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U.S State Terrorism in El Salvador

Between 1970 and 1991 the country of El Salvador became embroiled in a brutal civil conflict characterized by massive human rights abuses and political terror. The conflict claimed more than seventy thousand lives and turned more than a quarter of the population into refugees or displaced persons. In retrospective assessments, human rights organizations and truth commissions have attributed the great majority of the violence to the actions of government forces. A report of an Amnesty International investigative mission made public in 1984 stated that “many of the 40,000 people killed in the preceding five years had been murdered by government forces who openly dumped mutilated corpses in an apparent effort to terrorize the population.” In all, more than 70,000 deaths and mass human rights violations took place before a UN-brokered peace deal, was signed in 1992. Using evidence from various truth commissions, Professor Frederick H. Gareau, writes on El Salvador his book, State Terrorism and the United States, stating that 75,000 people were killed under US diplomatic cover, of whom the government, its army, the National Guard, and its death squads, were responsible for 95% of the deaths.

While peasants were primarily victimized, the killing of civilians extended to clergy, church workers, political activists, journalists, union members, health workers, students, teachers, and human rights monitors. The state terror took several forms. Salvadoran security forces, including army battalions, members of the National Guard, and the Treasury Police, performed numerous clearance operations, killing indiscriminately, and perpetrating hundreds of massacres and massive human rights violations in the process. The episode of the war responsible for the single largest civilian death toll occurred on December 11, 1981, when the U.S.-trained elite Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran army killed approximately nine hundred men, women, and children in and around the village of El Mozote. Human rights violations included decapitation, raping young girls before killing them, and massacring men, women, and children in separate groups with U.S.-supplied M-16 rifles. A report compiled by the villagers found that more half of the victims were under fourteen. It is reputed to be the worst such atrocity in modern Latin American history, but when news emerged of the massacre, the Reagan administration in the United States dismissed it as FMLN propaganda.

Death squads worked in conjunction with Salvadoran Security services to eliminate opponents, leftist rebels and their supporters. The squads were a means by which members of the armed forces were able to avoid accountability. Typically dressing in plainclothes and using vehicles with smoke-tinted windows and numberless license plates, terror tactics included publishing death lists of future victims, delivering empty coffins to the doorsteps of future victims and sending potential victims invitations to their own funeral. Cynthia Arnson, a long-time writer on Latin America for Human Rights Watch, argues that “the objective of death squad terror seemed not only elimination of opponents, but also, through torture and the gruesome disfiguration of bodies, the terrorization of the population.” The prototype of the El Salvadoran death squads was ORDEN, a paramilitary spy network that terrorized rural regions and which was founded by Col.Jose Alberto Medrano, a former agent on the CIA payroll. Medrano was awarded a silver medal by President Lyndon B. Johnson, "in recognition of exceptionally meritorious service." . One of Medrano's proteges, Roberto D'Aubuisson, was trained at the U.S. army's school in Panama and at The School of the Americas. D'Aubuisson was founder of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) whose public face was that of a rightist political party, but which also ran death squads secretly. In the spring of 1980, when D'Aubuisson was arrested for plotting against the administration of José Napoleón Duarte, a mass of documents was found implicating him in numerous death squad activities, including detailed plans linked to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. The Reagan administration was accused of ignoring the evidence implicating D'Aubuisson.

In the mid-1980’s state terror in El Salvador increasingly took the form of indiscriminate air forces bombing, the planting of mines and harassment of national and international medical personnel- “all indicate that although death rates attributable to death squads have declined in El Salvador since 1983, non-combatant victims of the civil war have increased dramatically.

Critics maintain that the U.S. economic and military aid played an essential role in enabling state terrorism in El Salvador. Specifically that the US government during the period of the worst abuses provided El Salvador with billions of dollars, and equipped and trained an army, which kidnapped and disappeared more than 30,000 people, and carried out large-scale massacres of thousands of the elderly, women, and children. Total aid to El Salvador during the time of the conflict was 6 billion dollars. El Salvador became the fourth largest recipient of U.S. aid, behind Israel, Egypt, and Turkey; and the largest recipient on a per capita basis. Military aid alone amounted to more than one billion dollars. In a joint 1982 report on human rights in El Salvador, The Americas Watch Committee and the ACLU place emphasis on U.S. military aid and training because it was "being provided to the same units alleged to be engaged in violations of human rights." The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights argued that because of the extensive provision of “funding, military equipment, training and military guidance” to the Salvadoran armed forces, as well as the fact that the U.S. “identified itself unreservedly” with the causes and conduct of the Salvador military, the U.S. “bears a heavy burden of responsibility”, and moreover argued that “there may be no place else where the United States is so directly responsible for the acts of a foreign government.”

Allegations point to the role that U.S. administrators played in both protecting the responsible military leaders from legal accountability, and the Salvadoran regime from criticism, while simultaneously maintaining the flow of military aid. According to the UN Truth Commission report, over 75% of the serious acts of violence reported took place during the Reagan administration’s time in office. Cynthia Arnson argues that when the killing was at its height, “the Reagan administration downplayed the scale of abuse as well as the involvement of state actors.” When Congress passed a law, unpopular with the Reagan administration, which placed conditions of assurances of human rights compliance and progress on agrarian reforms, the administration issued certification reports every six months that drew heavy criticism, particularly from human rights groups. The first certification report was submitted on January 28, 1982. On the eve of the reports The Washington Post and New York Times published feature articles by American investigative journalists describing massacres in early December of 1981 in and around the village of El Mozote. The massacres had been mainly perpetrated by the Atlacatl Battalion, the first "rapid response unit" to be trained in the U.S. The certification report was only six pages long. William Leogrande remarked that the report “contained little evidence to support the declaratory judgments that progress had been made in all of the areas required by law. The report refused to acknowledge any government complicity in human rights violations...Moreover the report flatly denied that the paramilitary death squads were linked to the government.” Leogrande further noted that “no independent human rights group agreed with the Reagan administration’s portrait of the situation.” The Americas Watch Committee and American Civil Liberties Union jointly referred to the report as a "fraud." Subsequent reports by U.S. agencies on the human rights situation were met with similar incredulity and contempt. A review of the Department of State's 1983 report on human rights in El Salvador by Americas Watch, Helsinki Watch and the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights concluded "all in all, this is a dreadful report." The Reagan Administration's actions included vociferous denunciations of their critics. In a retrospective report entitled El Salvador's Decade of Terror: Human Rights Since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero, Human Rights Watch summarized the administration's behavior thusly, "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."

Defenders of U.S. policies object to these allegations, emphasizing that the U.S. explicitly promotes professional conduct, including observance of human rights within its military and police training programs. They argue that the U.S. should not be held responsible for the actions of individuals trained by them.

Defenders also justify military aid by claiming it was necessary for defending U.S. National Security Interests. The FMLN guerrillas military efforts, including terrorist acts committed by them, seriously threatened the Salvadoran government. This was deemed a threat to "national security." As president Reagan argued in his historic national television address in 1984, "San Salvador is closer to Houston, Texas than Houston is to Washington, D.C. Central America is America; it's at our doorstep. And it has become a stage for a bold attempt by the Soviet Union, Cuba abd Nicaragua to install communism by force throughout the hemisphere,". The U.S. State Department provided detailed evidence for the links between the FMLN, Nicaragua,Cuba and the Soviet Union in its White Paper,"The Communist Interference in El Salvador." The documents argues that the U.S. chose the most viable middle path between the right and left extremes undermining the country. The U.S. supported the Duarte government which worked with "some success to deal with the serious political and economic problem that most concern the people of El Salvador." Military aid and training given to Salvador eventually professionalized their armed forces and prevented the insurrection by guerrillas from succeeding. The death of many innocent civilians is regarded as regrettable but necessary for Salvadoran and American security, and future prosperity. The Reagan administration did eventually denounce the death squads, acknowledging their links to the government, and the U.S. subsequently supported democratic elections, including providing funding to parties competing against the ARENA party. This support, it is argued, was instrumental to the progressive establishment of lasting democratic institutions in El Salvador. However, since the end of the civil war, El Salvador has remained one of the most violent societies in the hemisphere - with a murder rate rivalled only by Colombia.