These groups, appropriately nicknamed the escuadrones de la muerte, or “death squads,” employed particularly gruesome tactics. Those believed to have ties to insurgent groups or who challenged the established order in any way—through labor organizing, sermons and public speaking, classroom instruction, publications and journalism—were tortured, raped, and killed. Thousands of mutilated corpses appeared in town sewers, garbage dumps, street gutters, and shallow graves, left by their torturers as a warning to others: eyes gouged, tongues and limbs severed, breasts, genitalia, and throats slashed. One group's signature method of assassination was twelve gunshots in the face at point-blank range.42 So many Salvadorans were found dead or missing that the Catholic Church's Legal Office, the principal agency that documented the abuses, could not keep up with all the reports of the missing and killed. A favorite target of these death squads were nuns and priests, especially those affiliated with the more liberal Maryknoll and Jesuit orders that preached liberation theology.43 Flyers circulated throughout the capital city of San Salvador, urging the population: “Be a patriot, kill a priest!”44 According to Americas Watch, eighteen priests were killed in El Salvador from 1972 to 1989.45
Nineteen eighty was a particularly violent year: over eight thousand civilians were killed, and yet no one was arrested for the murders. Among the victims were some very prominent leaders whose violent deaths were meant to intimidate the opposition. In February, one of the more progressive civilian members of the government, Attorney General Mario Zamora, was assassinated during a dinner party at his own home, shot a dozen times in the face.46 In March, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot and killed while saying mass at the cathedral. At his funeral procession, the military fired into the crowd of thirty thousand mourners, killing thirty and wounding hundreds. In December, four US church workers, Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan, were kidnapped and murdered. Their raped and mutilated bodies were later found half buried in shallow graves. Throughout 1980, the military purged itself of its most progressive members to silence dissent: officers were demoted, reassigned to diplomatic posts, exiled, or assassinated.47
As in Nicaragua, the assassination of prominent leaders—in this case Zamora and Romero—served to unite reformers and revolutionaries. After the government failed to properly investigate death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, believed to have ordered the assassinations,48 the various political parties, religious organizations, trade unions, and peasant groups joined forces to create the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) under the leadership of former junta members Guillermo Ungo, Roman Mayorga, and Ruben Zamora.49 Five guerrilla groups also joined forces under the FMLN.50 The FDR and FMLN eventually reached a compromise and united under the banner FDR-FMLN.
Public pressure at home forced the Carter administration to place a temporary embargo on military aid to El Salvador—an embargo that was lifted in the final months of his administration, when the FMLN launched a new counteroffensive against the Salvadoran government. As in Nicaragua, Carter favored a more centrist government and tried to negotiate one under the direction of Ambassador Robert White. The administration applauded the junta's decision to appoint as president José Napoleón Duarte, the moderate Christian Democrat candidate who was denied victory in the fraudulent 1972 elections, imprisoned, tortured, and sent into exile. Carter—and later Reagan—regarded Duarte as someone who offered a political alternative to both the leftists and the rightists, and could help to rein in the more reactionary elements of the Salvadoran government. Through Ambassador White, the Carter administration also tried to convince the more progressive politicians to remain in the junta rather than join forces with the FDR-FMLN. However, Duarte proved ineffective in ending the violence. In 1981, the Catholic Church's legal office in San Salvador reported that the death squads and the government security forces killed 13,253 civilians. (In comparison, casualties at the hands of the guerrillas were always many fewer.)51 Particularly shocking was the massacre at El Mozote. In December 1981, the Atlacatl battalion, regarded as the Salvadoran army's most elite group of US-trained soldiers, killed 936 villagers in the Morazán province, mostly at the village of El Mozote. Over half of the victims were children under the age of fourteen.52 Despite the international press coverage, the United States denied the massacre until 1992, when forensic scientists began unearthing the mass graves.53 Assassinations decreased by the end of 1984, as a result of US pressure, but the Salvadoran military increased its bombing of villages on which the guerrillas depended for shelter and food. Over seventy thousand were left homeless as a result of this campaign.54
US military aid to El Salvador continued despite the blatant human rights violations and intense international opposition, and despite the December 1980 United Nations resolution calling for an end to military support of the Salvadoran government. As in Nicaragua, the hard-liners in the Reagan administration portrayed the Salvadoran civil war as part of the East-West struggle, in which the United States had a moral duty to contain Cuban/Soviet expansionism.55 Even their closest hemispheric allies were unable to influence US policy. As early as February 1980, Canadian and Mexican representatives met to discuss their mutual opposition to US intervention in Central American affairs. Canada cut off aid to El Salvador in November 1980, and along with Mexico and most nations in the hemisphere supported the UN resolution. In August 1981, Mexico and France extended official recognition to the FDR-FMLN, in an attempt to prevent “foreign military intervention in the Salvadoran conflict” and “allow the Salvadoran people to decide their own destiny.”56 The following year Mexico tried to negotiate a peace between the FDR-FMLN and the Salvadoran government, independent of the United States, but the initiative was unsuccessful.
In order to continue providing aid, the US Congress required evidence that El Salvador was making significant improvements in human rights. Members of the Reagan administration either denied or downplayed news reports of civilian casualties, claiming that only leftist guerrillas were caught in the crossfire. They assured Congress that El Salvador was taking significant steps toward democracy and ending the violence. In 1982, when rightwing forces regained control of the Salvadoran government, the Reagan administration convinced D'Aubuisson, now president of the National Assembly, to allow Alvaro Magaña to become president and at least give the appearance of a more centrist government. And in 1984, the administration facilitated the election of Christian Democrat Duarte in the country's most expensive election, so that he could immediately initiate peace talks with the FDR/FMLN.57 Public statements by the hard-liners in the Reagan administration showed their willingness to lie about what was happening in El Salvador. Commenting on the murder of the four American churchwomen, both Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick brought up the women's alleged connections to the guerrillas. In one interview Kirkpatrick suggested that the women got what they deserved: “The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists. We ought to be a little more clear about this than we usually are. They were political activists on behalf of the Frente. And somebody who is using violence to oppose the Frente killed these nuns.”58 Commenting on US policy, a US diplomat who served in Central America during the Reagan years stated: “Unless they see a guy like D'Aubuisson running a machete through somebody, they're inclined to ignore it…. There is absolutely zero conception of what these people are really like, how evil they really are.”59
Congress found the administration's arguments and evidence compelling enough to continue sending aid. Throughout the 1980s, El Salvador remained on the list of the top five nations to receive aid from the United States. All in all, the United States provided six billion dollars in economic and military aid to El Salvador during its twelve-year civil war. The United States also facilitated the transfer of millions of dollars in aid from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Agency.
While the different parties struggled for control of the Salvadoran government, thousands of people were uprooted from their homes or murdered. By 1986, over half a million Salvadorans were internally displaced, dependent on the government for their survival, and over one million had fled to other countries.60
THE “SCORCHED EARTH” POLICIES OF THE GUATEMALAN MILITARY
In
