist politician, President Duarte brags, in full-page newspaper ads, not about what he has done for his poor supporters, but about what he has done for his arch enemies— the coffee growers."

The London Economist noted renewed threats by death squads that people at the university leave the country or be assassinated: "This is a reminder that the right- wing terror machine is still in running order. President Jose Napoleon Duarte has been in office for more than a year, but nobody has yet been convicted for the tens of thousands of murders committed since 1979 by military-manned death squads. He has noticeably shifted to the right, reassuring the army and the businessmen that his aims are really the same as theirs." The director of the National Association of Private Enterprise said: "The man has been politically educated." The army too "has come to apreciate the president's skill, both as a tactician who can use peace talks to outmanoeuvre the guerrillas and as a salesman in Washington."

In 1984, Amnesty International reported that it had received: "regular, often daily, reports identifying El Salvador's regular security and military units as responsible for the torture, "disappearance" and killing of non- combatant civilians from all sectors of Salvadorean society. A number of patients have allegedly been removed from their beds or operating theaters and tortured and murdered. Types of torture reported by those who have survived arrest and interrogation included beatings, sexual abuse, use of chemicals to disorient, mock executions, and the burning of flesh with sulphuric acid."

In it's 10th annual report on human rights in Latin America for 1985, The Council on Hemispheric Affairs concluded that "there were only two governments in the hemisphere that abducted killed and tortured political opponents on a systematic and widespread basis. Thus Guatemala and El Salvador again - for the sixth consecutive year - receive COHA's designation as the Hemisphere's worst human rights offenders."

Human Rights Commission of El Salvador

In 1986, a major earthquake punctuated the war; and for three years fighting lessened and calls for negotiation grew within the context of the rising social movement, The National Debate for Peace; also the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador-non governmental (CDHES) published a 165-page report documenting the routine use of forty types of torture applied to political prisoners in the Mariona men's prison, and that U.S. military advisers often supervised and sometimes participated in said interrogations.

On 26 October 1987, Herbert Ernesto Anaya, head of the CDHES, was assassinated. His killing provoked four days' of political protest — during which his cadaver was displayed before the U.S. embassy and then before the Salvadoran armed forces headquarters. The National Union of Salvadoran Workers said: Those who bear sole responsibility for this crime are José Napoleón Duarte, the U.S. embassy ... and the high command of the armed forces. In its report the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, established as part of the El Salvador peace agreement, stated that it could not establish for sure whether the death squads, the Salvadoran Army or the FMLN was responsible for Anaya's death.

Moreover, the FMLN and the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) also protested Mr. Anaya's assassination by suspending negotiations with the Duarte Government on 29 October 1987. The same day, Reni Roldán resigned from the Commission of National Reconciliation, saying: The murder of Anaya, the disappearance of university labor leader Salvador Ubau, and other events do not seem to be isolated incidents. They are all part of an institutionalized pattern of conduct. Mr. Anaya's assassination evoked international indignation: the West German Government, the West German Social Democratic Party, and the French Government asked President Duarte to clarify the circumstances of the crime. United Nations Secretary General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Americas Watch, Amnesty International, and other organizations protested against the assassination of the leader of the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador.

Human Rights Abuses

Numbers are down and the bodies are dropped discreetly at night into the middle of Lake Ilopango and only rarely wash up onto the shore to remind bathers that the repression is still going on. The death squads did exactly what they were supposed to do: they decapitated the trade unions and mass organizations that seemed in danger of setting off an urban insurrection at the beginning of the decade. The survivors had either to flee the country or join the guerrillas.

The practice, well known to Vietnam aficionados and brought to El Salvador by US military advisers, is to drive civilians out of the zones and leave the guerrillas cut off from their support structure. Without the 'sea' (people), wrote Chairman Mao, the 'fish' (guerrillas) cannot survive. So the sea must be drained.

The peasants say they can always tell when there is going to be an attack. First comes a 'push and pull' reconnaissance flight, then an A-37 Dragonfly in a flat dive. And they say the bombs are so big — often 500 pounds — that they can tell where they are going to land and have about 30 seconds to find cover. If it is a fragmentation bomb that explodes in the air and blasts sharpnel in all directions, they can only trust to God. Then comes the 'guinda', the flight from follow-up sweeps by regular infantry. The peasants grab what they can and run off to secret caves and burrows where they may spend days on end, too frightened to venture out for food and water. Meanwhile, the troops go through their villages, burning crops, killing livestock, tearing down houses, ripping up water pipes, and even planting hideous booby traps in the ruins they leave behind.

The army learnt its tricks at American counter-insurgency schools in Panama and the United States. "We learnt from you", a death squad member once told an American reporter, "we learnt from you the methods, like blowtorches in the armpits, shots in the balls." And political prisoners often insist they were tortured by foreigners, some Argentine, others maybe American.

--The Spectator: Bach and War in El Salvador, May 10, 1986

In 1986 Amnesty International continued to receive reports of human rights violations, "including arbitrary detentions, 'disappearances', individual death-squad killings and the extrajudicial execution of non-combatant civilians. Such violations, however, appear to be taking place on a more selective basis against people suspected of being in opposition to the present government or of being sympathetic to those that are. Trade unionists, human rights workers and those helping refugees were targets."

Although death squad killings were down significantly from the early 1980's, human rights analysts said the military was successful in wiping out opposition movements and leaving large sectors of the population too scared to participate in opposition political activity. "They don`t have to kill as many people as they used to. The occasional body turns up and everyone gets the message, 'We're still here, we're still watching you,'" said a church worker.

An Oxfam study of the US designed land reform program that began in 1980 concluded that "the majority of the rural population — landless and poorest — are excluded from any potential benefits under the present land reform." Peasants in cooperatives believe "that they have simply changed patronos, that the agrarian reform does not represent a substantial change in their lives." Key Salvadoran officials regard its major component as a "misguided and US imposed initiative." The land reform program "aggravates the most serious agrarian problems of El Salvador," the authors said. Oxfam also noted that "The regions most directly affected by Decree 207 coincide almost identically with the areas of greatest repression against peasants by government security forces."

The Reagan administration claimed that US military aid to the security forces would moderate their human rights abuses but Americas Watch pointed out that U.S. officials collaborated with the Treasury Police in death squad activities: "Menendez de Iglesias, was arrested in September 1985..The role of the U.S. in her ordeal was outlined in an article in the Sunday Times of London:" "The evidence shows that she was illegally arrested and interrogated by U.S. officials, handed over to the Salvadoran Treasury Police -- a notoriously brutal security force -- repeatedly raped and tortured while in detention and further questioned by U.S. officials while in custody. Menendez...was interrogated for four hours in the embassy by four American security agents who told her that if she did not "collaborate" they would use "all their power" to destroy her. Mrs. Menendez, who suffers from a heart condition, thought she was going to die. She was refused the attendance of a Priest. "All Priests are Communists," said her captors. During her detention by the Treasury police, she was interrogated and threatened on three occasions by American security agents, who told her: "We pay the bills. We have a lot of power." During her interrogation by the Treasury Police, Menendez was made to sign a succession of pieces of paper and, after two weeks of torture, "confessed" to being a guerrilla sympathizer."

Death squad activities began to pick up in late 1987 after the signing of the Central American Peace Agreement and continued to creep upward in 1988. In "El Salvador: "death squads"--a government strategy," Amnesty International reported: "Forces involved include all branches of the Salvadorian security apparatus, including the navy, air force and army and the security services, --- including the National Guard, the National Police and the Treasury Police. Personnel from these units have carried out torture and extrajudicial execution and have been responsible for "disappearances" - both while in uniform and in plain clothes. The death squad style is to operate in secret but to leave mutilated bodies of victims as a means of terrifying the population. Victims are customarily found mutilated, decapitated, dismembered, strangled or showing marks of torture or rape."

According to Maria Julia Hernandez, director of the Roman Catholic Church's human rights office, the Tute- la Legal, the death squads always appeared when opposition increased and the government couldnt control it.

In "El Salvador's Decade of Terror: Human Rights Since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero," Human Rights Watch reported: "During the Reagan years, in particular, not only did the United States fail to press for improvements ... but, in an effort to maintain backing for U.S. policy, it misrepresented the record of the Salvadoran government, and smeared critics who challenged that record. In so doing, the Administration needlessly polarized the debate in the United States, and did a grave injustice to the thousands of civilian victims of Government terror in El Salvador."

On 16 November 1989, the US-backed Atlacatl Battalion summarily killed six Jesuit priests — Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Joaquín López y López, Juan Ramón Moreno, and Amando López — and their housekeepers (a mother and daughter, Elba Ramos and Celia Marisela Ramos). In the middle of the night, the six priests were dragged from their beds and then shot in the head. "They were assassinated with lavish barbarity" said the Rev. Jose Maria Tojeira, the Jesuit Provincial for Central America. "For example, they took out their brains." The mother and daughter were found shot to death in the bed they shared. The Atlacatl Battalion were under the tutelage of U.S. special forces just 48 hours before they killed the six priests and two women. The bishops were declared an enemy of the state for taking up the Vatican's call to speek out against institutionalized violence and to work for the "preferential option of the poor," a religious current that became known as "liberation theology."

Amnesty International reported a significant upsurge in the number of killings by death squads in 1990 despite a U.N. Agreement on Human Rights signed July 26 by the government of President Alfredo Cristiani and the guerrilla group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

In its annual report for 1991, Human Rights Watch observes: "The human rights situation remained grim, characterized by the steady diet of assassinations, abductions and violations of the laws of war..Corpses mutilated beyond recognition continued to appear along roadsides or were dumped in local cemeteries, suggesting ongoing activities of death squads. Despite Congress's decision in 1990 to withhold fifty percent of El Salvador's military aid as a protest over the Jesuit murders, the Bush Administration was reluctant to deviate from the long-standing U.S. policy of support for the Salvadoran armed forces. On June 27 , the Administration announced that it was releasing $21 million, or half of the withheld aid, to purchase spare parts and "non-lethal" equipment such as medical supplies and rations. The Administration hoped to blunt congressional criticism by pledging that none of the aid would go for arms and ammunition, studiously avoiding mention that about eighty million dollars of undisbursed military aid from previous years remained in the pipeline and was available for expenditure on lethal items."

Human Rights Watch also noted that U.S. actions on the Jesuit case aided the efforts of the Salvadoran military to limit the scope of the investigation. The Committee advised the administration "to release documents on the Jesuit case currently withheld on grounds of national security – documents which would show how much the U.S. Embassy, State Department and intelligence agencies knew about the murders before and after they occurred."

Peace accords

In November 1989, the FMLN captured parts of San Salvador city, though they failed to take power. Eventually, by April 1991, negotiations resumed, resulting in a truce that successfully concluded in January 1992, bringing about the war's end.

On 16 January 1992, the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City, to bring peace to El Salvador,. The Armed Forces were regulated, a civilian police force was established, the FMLN metamorphosed from a guerrilla army to a political party, and an amnesty law was legislated in 1993.

Aftermath

Central America today is experiencing globalization, a more devastating pillage than what its people underwent 500 years ago with the conquest and colonization. a strong transnational state that dictates economic policy and plans resource allocation. The IMF, World Bank, Interamerican Development Bank, US Agency for International Development, European Community, UN Development Program and their ilk are all state or interstate institutions of a transnational character that have much greater economic influence over our countries than the market.

--Report at Jesuit Conference in San Salvador

Stabilisation and structural adjustment have brought magnificent returns to the rich— in a continent with the world's most unequal distribution of income. Failures to act aggressively on poverty will likely encourage distributive conflicts, prompting discontent and perhaps even a return to populism, dirigisme and chaos.

--The World Bank, 1993

The peace process set up under the Chapultepec Accords was monitored by the United Nations from 1991 until June 1997 when it closed its special monitoring mission in El Salvador.

During the 2004 elections, White House Special Assistant Otto Reich gave a phone-in press conference at ARENA party headquarters. He reportedly said he was worried about the impact an FMLN win could have on the country's "economic, commercial, and migratory relations with the United States." In February 2004, Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega told voters to "consider what kind of a relationship they want a new administration to have with us." He met with all the candidates except Schafik Handal, the FMLN candidate. This prompted 28 US Congress members to send a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell saying Mr. Noriega "crossed a boundary" and that his remarks were perceived as "interference in Salvadoran electoral affairs." A week later, two US congressmen blasted Reich's comments as inflammatory.

Truth Commission

At war's end, the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador registered more than 22,000 complaints of political violence in El Salvador, between January 1980 and July 1991, 60 percent about summary killing, 25 percent about kidnapping, and 20 percent about torture. These complaints attributed almost 85 percent of the violence to State agents, private paramilitary groups, and the death squads. The Salvadoran armed forces were accused in 60 per cent of the complaints, the security forces in 25 percent, military escorts and civil defense units in 20 percent of complaints, the death squads in more than 10 percent, and the FMLN in 5 percent. The Truth Commission could collect only a significant sample of the full number of potential complaints, having had only three months to collect it.

The retrospective assessments of human rights organizations and truth commissions document and reiterate that most violence was committed by the National Guard and other military bodies. Amnesty International's 1985 annual report likewise stated that that many of the 70,000 people killed in the preceding five years had been murdered by government forces, who openly dumped the mutilated corpses, in an apparent effort to terrorize the population. More than 70,000 people were killed, many in the course of gross violation of their human rights. More than 25 per cent of the populace was displaced as refugees before the civil warriors signed a U.N. peace treaty in 1992.

Despite mostly killing peasants, the Government readily killed any opponent they suspected of sympathy with the guerrillas — clergy (men and women), church lay workers, political activists, journalists, labor unionists (leaders, rank-and-file), medical workers, liberal students and teachers, and human-rights monitors. The State's terrorism was effected by the security forces, the Army, the National Guard, and the Treasury Police; yet it was the paramilitary death squads who gave the Government plausible deniability of, and accountability for, the political killings. Typically, a death squad dressed in civilian clothes and traveled in anonymous vehicles (dark windows, blank license plates). Their terrorism comprised publishing future-victim death lists, delivering coffins to said future victims, and sending the target-person an invitation to his/her own funeral. Cynthia Arnson, a Latin American-affairs writer for Human Rights Watch, says: the objective of death-squad-terror seemed not only to eliminate opponents, but also, through torture and the gruesome disfigurement of bodies, to terrorize the population. In the mid-1980s, state terror against Salvadorans became open — indiscriminate bombing from military airplanes, planted mines, and the harassment of national and international medical personnel; all indicate that, although death rates attributable to the death squads have declined in El Salvador since 1983, non-combatant victims of the civil war have increased dramatically.

In addition, the FMLN continuously violated the human rights of many Salvadorans and other individuals identified as right-wing supporters, military targets, pro-government politicians, intellectuals, public officials, and judges. These violations included kidnapping, bombings, rape, and killing.

Military reform

In accordance with the peace agreements, the constitution was amended to prohibit the military from playing an internal security role except under extraordinary circumstances. During the period of fulfilling of the peace agreements, the Minister of Defense was General Humberto Corado Figueroa. Demobilization of Salvadoran military forces generally proceeded on schedule throughout the process. The Treasury Police and National Guard were abolished, and military intelligence functions were transferred to civilian control. By 1993 — nine months ahead of schedule — the military had cut personnel from a wartime high of 63,000 to the level of 32,000 required by the peace accords. By 1999, ESAF strength stood at less than 15,000, including uniformed and non-uniformed personnel, consisting of personnel in the army, navy, and air force. A purge of military officers accused of human rights abuses and corruption was completed in 1993 in compliance with the Ad Hoc Committee's recommendations.

National Civilian Police

The new civilian police force, created to replace the discredited public security forces, deployed its first officers in March 1993, and was present throughout the country by the end of 1994. As of 1999, the PNC had over 18,000 officers. The PNC faced many challenges in building a completely new police force. With common crime rising dramatically since the end of the war, over 500 PNC officers had been killed in the line of duty by late 1998. PNC officers also have arrested a number of their own in connection with various high-profile crimes, and a "purification" process to weed out unfit personnel from throughout the force was undertaken in late 2000.

Alleged external support for the FLMN

You may have to sell in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine.

--Samuel Huntington, Harvard Government Proffessor, Foreign Policy Advisor, White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council (1977-79)

What we are watching is a four-phased operation of which phase one has already been completed — the seizure of Nicaragua, next is El Salvador, to be followed by Honduras and Guatemala. It's clear and explicit. I wouldn't call it necessarily a domino theory. I would call it a priority target list — a hit list, if you will — for the ultimate takeover of Central America.

--Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Mar 19, 1981

The Washington Post: White Paper on El Salvador is Faulty

The State Department's white paper on El Salvador, published in February, contains factual errors, misleading statements and unresolved ambiguities that raise questions about the administration's interpretation of participation by communist countries in the Salvadoran civil war.

The contention of the white paper that the Salvadoran rebels were enjoying the benefits of "nearly 200 tons" of communist-supplied arms and materiel is not supported anywhere in these documents, and is implicitly refuted by many of them. In document after document there are reports of rebels short of arms, or looking for ways to buy arms, or exhorting comrades to produce home-made arms, or plotting to kidnap wealthy Salvadorans thought to have access to private arsenals.

The tile copy includes this notation from a US government official who read and evaluated it "From this," the American wrote, "it would appear they had only 626 weapons for more than 9000 men." This document was omitted from the collection released to the press with the white paper.

In 1980, Cuba and Nicaragua allegedly helped unify the Salvadoran rebel groups and gave them a base in Nicaraguan territory. The Soviet bloc allegedly supplied enough weapons to arm several battalions.

In 1983, it was reported that an FMLN broadcast boasted of Cuban and Nicaraguan backing and an FMLN commander stated that the war was directed by Cuba and that nearly all of his weapons came from Nicaragua. In 1985, the Sandinistas reportedly offered to stop military aid to forces in El Salvador in return for an end to the Contra insurgency.

In 1986, the International Court of Justice dismissed the administration's allegations that the Nicaraguan government was supplying arms to the Salvadoran rebels fighting the U.S. backed military junta, concluding that: "The evidence is insufficient to satisfy the Court that, since the early months of 1981, assistance has continued to reach the Salvadorian armed opposition from the territory of Nicaragua on any significant scale, or that the Government of Nicaragua was responsible for any flow of arms at either period. Evidence of military aid from or through Nicaragua remains very weak. This is so despite the deployment by the United States in the region of extensive technical resources for tracking, monitoring and intercepting air, sea and land traffic and its use of a range of intelligence and information sources in a political context where, moreover, the U.S. Government had declared and recognized surveillance of Nicaragua as a "high priority."

On Feb. 24, 1981, the State Department published a report entitled "Communist Interference in El Salvador" which they claimed was based on 19 captured guerrilla documents. The State Department's White Paper purported to provide evidence demonstrating that the Soviet Union acting through Cuba took over the Salvadoran rebellion and was carrying out a covert operation to install a puppet regime.

The administration's pretext for increased U.S. backing of the Salvadoran armed forces was presented as fact by most of the major media until weeks later when the White Paper was described as fraudulent by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

In "Tarnished Report? Apparent Errors Cloud US 'White Paper' on Reds in El Salvador," the Wall Street Journal reported that "Several of the most important documents, it's obvious, were attributed to guerrilla leaders who didn't write them. And it's unknown who did. Statistics of armament shipments into El Salvador, supposedly drawn directly from the documents, were extrapolated, Mr Glassman concedes. And in questionable ways it seems. Much of the information in the white paper can't be found at all ." The Journal concluded that "a close reading of the white paper indicates that its authors probably were making a determined effort to create a 'selling' document no matter how slim the background material."

In "White Paper or Blank Paper?," the Los Angeles Times also dismissed the White Paper's assertions, concluding that "these..documents— in addition to other intelligence reports available to the Reagan Administration that were not included in the White Paper— provide conclusions that fall far short of the Administration's portrayal of El Salvador as an arena of U.S.-Soviet confrontation."

In "Flaws in documents on arms to El Salvador", the Sydney Morning Herald reports: "Mr Jon Glassmen, the senior State Department official responsible for compiling the white paper,..conceded a number of serious flaws in the white paper and the documents. For example, a key claim was that "nearly 200 tonnes of arms were in the process of being shipped into El Salvador, mostly through Cuba and Nicaragua." He also conceded that the only concrete instance of Soviet aid delivered to the Salvadorean insurgents was a plane ticket from Moscow to Vietnam for one guerrilla."

A senior Carter administration official who had access to all the intelligence traffic rebutted the administration's case, stating that: "Our impression was that the guerrillas got most of their arms on the international black market, primarily in Miami."

Some of the documents were provided by the mastermind of some of the Salvadoran death squads, Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, who had them in his possession in Guatemala. In late 1980, a Reagan advisor, retired General Daniel O. Grahm, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, met with D'Aubuisson in Miami: "During the conversation, a number of Salvadorans present remembered Graham asking D'Aubuisson if he could find proof that the Salvadoran guerrillas were being manipulated by outside forces, because the incoming Reagan Administration believed proof of such manipulation was what was needed to 'influence American public opinion to increase military and economic support for El Salvador."

Many outside observers visited the rebel forces in different parts of El Salvador. Dr Charles Clements lived and worked in the rebel controlled Guazapa zone during 1982 and 1983. Clements recalls an evening in March 1982; an attack was planned to take place the next day: "Around me, the guerrillas looked to their sorry store of weapons, cleaning and recleaning them and checking their ammunition. When they went to battle the next day they would be armed with U.S. M-16s, Belgian FALs, German G-3s, plus a few old M-1s and .30 calibre carbines. With the exception of a rusty Chinese RPG II grenade launcher - the only non-western weapon I would see all year - there were no heavier weapons among them."

Clements recalls how Raul Hercules, the leader of the guerrillas were insulted at the implication that they had not made the revolution themselves: "This is an authentic revolution, as yours was. We know what we're fighting for. You norteamericanos will not control our country, and neither will the Soviets. If we must fight to victory, we will. It is only a matter of time."

The FMLN-FDR's "Programtic Platform of the Democratic Revolutionary Government," declares that among the "tasks and objectives of the revolution in El Salvador" are "To orient the foreign policy and international relations of our country around the principles of independance and self-determination, solidarity, peaceful coexistence, equal rights, and mutual respect between states."

"The three most important guerrilla groups in El Salvador all have anti-Soviet origins," and "harbor suspicions of the Soviet Union" said Robert Leiken, the scholar of the Latin American left who holds strong anti-Soviet views.

Even Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations, was obliged to admit that "The Soviets don't have very much popular support in El Salvador."

Post-war international litigation

Groups seeking investigation or retribution for actions during the war have sought the involvement of other foreign courts. In 2008 the Spanish Association for Human Rights and a California organization called the Center for Justice and Accountability jointly filed a lawsuit in Spain against former President Cristiani and former defense minister Larios in the matter of the 1989 slaying of several Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter. The lawsuit accused Cristiani of a cover-up of the killings and Larios of participating in the meeting where the order to kill them was given; the groups asked the Spanish court to intervene on the principle of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity.

Long after the war, in a U.S. Federal Court, in the case of Ford vs. García the families of the murdered Maryknoll nuns sued the two Salvadoran generals believed responsible for the killings, but lost; the jury found Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, ex-National Guard Leader and Duarte's defense minister, and Gen. José Guillermo Garcia--defense minister from 1979 to 1984, not responsible for the killings; the families appealed and lost, and, in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear their final appeal. A second case, against the same generals, succeeded in the same Federal Court; the three plaintiffs in Romagoza vs. García won a judgment exceeding US$54 million dollars compensation for having been tortured by the military during El Salvador's Civil War.

The day after losing a court appeal in October, 2009, the two generals were put into deportation proceedings by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), at the urging of U.S. Senators Richard Durbin (Democrat) and Tom Coburn (Republican), according to the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA). Those deportation proceedings as of May, 2010 have been stalled, however; one of the plaintiffs in the case believes the U.S. CIA/DOD — protecting its "assets" — has stymied the Obama Justice Department, for now.

The Spanish judge who issued indictments and arrest warrants for 20 former members of the Salvadoran military, charged with murder, Crimes Against Humanity and Terrorism requested that US agencies declassify documents related to the killings of the Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter but were denied access. In his report, Judge Velasco writes:

"The agencies in charge of making the information public have identified 3,000 other documents that remain secret and are not available; the reasoning given is that privacy is needed to protect sources and methods. Many of the documents, from the CIA and the Defense Department, are not available…"

U.S. news media reportage

We have orders to finish everyone and we have to complete our orders. That's it. If we don't kill them now they'll just grow up to be guerrillas. We have to take care of the job now.

--Captain Salazar of the Atlacatl Battalion, El Mozote, December 1981

Newsday: MEDIA NOTES Perestroika at the Times?

In an unusually long and blunt Editor's Note last Thursday, the paper's editors said that an article by Central America correspondent James LeMoyne "fell short of The Times's reporting and editing standards." LeMoyne described the public execution of two Salvadoran peasants "because they had applied for and received voter registration cards." "According to the villagers," he wrote, "the guerrillas placed the voting cards of Juan Martin Portillo and Ismael Portillo in their mouths after executing them as a warning to others not to take part in the elections."

The problem with this grisly incident, as the Times acknowleged, is that it never happened. Lemoyne's report was in fact cribbed from El Mundo, described by the Times as "a center-right newspaper, which attributed the information to the Salvadoran military command."

The Editor's Note credited "freelance journalists in Central America" with tracking down the truth - or fiction - of LeMoyne's February 29 story. The Times also credited a May issue of L.A. Weekly for publishing "a summary of the findings of those journalists."

The Times' detailed mea culpa seemed like vivid evidence of glasnost on 43rd Street. But why wait until last week?

"We read Mr. Cockburn's column in the Nation," said foreign editor Joseph Lelyveld. Alexander Cockburn, who was not mentioned by the Times, cited L.A. Weekly's Marc Cooper and the efforts of stringer Chris Norton, who writes for Time, Newsday and the Christian Science Monitor.

Reached by telephone in San Salvador, Norton said the article in El Mundo had "seemed off" to him, adding that LeMoyne "wasn't even in the country" on January 24, when the killings were supposed to have taken place. The Editor's Note, which says LeMoyne couldn't "confirm the account at first hand because the village was in a war zone," was labeled "misleading" by Norton.

"My secretary keeps a list of things that happen while I'm away," LeMoyne said on Monday. "When I got back I noticed a tremendous number of political killings, both by guerrillas and by what they call right wing death squads."

Both Lelyveld and LeMoyne said the story should have been better sourced. "But he is an excellent correspondent," said Lelyveld, who accused Cockburn of "waging a vendetta against LeMoyne."

Cockburn, who has written articles questioning LeMoyne's coverage on two other occasions earlier this year, termed the accusation "squalid." But he added some charges of his own.

"Ever since Bonner," he said, "those reporters keep half an eye on what they're looking at, and half on what they think their editors will tolerate." Raymond Bonner, a former Times correspondent, left the paper after being transferred to the business desk following conservative criticism of his Central America coverage. The Times has denied that politics played a role in Bonner's reassignment.

Cockburn says the Times has yet to respond to his allegation that LeMoyne exagerated the effectiveness of a contra raid, described by LeMoyne in January as "the biggest and most militarily successful" of the war. "Two major sources explicitly contraverted" LeMoyne's account, Cockburn says. He also accused LeMoyne of deliberately understating the size of a May Day rally by supporters of Salvadoran rebels.

LeMoyne says his estimate "came from a member of a pro-guerrila group. But I won't name him, because he'll get a call from Cockburn asking why he betrayed the cause." So much for glasnost.

On January 27, 1982, New York Times foreign correspondent Raymond Bonner informed Americans: "From interviews with people who live in this small mountain village and surrounding hamlets, it is clear that a massacre of major proportions occurred here last month. In some 20 mud brick huts here, this reporter saw the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams and shattered tiles. There were more along the trail leading through the hills into the village, and at the edge of a nearby cornfield were the remains of 14 young men, women and children. In separate interviews during a two-week period in the rebel-controlled northern part of Morazan Province, 13 peasants said that all these, their relatives and friends, had been killed by Government soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion in a sweep in December. 733 Victims Listed. The villagers have compiled a list of the names, ages and villages of 733 peasants, mostly children, women and old people, who they say were murdered by the Government soldiers. The Human Rights Commission of El Salvador, which works with the Roman Catholic Church, puts the number at 926."

"The Atlacatl Battalion is an elite unit created, trained and equipped by the United States," Human Rights Watch observes. "Almost from the start, the Atlacatl Battalion — "the first Salvadoran army battalion to be created from scratch by U.S. funding and training" — was engaged in the murder of large numbers of civilians."

Shortly after this report, Bonner was dispatched to the Financial desk, where he worked for one year before taking a leave of absence to write a book about the civil war in Salvador. Upon returning to the Times, he first was sent back to the Financial desk and then later to the Metropolitan desk. He resigned from the New York Times on July 3, 1984.

Asked in an interview with Mark Hertsgaard why he had recalled Bonner from El Salvador in the first place, A.M. Rosenthal, then-Executive Editor of the New York Times, explained: "The general impression among me and some others was that Bonner was first-rate, but we were really screwing this guy, because he wasn't getting what you really need to be a reporter. You don't have to get it necessarily at the Times, but you have to have some background in reporting non-foreign affairs in order to be a foreign affairs reporter. You have to know how a paper runs, what a paper considers its standards, and so on."

For another account of Bonner's firing, "The Truth of El Mozote," The New Yorker, by Mark Danner: "According to Rosenthal, Bonner was removed because he had never been fully trained in the Times' particular methods. Bonner, he said, "didn't know the techniques of weaving a story together. I brought him back because it seemed terribly unfair to leave him there without training " But "training" was not the only issue -- for that matter, as Bonner pointed out to me, he had spent a good part of 1981 on the Metro desk -- and, at least in Rosenthal's case, the question of Bonner's "journalistic technique" seems to have been inextricably bound up with what the executive editor came to perceive as the reporter's left-wing sympathies. Several current and former Times employees (none of whom would speak for attribution) pointed to a scene in a Georgetown restaurant a few weeks after the El Mozote story ran -- it was the evening of the annual Gridiron dinner -- in which Rosenthal criticized Bonner and angrily described the sufferings that Communist regimes inflict on their people."

In his most aggressive denial, Rosenthal declared: "At no time did anybody in the United States government suggest to me, directly or indirectly, that I remove Mr. Bonner. Anyone who would approach the New York Times and suggest to me that I remove or punish a correspondent would have to be an idiot. To imply that a man who devoted himself to journalism would remove a reporter because of the U.S. government or the C.I.A., or whatever, is ridiculous, naïve, cruel, and slanderous."

In "Iran-Contra's Untold Story," Foreign Policy, Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh report: "U.S. embassy officials boasted in 1982 that they had forced the New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner out of the country because of his unfavorable reporting on the Salvadoran government."

In "As Salvadoran Vote Nears, Political Killings Increase," The New York Times, February 29, 1988, foreign correspondent James LeMoyne reported that "there have been rebel killings aimed directly at stopping the elections next month. Villagers say guerrillas publicly executed two peasants in the town of Guatajiagua in Morazan department three weeks ago because they had applied for and received new voter registration cards. According to the villagers, the guerrillas placed the voting cards of Juan Martin Portillo and Ismael Portillo in their mouths after executing them as a warning to others not to take part in the elections. Rebel units in the area have told all villages not to vote and not to propose candidates for mayor."

A freelance journalist in El Salvador, Chris Norton, read LeMoyne’s article and was confused by it, because the killings LeMoyne reported were supposed to have taken place in an area of the country journalists couldn't reach because it was under military occupation and LeMoyne wasn't even in the country at the time. Norton wanted to find out how LeMoyne knew about these voters being executed, so he talked to the mayor, and to the priest, and to people in the community and he discovered that one of the alleged victims did not exist, and the other was perfectly fine. He then went back to San Salvador and did some more investigating and he discovered that LeMoyne had simply copied the story from the right wing San Salvadoran newspaper, El Mundo, where it had been quoted from the Salvadoran military command. LeMoyne reported the army propaganda in the New York Times and the State Department then distributed the Times' story to Congress to show that the FMLN guerrillas were undermining the election.

Norton exposed this, then another freelance journalist, Mark Cooper published an article about Norton's story in the L.A. Weekly. The article then appeared in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (F.A.I.R.) and the Times still didn't respond. Finally, Alexander Cockburn addressed it in the Nation Magazine and the New York Times published a "Correction." The Editors conceded that: "The article fell short of the Times's reporting and editing standards. It should not have left the impression that it was based on firsthand interviewing, and it should have explained why firsthand confirmation was not available."

In another case, James LeMoyne published an article in the Times, reporting that: "The new plan..commits Nicaragua, which has served as a principal base of support for the Salvadoran guerrillas...to stop supplying the Salvadoran rebels and stop permitting Nicaragua to be used for rebel activities. The rebels deny receiving such support from Nicaragua, but ample evidence shows it exists, and it is questionable how long they could survive without it."

F.A.I.R. wrote a letter to the New York Times, asking them to please have James LeMoyne enlighten their readers about the "ample evidence" of this arms flow to the F.M.L.N. since the World Court concluded that "the evidence is insufficient to satisfy the Court that, since the early months of 1981, assistance has continued to reach the Salvadorian armed opposition from the territory of Nicaragua on any significant scale, or that the Government of Nicaragua was responsible for any flow of arms at either period. This is so despite the deployment by the United States in the region of extensive technical resources for tracking, monitoring and intercepting air, sea and land traffic and its use of a range of intelligence and information sources in a political context where, moreover, the U.S. Government had declared and recognized surveillance of Nicaragua as a "high priority."

F.A.I.R. eventually got a personal response from the Foreign Editor, Joseph Lelyveld who acknowledged that LeMoyne's terminology was "imprecise," but "even our best correspondents -- and James LeMoyne is one of our best -- are not perfect".

Then the Times repeated the same assertion that "there was ample evidence" of an arms flow from Nicaragua to the FMLN which appeared in multiple articles by LeMoyne, George Volsky, and Steven Engelberg. F.A.I.R. continued to blow the whistle and they finally got another letter back from Lelyveld who said he had recently assigned LeMoyne to do a major story on the arms supplying to the FMLN, to really find out the truth and that they should wait for it.

Nine months later and fifteen months after Lemoyne's original story, the Times published a story which reported that the "ample evidence" had turned into no evidence. LeMoyne said: "The charges are extremely difficult to prove. Evidence of Sandinista support for the rebels is largely circumstantial and is open to differing interpretations. It includes accounts of deserters who could lie or exaggerate."

See also

• Timeline of the Salvadoran Civil War
• Command responsibility
• El Mozote massacre
• History of El Salvador
• Human rights abuse
• International law
• MS-13
• Weapons of the Salvadoran Civil War
• Peace Accords
• Voces inocentes (film)
• Romero (film)
• Salvador (film)

References

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82. "NACLA report on the Americas", Volumes 20-21 North American Congress on Latin America, 1988
83. "Duarte: US calls war strategy in Salvador" The Associated Press, Sep 22, 1984
84. "Settling into routine: human rights abuses in Duarte's second year" Americas Watch, 1985
85. "Salvador in Iraq: Flash Back" Council on Foreign Relations, by Jonathan D. Tepperman, Senior Editor of Foreign Affairs, April 5, 2005
86. "Report Accuses Salvadoran Army of 'Terror Tactics'" The Associated Press, March 29, 1985
87. "U.S. Military Assistance to El Salvador Negates Benefits of Economic Aid" The Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1988
88. "US TRAINS POLICE IN EL SALVADOR AS CONGRESS BAN IS LIFTED" The New York Times, Feb. 25, 1986
89. "U.S. to Train Unit to Fight Salvadoran Urban Rebels" The Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1985
90. "Settling into routine: human rights abuses in Duarte's second year" Americas Watch, 1986
91. "Salvador rebels ruin myth that Army's winning. Rebel raid shows early Army victory unlikely" The Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 1987
92. "U.S. Accelerates Aid to El Salvador" The New York Times, December 08, 1990
93. "Bush to Free El Salvador Military Aid" The Associated Press, January 16, 1991
94. "In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years" By Thomas Carothers, 1993
95. "Exporting democracy: the United States and Latin America" By Thomas Carothers, 1991
96. "In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years" By Thomas Carothers, 1993
97. "Exporting democracy: the United States and Latin America : themes and issues" By Thomas Carothers, 1991
98. "Thousands of Salvadorans March to Protest Duarte's Economic Austerity Plan" The Los Angeles Times, February 22, 1986
99. "With friends like these: the Americas watch report on human rights and U.S. policy in Latin America" Americas Watch, 1985
100. "Weakness and deceit: U.S. policy and El Salvador" By Raymond Bonner, 1984
101. "Weakness and deceit: U.S. policy and El Salvador" By Raymond Bonner, 1984
102. "Weakness and deceit: U.S. policy and El Salvador" By Raymond Bonner, 1984
103. "Extra!: the newsletter of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)., Volumes 2-3" FAIR., 2006
104. "Observing El Salvador: The 1984 Elections" By PC Chitnis
105. "NACLA report on the Americas, Volumes 20-21" North American Congress on Latin America, 1986
106. "Despite tattered economy and ongoing war, Salvador's Duarte rides high for now" The Christian Science Monitor, May 29, 1985
107. "The economist, Volume 296" Economist Newspaper Ltd., 1985
108. "Torture in the eighties: an Amnesty International report" Amnesty International, 1984
109. "El Salvador, Guatemala worst rights offenders" United Press International, Dec. 31, 1985
110. "Torture in El Salvador: From La Esperanza (Mariona) Prison, San Salvador, El Salvador, C.A." Comisión de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador, 1986
111. "Beat the Devil; After the Press Left" The Nation, 1987
112. Jose Gutierrez: The Killing of Herbert Anaya Sanabria Green Left Online, 7 April 1993 Template:En icon
113. "Bach and War in El Salvador" The Spectator, May 10, 1986
114. "Amnesty Cites Gains, Says U.S. 'Encouraging' Torture and Assassinations" United Press International, October 15, 1986
115. "Salvadoran Military Maintaining Links To Death Squads" The Sun Sentinel, February 14, 1988
116. "El Salvador land reform, 1980-1981: impact audit" Oxfam America, 1982
117. "Settling into routine: human rights abuses in Duarte's second year" Americas Watch, 1986
118. "U.S. plays role in Salvadoran torture" Sunday Times, Dec 22, 1985
119. "El Salvador: "death squads"--a government strategy" Amnesty International, 1988
120. "Violent Incidents Again On Rise In El Salvador" The Sun Sentinel, July 12, 1987
121. El Salvador’s decade of terror, 119.
122. "6 PRIESTS KILLED IN A CAMPUS RAID IN SAN SALVADOR" The New York Times, November 17, 1989
123. "Salvadoran Justice Wears Out Patience" The New York Times, May 13, 1990
124. "A year of reckoning: El Salvador a decade after the assassination of Archbishop Romero" Human Rights Watch, 1990
125. "Threat to Salvadoran Priests Is Nothing New" The Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1989
126. "Amnesty Reports Increase In Death Squad Killings" The Orlando Sentinel, October 24, 1990
127. "Human Rights Watch World Report 1992 - El Salvador" Human Rights Watch, 1 January 1992
128. The El Salvador Accords: A Model for Peace Keeping Actions
129. Amnesty Law Biggest Obstacle to Human Rights, Say Activists by Raúl Gutiérrez, Inter Press Service News Agency, May 19, 2007
130. "Central America's Alternative: Integration from Below" Central American University - UCA
131. "The Economist, Volume 329, Issues 7836-7839" Economist Newspaper Limited, 1993
132. "El Salvador vote recalls cold-war power play" The Christian Science Monitor, March 19, 2004
133. ^ From madness to hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador, Part IV. Cases and patterns of violence, Truth Commissions Digital Collection: Reports: El Salvador, United States Institute of Peace. Retrieved 2008-07-16. Cite error: The named reference "madness-4" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
134. El Salvador’s decade of terror, Americas Watch, Human Rights Watch Books, Yale University Press, 1991.
135. El Salvador: 'Death Squads' — A Government Strategy. New York: Amnesty International, 1988.
136. From Madness to Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador: Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador.
137. El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, 107.
138. "U.S. role in Salvador's brutal war," BBC News, March 24, 2002.
139. El Salvador’s decade of terror, vii.
140. McClintock, Mchael, The American connection: state terror and popular resistance in El Salvador, Zed Books, 308.
141. El Salvador’s decade of terror, 47.
142. Martin, Gus. Understanding terrorism: challenges, perspectives and issues, Sage Publications, 2003, 110.
143. El Salvador’s decade of terror, 21.
144. Arnson, Cynthia J. "Window on the past: a declassified history of death squads in El Salvador," in Death squads in global perspective: murder with deniability, Campbell and Brenner, eds., 86.
145. Lopez, George A. "Terrorism in Latin America," in The politics of terrorism, Michael Stohl, ed.
146. Profile, El Salvador
147. "International security, Volume 6, Issues 1-2" Harvard University. Program for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government. Center for Science and International Affairs, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 1981
148. "El Salvador in the 1980's" CNN
149. "Haig Points To Hit List" United Press International, Mar 19, 1981
150. "White Paper on El Salvador is Faulty" The Washington Post, June 9, 1981
151. Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction, 1993), pp 138-48;
152. Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1983 (FMLN boast); New York Times, July 28, 1983, July 12, 1984 (commander); New York Times, April 28, 1985 (offer). See Robert P. Hager, “Soviet Bloc Involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, December 1995, pp437-70.
153. "Reports of judgments, advisory opinions, and orders , Issue 520" International Court of Justice, 1986
154. "TEXT OF STATE DEPARTMENT REPORT ON COMMUNIST SUPPORT OF SALVADORAN REBELS" The New York Times, Feb. 1981
155. "Tarnished Report? Apparent Errors Cloud U.S. 'White Paper' On Reds in El Salvador" The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 1981
156. "White Paper or Blank Paper?" The Los Angeles Times, Mar 17, 1981
157. "Flaws in documents on arms to El Salvador" The Sydney Morning Herald, Jun 10, 1981
158. "Weakness and deceit: U.S. policy and El Salvador" By Raymond Bonner, 1984
159. "Foreign assistance and related programs appropriations for 1985: hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Ninety-eighth Congress, second session, Part 3" United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Related Agencies Appropriations, 1984
160. "Witness to war: an American doctor in El Salvador" By Charles Clements, 1985
161. "Witness to war: an American doctor in El Salvador" By Charles Clements, 1985
162. "In the Name of the People" By Frank Christopher & Alex Drehsler; Narrated by Martin Sheen; Featuring Dr Charles Clements, 1985
163. "Programtic Platform of the Democratic Revolutionary Government" By FMLN-FDR, 1980
164. "Weakness and deceit: U.S. policy and El Salvador" By Raymond Bonner, 1984
165. "U.S. policy options in El Salvador: hearing and markup before the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, first session, on H. Con. Res. 197, H. Con. Res. 212, September 24, November 5, and 19, 1981" United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, 1981
166. "Certification concerning military aid to El Salvador: hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninety-seventh Congress, second session ... February 8 and March 11, 1982" United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations, 1982
167. "Soviet strategy in Latin America" By Robert S. Leiken, 1982
168. "Weakness and deceit: U.S. policy and El Salvador" By Raymond Bonner, 1984
169. Daniel Woolls, Associated Press. "El Salvador massacre case filed in Spanish court," November 13, 2008. Retrieved 2008-11-14.
170. "The Right to Information is the Right to Justice: Declassified Documents and the Assassination of the Jesuits in El Salvador" The National Security Archive, November 16, 2009
171. ^ "The Truth of El Mozote" The New Yorker, December 06, 1993
172. "MEDIA NOTES Perestroika at the Times?" Newsday, Sep 21, 1988
173. "Massacre Of Hundreds Reported In Salvador Village" The New York Times, January 27, 1982
174. "A Year of Reckoning: El Salvador a Decade After the Assassination of Archbishop Romero" Human Rights Watch, 1990
175. "On bended knee: the press and the Reagan presidency" By Mark Hertsgaard, September 9, 1989
176. "Iran-Contra's Untold Story" Foreign Policy, 1988
177. "The natural history of LeMoyne, continued. (New York Times correspondent in El Salvador, James LeMoyne) (Beat the Devil) (column)" The Nation, August 27, 1988
178. "As Salvadoran Vote Nears, Political Killings Increase" The New York Times, February 29, 1988
179. "Latin Pact Seen as Helpful to Duarte" The New York Times, August 13, 1987
180. "Extra!, Volumes 1-2" Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, 1987
181. "Contras Agree to Attend Truce Talks" The New York Times, January 20, 1988
182. "Salvador Rebel Arms: Noriega Link?" The New York Times, December 18, 1987
183. "Contras' Future: Crippled as Warriors" The New York Times, April 03, 1988
184. "Salvador Rebels: Where Do They Get the Arms?" The New York Times, November 24, 1988

Further reading

Books

• Americas Watch (1993). El Salvador's Decade of Terror: Human Rights Since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero. New Haven, London: Yale University Press.
• Bonner, Raymond (1984). Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador. New York, NY: Times Books.
• Commission on the Truth for El Salvador (1993). From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El Salvador (PDF). UN Security Council.
• Federal Research Division (1988). A Country Study: El Salvador. Washington, DC: US Library of Congress.
• LeoGrande, William M. (1998). Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Montgomery, Tommie Sue (1995). Revolution in El Salvador: From Civil Strife to Civil Peace. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Whitfield, Teresa (1995). Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
• Binford, Leigh (1996). The El Mozote Massacre. University of Arizona Press.
• Wright, Barbara. White Hands (Novel Excerpt). Stony Brook, NY: Southampton Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, Spring 2010.
• Lafeber, Walter (1993). Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York City, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Fish, Joe (1988). El Salvador: testament of terror. London: Zed Books.
• Carothers, Thomas (1993). In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years. University of California Press.
• Lowenthal, Abraham (1991). Exporting democracy: the United States and Latin America : themes and issues. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Journals / Academic studies

• UNHCR Refworld search for FMLN
• Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador (1993)
• CIA World Factbook on El Salvador
• UN General Assembly Resolution on the "Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in El Salvador"
• CIA Threat Assessment of El Salvador in 1979

News

• Questionnaire for the New York Times on Its Central America Coverage, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), February 1998

Documentaries

• In the Name of the People By Frank Christopher & Alex Drehsler; Narrated by Martin Sheen, 1985
• War on Democracy By John Pilger, 2007
• El Salvador and the School of the Americas School of the Americas Watch
• Labor Movement in El Salvador 1987
• Human Rights in El Salvador (1990) - The War Continues Behind the Headlines, 1991
• Former CIA Chief, Latin America, Duane Clarridge Defends the Empire By John Pilger, 2007

Lectures

• Americas Third World War By John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief and NSC official, 1988

External links

• Unrest in El Salvador from the Dean Peter Krogh Foreign Affairs Digital Archives

• Salvadoran Civil War
• History of El Salvador
• Guerrilla wars
• Communism in El Salvador
• Civil wars involving the states and peoples of North America
• Civil wars post-1945
• MS-13
• Revolution-based civil wars
• 20th century in El Salvador