The US Government's Role in the Murder of Nuns, Women, the Elderly, and Babies in El Salvador

i think i've posted a similar article before, but it's important that we remember what our government and corporations are capable of, and what ties there may be to our current foreign policy around the world...please read on if you're interested...although there aren't citations in the article, i can recommend some to you if you have an interest in a particular topic.

also, we should think about why it was that the US supported such atrocities...what political and economic interests do we have that would make people think it was justifiable? how did the government convince the public it was okay? etc...

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Posted today on lib.com:
http://libcom.org/history/1970-1990-the-war-of-counter-insurgency-in-el-salvador

Noam Chomsky on the ultra-violent war of the right-wing regime in El
Salvador against grassroots resistance of workers, peasants and liberation
theologists - socialist clergymen and women.

The crucifixion of El Salvador

For many years, repression, torture and murder were carried on in El
Salvador by dictators installed and supported by the US government, a matter
of no interest in the US. The story was virtually never covered. By the late
1970s, however, the government began to be concerned about a couple of
things.

One was that Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, was losing control. The US
was losing a major base for its exercise of force in the region. A second
danger was even more threatening. In El Salvador in the 1970s, there was a
growth of what were called "popular organisations" - peasant associations,
cooperatives, unions, Church-based Bible study groups that evolved into
self-help groups, etc. That raised the threat of democracy.

In February 1980, the Archbishop [libcom - though nominally part of the
Catholic Church, they did not receive the backing of the Vatican] of El
Salvador, Oscar Romero, sent a letter to President Carter in which he begged
him not to send military aid to the junta that ran the country. He said such
aid would be used to "sharpen injustice and repression against the people's
organisations" which were struggling "for respect for their most basic human
rights" (hardly news to Washington, needless to say).

A few weeks later, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying a mass.
The neo-Nazi Roberto d'Aubuisson is generally assumed to be responsible for
this assassination (among countless other atrocities). D'Aubuisson was
"leader-for-life" of the ARENA party, which now governs El Salvador; members
of the party, like current Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani, had to
take a blood oath of loyalty to him.

Thousands of peasants and urban poor took part in a commemorative mass a
decade later, along with many foreign bishops, but the US was notable by its
absence. The Salvadoran Church formally proposed Romero for sainthood.

All of this passed with scarcely a mention in the country that funded and
trained Romero's assassins. The New York Times, the "newspaper of record,"
published no editorial on the assassination when it occurred or in the years
that followed, and no editorial or news report on the commemoration.

On March 7, 1980, two weeks before the assassination, a state of siege had
been instituted in El Salvador, and the war against the population began in
force (with continued US support and involvement). The first major attack
was a big massacre at the Rio Sumpul, a coordinated military operation of
the Honduran and Salvadoran armies in which at least 600 people were
butchered. Infants were cut to pieces with machetes, and women were tortured
and drowned. Pieces of bodies were found in the river for days afterwards.
There were church observers, so the information came out immediately, but
the mainstream US media didn't think it was worth reporting.

Peasants were the main victims of this war, along with labour organisers,
students, priests or anyone suspected of working for the interests of the
people]. In Carter's last year, 1980, the death toll reached about 10,000,
rising to about 13,000 for 1981 as the Reaganites took command.

In October 1980, the new archbishop condemned the "war of extermination and
genocide against a defenceless civilian population" waged by the security
forces. Two months later they were hailed for their "valiant service
alongside the people against subversion" by the favourite US "moderate,"
José Napoleón Duarte, as he was appointed civilian president of the junta.

The role of the "moderate" Duarte was to provide a fig leaf for the military
rulers and ensure them a continuing flow of US funding after the armed
forces had raped and murdered four churchwomen from the US. That had aroused
some protest here; slaughtering Salvadorans is one thing, but raping and
killing American nuns is a definite PR mistake. The media evaded and
downplayed the story, following the lead of the Carter Administration and
its investigative commission.

The incoming Reaganites went much further, seeking to justify the atrocity,
notably Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick. But it was still deemed worthwhile to have a show trial a few
years later, while exculpating the murderous junta - and, of course, the
paymaster.

The independent newspapers in El Salvador, which might have reported these
atrocities, had been destroyed. Although they were mainstream and
pro-business, they were still too undisciplined for the military's taste.
The problem was taken care of in 1980-81, when the editor of one was
murdered by the security forces; the other fled into exile. As usual, these
events were considered too insignificant to merit more than a few words in
US newspapers.

In November 1989, six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, were
murdered by the army. That same week, at least 28 other Salvadoran civilians
were murdered, including the head of a major union, the leader of the
organisation of university women, nine members of an Indian farming
cooperative and ten university students.

The news wires carried a story by AP correspondent Douglas Grant Mine,
reporting how soldiers had entered a working-class neighbourhood in the
capital city of San Salvador, captured six men, added a 14-year-old boy for
good measure, then lined them all up against a wall and shot them. They
"were not priests or human rights campaigners," Mine wrote, "so their deaths
have gone largely unnoticed" - as did his story.

The Jesuits were murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit created,
trained and equipped by the United States. It was formed in March 1981, when
fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the
US Army School of Special Forces. From the start, the Battalion was engaged
in mass murder. A US trainer described its soldiers as "particularly
ferocious....We've always had a hard time getting [them] to take prisoners
instead of ears."

In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which over a
thousand civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and burning. Later
it was involved in the bombing of villages and murder of hundreds of
civilians by shooting, drowning and other methods. The vast majority of
victims were women, children and the elderly.

The Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by US Special Forces shortly before
murdering the Jesuits. This has been a pattern throughout the Battalion's
existence -- some of its worst massacres have occurred when it was fresh
from US training.

In the "fledgling democracy" that was El Salvador, teenagers as young as 13
were scooped up in sweeps of slums and refugee camps and forced to become
soldiers. They were indoctrinated with rituals adopted from the Nazi SS,
including brutalisation and rape, to prepare them for killings that often
have sexual and satanic overtones.

The nature of Salvadoran army training was described by a deserter who
received political asylum in Texas in 1990, despite the State Department's
request that he be sent back to El Salvador. (His name was withheld by the
court to protect him from Salvadoran death squads.)

According to this deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by
biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as
soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents -- tearing out their
fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and
playing with the dismembered arms for fun.

In another case, an admitted member of a Salvadoran death squad associated
with the Atlacatl Battalion, César Vielman Joya Martínez, detailed the
involvement of US advisers and the Salvadoran government in death-squad
activity. The Bush administration has made every effort to silence him and
ship him back to probable death in El Salvador, despite the pleas of human
rights organisations and requests from Congress that his testimony be heard.
(The treatment of the main witness to the assassination of the Jesuits was
similar.)

The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the
Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El
Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her
three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with
its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body,
the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head."

The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep
the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it.
A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the
centre of the table. According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind
aren't uncommon.

People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador -- they are
decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the
landscape. Men are not just disembowelled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police;
their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are
not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies
and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are
dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while
parents are forced to watch.

Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly
increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self-help
groups in an attempt to organise the poor.

By and large, the US approach in El Salvador has been successful. The
popular organisations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero
predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million
have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US
history - and it's got a lot of competition.

From What Uncle Sam Really Wants, by Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky is of course an American citizen, and so "we" and "our" refers to
the US. The article has been edited slightly by libcom - US to UK spellings
and a few small details have been added for the reader new to the topic.