El Salvador mozote

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see pres bukele tucker musk

919 bak has new

see gangs

MS 13 (created in US, ex- deported to El S.

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note it always expands

an 4 25

Legal experts pounced President Donald Trump’s proposal of sending U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to international prisons.

The Washington Post reports Trump openly mulled the possibility of off-siting U.S. citizens to foreign prisons on Air Force One, saying “we have some horrible criminals, American grown, born.” He added that he’s “all for” sending them to prisons in El Salvador, where he has already detained some Venezuelan migrants to public outcry.

After protestors attacked Tesla dealerships, vehicles and charging stations over controversial figure and Trump adviser Elon Musk, Trump hoped protestors would “get 20 year jail sentences … in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”

Trump conceded on Sunday that, “I don’t know what the law says on that.”

IFrame Content

The law doesn’t smile on it, according to University of California Professor and immigration scholar Davis Gabriel J. Chin.

Such a proposal is “the equivalent of sending political opponents to the Gulag in the Soviet Union era,” Chin told Washington Post reporters in an email.

The paper reports that U.S. citizen cannot legally be deported or denied entry to the United States. The suggestion “does not seem very realistic,” said Jean Reisz, an associate professor of law who co-directs the University of Southern California Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic, said Trump’s suggestion “does not seem very realistic.”

Even U.S. citizens who have traveled overseas to fight with terrorist organizations against U.S. interests, such as the Islamic State must be allowed to return, said Reisz. The government can detain them and charge them with crimes and even incarcerate them upon conviction, but U.S. officials are not permitted to deny them reentry to the U.S.”

Read the full Washington Post article at this link (subscription required).

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THOM 3 3 25

ISIS STYLE VIDEO, CONC CAMP // PVT PRISON

And they’re proud of it.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, ridiculing the judge’s order to stop the illegal, no-due-process deportation flights to El Salvador, retweeted “Oopsie … Too late,” with a smirking emoji.

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QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, I think that, you know, the January 6 is apropos for a couple reasons. One is kind of silly but also meaningful, which is, if you look at the character that Musk uses when he plays the game Diablo IV, which he describes as giving him life lessons and allowing him to see the matrix, the guy kind of looks quite a bit like the QAnon shaman, so well known from January 6. So, January 6, in a way, kind of, I think, opened this new era in American politics where the kind of surreal, fringe, often online communities have sort of entered the world of sort of high politics and have scrambled the kind of coordinates of average rules of the game and the normal sort of protocols. I think that Musk is someone who is really a product of that kind of crossover effect, where building up a kind of huge online community, building up the sort of status as a global media influencer, has now the capacity to actually shatter existing coalitions, shatter existing standards of what normal politics is. And his connections now to people like Nigel Farage, until recently, Tommy Robinson, the AfD, Giorgia Meloni, these are signs of kind of a willingness to shatter existing traditional party systems, to embrace disruption kind of for its own sake, and to really harness especially the power of the internet to make possible things that had been previously impossible, so to make certain forms of speech possible, to make certain forms of mobilization possible, and to make things like, you know, the attempted coup d’état in January 6 something that could actually be followed through to its conclusion.

And I think that, you know, the kind of — the horizon of what the kind of politics in real life that someone like Musk is aiming at is broadcast by him frequently on his own Twitter account. Most recently, for example, he celebrated Nayib Bukele, the leader in El Salvador, as having done something that has happened in El Salvador and will happen and must happen in the United States, which, in El Salvador, has been to imprison 2% of the adult population as an absolutely draconian way of cracking down on crime. So, this vision of sort of authoritarian strongman on politics, sort of gloves-off mass incarceration crackdowns, on the one hand, and then a deregulatory kind of unleashing of the free market, on the other hand, is — produced this kind of curious combination of, on the one hand, Elon Musk posting Milton Friedman memes all the time, on the other hand, scaremongering about the, quote-unquote, “genocidal rape tactics” of nonwhite immigrants in the U.K. So, he’s produced this sort of surreal effect, I think, of sort of the strong state and the free market turning the sort of Thatcherist vision, grafting it onto all kinds of online aesthetics and kind of video game dynamics in ways that have really, I think, blindsided, for good reason, sort of mainstream, normal politicians, like Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer, Biden-Harris, who don’t know how to deal with this kind of chaotic energy, which, unfortunately, has a huge amount of legitimacy behind it, not only his multimillion-dollar — or, multimillion number of followers on social media.

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November 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Five

BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): The other thing I thought of this morning, why are we just seeing this 2-year-old today? We hear about about 300,000 kids missing, 32,000 that I.C.E. is looking for, 80,000 which didn't show up. Why are we just seeing this one today? So Bill Melugin just told me it's because DPS picked them up. Texas is much more lenient. If you get picked up by border patrol, it's a black hole. You don't know what happens.

Why is it that Ted Cruz had to go in with a secret iPhone, and same with Rodriguez or Gonzalez, when he was on the border with, he represents that district. Why don't we just see it? We blur out the faces. If there were 300 kids in a small tent or a shed, we need to see those people. We need to find out what is going on. And the question is, what do we do with those kids, Harold? I say this, treat them great.

What we're going to do is get them ready on a plane and we send them right back to El Salvador. That's what got to happen. By the way, El Salvador, you shouldn't be leaving. They have cracked down on those criminals. They've cleaned up their country. You've got to really sing a different song if you tell me that you need asylum from El Salvador. It's not Venezuela. It's not Bolivia. It's not Nicaragua. It's not Cuba.

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https://www.alternet.org/human-rights-activists-sound-the-alarm-as-el-salvador-battles-its-gang-crisis/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-guest-praises-el-salvadors-authoritarian-president-failing-bitcoin

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-embrace-foreign-authoritarian-leaders

pulldown menu?!

In the past two years, Tucker Carlson has repeatedly hosted global leaders with authoritarian tendencies and embraced anti-democratic regimes on his Fox News and Fox Nation shows.

In interviews with Hungary’s president Victor Orbán, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, Poland’s president Andrzej Duda, and most recently, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, Carlson has pitched softball questions, praised anti-democratic ideas, and allowed lies about some of the regimes to go unchallenged. Carlson has also repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, excusing his regime’s aggression in Ukraine.

By promoting and celebrating anti-democracy leaders to his audience of over 3 million viewers, Carlson is whitewashing their authoritarian tendencies and inaccurately covering the implication of their policies. Reeling from the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, the majority of voters believe American democracy is already at risk. Carlson's embrace of authoritarian ideologies from around the world only further threatens its future.

no lnx many some vid

Russia

Fox News has a documented pattern of supporting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Tucker Carlson has clearly led this charge.

A month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Carlson praised Nigel Farage for saying, “Whatever we may think of him [Putin] as a human being,” he is “actually on our side.”

Video CitationFrom the March 30, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Media Matters has documented Carlson’s extensive history of pushing pro-Kremlin talking points on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

He has mocked criticism of the Russian president and downplayed the significance of his invasion of Ukraine. He also suggested the Biden administration backs Ukraine only because of Hunter Biden’s ties to the country and questioned the U.S.’s efforts to support Ukraine, asking, “Why do we care so much” about “Russia messing around in Ukraine or Estonia or Crimea or whatever?” and “Why wouldn’t we be friends with Russia?”

He even went so far as to throw a jab at his Fox News colleague Jennifer Griffin’s reporting on the region, accusing her of “lying” while not bothering “to do any reporting whatsoever.”

Putin leads an authoritarian state in which he cannot be prosecuted and officials in his government are protected under strict confidentiality laws. The country has cracked down on free internet access by limiting access to social media platforms, and critics of the Kremlin are labeled “foreign agents” and silenced. A Media Matters report from April 2022 found that Facebook videos featuring 5 pro-Russian segments from Carlson received more than 2 million views and nearly 200,000 interactions.

In 2019, Carlson asked on his show, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am,” in reference to the conflict with Ukraine. (Later in the show he claimed he was joking.)

Video CitationFrom the November 25, 2019 edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight:

In return for his fealty, the Kremlin has praised Fox and Carlson, amplifying segments of Carlson’s show on its state-run social media accounts and state-run television. A leaked Kremlin memo distributed to Russian media outlets instructed broadcasters to use as many clips from Tucker Carlson as possible.

Brazil

In June, Carlson traveled to Brazil to film a new documentary for his “Tucker Carlson Originals” series. While there, he interviewed Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who, since he assumed the presidency in 2019, has created a government in Brazil that is anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black, and anti-woman, once even stating he would rather see his son “die in an accident” than have a gay family member.

Despite international attention on Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic regime, Carlson hosted the Brazilian president for a friendly interview, during which they promoted a variety of false claims and conspiracy theories. Bolsonaro and Carlson embraced their similar ideologies, with Bolsonaro praising Carlson’s show and Carlson suggesting Brazil gets its own Fox News Channel.

Video CitationFrom the June 30, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson and Bolsonaro pushed a number of other right-wing talking points.

Carlson cheered on Brazil’s pro-life and Christian ideology, and Carlson and Bolsonaro agreed “the left” in Brazil will be responsible for the downfall of the good, Christian-centric society. Carlson implied the same would happen in the United States.

Carlson falsely claimed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “arms Nazis,” saying Bolsonaro is not like him.

Carlson claimed Bolsonaro is a “liberal” and has “done nothing to stop civil liberties in Brazil” although the president is known to arrest and investigate his critics under a vague national security law.

Carlson and Bolsonaro repeatedly called a man who attacked Bolsonaro in 2018 “leftist” and claimed the stabbing was politically motivated although a judge ruled the attacker was mentally ill after he told investigators he was “acting on the orders of God.”

Bolsonaro shared false claims that he did not need the COVID-19 vaccine because he had previously had the virus.

Bolsonaro also promoted both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as effective COVID-19 treatments.

Bolsonaro repeated the generally discounted theory that COVID-19 was started in a “laboratory on the other side of the world.”

Responding to a Carlson question about the expansion of gun ownership in Brazil, Bolsonaro claimed an increase in civilian gun ownership is what caused a “drop in the number of people who are killed by firearms in Brazil,” though the president though in reality states where civilian gun ownership increased the most did not see crime fall by any significant amount in comparison to states with less growth of gun ownership.

Dubbed “Trump of the tropics,” Bolsonaro campaigned on heavy military presence, after years of supporting Brazil’s military dictatorship, and violent policing. He had a plan to appoint military leaders to top government posts and following the election he did just that. Bolsonaro also claimed he would not accept the results of the election if he lost and has “threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents.”

During the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil, Bolsonaro spread narratives meant to discredit the country's democratic voting system after his party’s candidates lost. He has begun to push for restricting votes to paper ballots only for the 2022 election, echoing Trumpworld’s conspiracy theories about compromised electronic voting machines.

On his first day as president in 2019, Bolsonaro targeted Indigenous lands by preventing new lands from becoming demarcated for protection and has since dismantled the country’s environment ministry through cutting the budget, and overseen increased deforestation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s failed policies resulted in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. Bolsonaro spread false narratives about the pandemic, refused to follow the World Health Organization’s recommendations, and even blocked local or state governments that attempted to follow prevention advice such as implementing mask mandates. Federal police have investigated multiple people who criticized the president’s COVID-19 response in public media.

Hungary

Carlson’s coverage of President Viktor Orbán and his governance in Hungary has garnered a flurry of mainstream media press attention in the American press. He has interviewed Orbán, filmed an antisemitic documentary targeting philanthropist George Soros, and spoken at a conference put on in Hungary by a right-wing organization tied to the Orbán government.

Carlson has shown his enthusiasm for authoritarian ideas and frequently connects Hungary’s move to the right as an example the U.S. should follow.

Carlson suggested the U.S. adopt Hungary’s nationalistic immigration policies while calling immigrants “chaos and filth and crime growing all around us.”

He hosted Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto in an interview titled “Here's what America should learn from Hungary” in which they discussed Hungary’s extreme immigration policies.

Carlson suggested that without Orbán’s strict immigration policies, “there will be no more Hungarians” and claimed that “neoliberals” would rather “import a replacement population from the Third World,” once again pushing the fascist great replacement theory.

Carlson celebrated Orbán’s election victory in 2022, noting, “Orban described the victory as a win for sensible nationalism -- which it certainly is.”

Carlson claimed on his nightly show that calling Orbán a “facist” or “authoritarian” is “the greatest of all” lies. Orbán is widely known for minimizing democratic freedom in Hungary.

While in Hungary, Carlson claimed “left-wing NGOs” are vilifying Orbán for his facist policies and claimed it’s “insane” to consider Hungary less free than South Africa. He was referring the nongovernmental organization Freedom House’s 2022 list saying Hungary was “partly free” due to “antimigrant and anti-LGBT+ policies, as well as laws that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)” created by Orbán’s government.

Carlson has repeatedly promoted Orbán’s policy ideas and supported his political career while repeatedly pushing for similar change to come to the U.S. In an introduction to one his interviews with the Hungarian president, Carlson claimed the U.S. media frequently lies about Orbán and “how repressive Hungary is.” Carlson went on to imply Hungary is a more free nation than the U.S., saying people who “loudly and publicly attack Joe Biden’s policies” are “silenced” and “might very well have to hire armed bodyguards” and falsely claiming “opposition figures here [in Hungary] don’t worry that they’ll be hurt for their opinions.” Carlson commended Orbán’s conservative policies and bashed U.S. leaders who “vilified” him for them.

Video CitationFrom the August 5, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

The admiration goes both ways. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary in May, Orbán described Carlson as a “friend” and told his audience that Carlson’s show should be “broadcasted day and night.”

Orbán recently gave a widely condemned speech during which he railed against “race mixing,” prompting one of his closest advisers to resign. He has downplayed Hungary’s involvement in the Holocaust and promoted antisemetic stereotypes as propaganda.

Orbán’s government has pushed far-right legislation, including banning LGBTQ representation in educational materials and media for kids and passing extreme anti-migrant legislation that goes against the European Union’s policies. Orbán has also undermined free and fair elections in Hungary and tightened his control over national media.

Mainstream media in the U.S. have closely covered Carlson and Orbán’s close relationship. The New York Times has published multiple articles drawing connections between Orbán and the political right in the U.S., and the relationship has inspired a number of think pieces by other media outlets.

El Salvador

Carlson has also interviewed Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on his Fox News show. Carlson focused on Bukele’s promise to curb gang violence in the country by increasing police funding and military presence while also applauding Bukele’s conservative stances and pushing for similar policies in the U.S.

Bukele claimed his solution for MS-13 gang violence is to “give more funds to the police, apply tougher dynamics, get the criminals, and put them in jail” and compared El Salvador’s crime rates to those of popular Fox News target Chicago, saying under his new tactics, crime in the country has fallen below that of the city.

Carlson applauded Bukele’s efforts and called the supposed solution to crime rates “obvious.”

In the past, Carlson has repeatedly referenced MS-13 when fearmongering about supposed white replacement and immigration in the U.S.; most well-known was his claim that Biden would release gang members into U.S. neighborhoods. Carlson also defended Trump when he made comments about immigration from “shithole countries,” even suggesting that El Salvador was indeed a “shithole country” or it wouldn't need immigration protections.

Carlson focused his interview with Bukele on his response to gang violence in El Salvador, praising him for cracking down through police and military power. However, Bukele policies has resulted in human rights violations in many of El Salvador’s jails including torture and death of prisoners, according to Amnesty International.

According to the Journal of Democracy, Bukele’s measures to limit judiciary independence following his rise to power in 2019 were a “serious blow to Salvadoran democracy” and his actions include “classic authoritarian behavior.” He claimed electoral authorities and the media were part of a voting fraud conspiracy during the 2021 election despite his party winning a legislative supermajority. As a candidate, Bukele avoided public debates and press interviews during the campaign, which left many to believe he was “intolerant.”

Since his election, Bukele has used the country’s military to bully opposition into voting for his budget and disbanded an anti-corruption body. Bukele has used his supermajority power to consolidate his power, firing high level judges and the attorney general. After his attacks on the judicial system, the top court in the country announced sitting presidents will be able to run again, even though El Salvador’s constitution states otherwise.

Poland

Carlson also interviewed Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and claimed Duda is an example of leaders “who actually care about their people” and who “defended their populations against international interference.” The interview included staples of Carlson’s conversations with conservative foreign leaders including comparisons to the United States, promotion of conservative and Christian ideals, and blatant lies.

VideoCitationFrom the September 27, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson started the interview by describing Duda’s efforts to stop the European Union from resettling refugees in Poland in 2015 as fighting back.

When asked about the power of technology companies in Poland, Duda stated the government has never introduced any kind of social media restrictions. Buth in 2021 the government planned to create a “Freedom of Expression Council” as a workaround to social media platforms’ power to ban accounts in the country, shortly after Twitter suspended Trump’s account. They ended the interview discussing the importance of pro-heterosexual family and Christian conservative ideals in government.

Video fileCitationFrom the September 27, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Duda has eroded judicial independence in Poland, forcing out sitting judges by establishing age limits and taking control over judicial appointments. An outspoken homophobe, Duda is known for his so-called “Christian values.” His administration has banned gay parents from adopting children, and under his regime “LGBT-free zones” have appeared across the country. Duda himself has called LGBTQ rights a “more destructive” ideology than communism.

His anti-abortion laws prevent abortion in almost all cases — recently, a bill was introduced to ban abortions for cases of fetal abnormalities — and they have rallied pro-abortion protestors and political opposition against the president. Duda’s government has also cracked down on the free press by introducing a new law that makes it impossible for media entities to be controlled by anyone outside the EU and has amended laws to allow the government to choose the heads of state-run media organizations.

With similar ideologies taking hold in the U.S., Fox News is giving Tucker Carlson free reign to embrace authoritarian leaders from around the world. Carlson has gone out of his way to promote false and conspiratorial narratives that have been repeatedly debunked while pushing these ideas onto his audience.

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el moz

written up some in press suppression ggl doc

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https://theconversation.com/el-salvadors-facade-of-democracy-crumbles-as-president-purges-his-political-opponents-161781

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/bill-barr-had-deep-links-to-the-origins-of-central-american-migration-crisis-long-before-trump/

...

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Roberto, you begin the book talking about a tour you were giving in 1992 in Los Angeles at the time you were working with the immigrant rights group CARECEN in Los Angeles. And you’re touring around a foundation program officer, one of these people who decides whether to give money to worthy organizations. And you had very mixed feelings taking him around the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles. There’s a sudden shootout at one point. Could you talk about that whole part of your work with CARECEN? Also, what lessons might be drawn for a lot of activists today, Black Lives Matter activists and prison reform activists, who are suddenly being courted by foundations who suddenly have discovered that they haven’t been properly funding antiracism programs around the country?

ROBERTO LOVATO: That’s a great question, Juan. Yeah, the opening, the introduction of the book, is 1992, right after the L.A. riots had hit. We had foundations and corporations come in, along with scholars, and it was just people interested in post-riot L.A. And we were in MacArthur Park touring, like we did. I felt like — and I say at one point I felt like, you know, I was getting tired of being like Virgil to these Dantes, you know, these aspiring Dantes wanting to see the underworld. And so, I’m showing this guy, Leland, MacArthur Park,when I’m approached by the first MS-13 member I ever met, this kid named José. And, you know, we were — and I could tell that Leland was scared out of his wits, like he was in a lion’s den or something, and he was looking to me for security.

And so, I open it that way because it shows kind of the way that the whole issue of youth and urban youth and gangs, even foundations and corporations will kind of shy away from, as do legislators, including legislators of color here in California, where the gangs were born, in fact, where MS-13 and 18th Street were born. And then, after they were born, they kind of adopted the structures of like the Mexican Mafia. And so, I’m there when this is starting to escalate and get more violent.

And then, Attorney General William Barr, again, and at the avatar, from the Bush administration, who’s now in the Trump administration, deployed all these FBI resources to L.A. and other cities to start the gang war, which, you know, we see the products as we speak, right? And so, then he also introduced the INS to then join the LAPD and law enforcement to deport the “problem,” the gang structures, to El Salvador.

...

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, William Barr, the current attorney general, the attorney general under George H.W. Bush — we just have a minute, but as you wrap up, Roberto, what is his connection to this story?

ROBERTO LOVATO: William Barr, as attorney general under the first Bush, redeployed FBI resources, in the greatest deployment of FBI resources up to that point, taking FBI agents who were fighting foreign — you know, looking at foreign “threats,” and started focusing them on gangs. And then he starts looking at MS-13 and other gangs right after the L.A. riots. You can see he was there in L.A., and he started us on the path to eventually, like, militarizing the police, that we have right now. And then, he then also had the INS deport the gang “problem” to El Salvador, and then he exported, after the war, U.S.-style policing. And then, I found out that military trainers from El Salvador actually came to train LAPD in counterinsurgency, and other police forces. It’s just when you start seeing the Robocopization of cop uniforms — right? — and that we have now. And William Barr had everything to do with — had not everything, but he had a lot to do with this. I had to sing his song, because he deserves all the credit he deserves for what he did to El Salvador and to L.A. and to our national situation long before Trump....

FULL:

September 13, 2020

We look at how decades of U.S. military intervention in Central America have led to the ongoing migrant crisis, with Salvadoran American journalist Roberto Lovato, author of the new book “Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas.” Lovato recounts his own family’s migration from El Salvador to the United States, his return to the country as a young man to fight against the U.S.-backed right-wing government responsible for grave human rights violations, and his embrace of journalism to tell the stories of people on the margins. “I’m unforgetting a history of not just El Salvador, but the United States and of myself,” says Lovato.

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Transcript

... as we spend the rest of the hour looking at how decades of U.S. military intervention in Central America has led to the migrant crisis of today.

The majority of Central American refugees and immigrants to the United States come from just three countries: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which are the same three countries the United States intervened in during, among other decades, the 1980s, on the sides of military governments and paramilitary death squads that killed tens of thousands — and in the case of Guatemala, hundreds of thousands — of mostly Indigenous people. In El Salvador, many soldiers responsible for carrying out the notorious 1981 El Mozote massacre, in which nearly a thousand unarmed villagers were killed, were elite U.S.-trained forces. Between 1980 and ’92, the U.S. sent over $4 billion in economic and military aid to El Salvador’s government — nearly $1 million a day.

Well, today, we follow the story of one man and his family, and why he says the story of El Salvador is the story of the United States. Roberto Lovato is an award-winning journalist. He’s just published his memoir called Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. He’s joining us now from San Francisco, where he was born.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

Roberto, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Congratulations on this unforgettable memoir. But let’s start with the title, why you call it Unforgetting.

ROBERTO LOVATO: Before anything, Amy, thank you, as always. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be with Juan and you and the crew once again on this joyous occasion for me, that I’ve worn a red shirt for you that’s in celebration and in solidarity. And I was going to have a gangster lean when you played that song that I used to play, like, in lowriders and stuff. And so…

But the term “unforgetting” comes from the Greeks. The Greeks believed that when you went into the underworld, the dead — when the dead went into the underworld, they had to cross the Lethe river, which was the river of forgetting, before going to either Elysium or Hades. And so, as I was trying to pick out a title for this book, I realized that the journey that I had taken to all these different underworlds for the book, whether it was gang underworlds, the underworld of the FMLN guerrillas, the underworld of my personal family history, that was unknown to me in many ways, or my own psychology, and the underworld of migrants, who have to kind of occupy an underworld existence in many ways — I just thought, “Wow! What a perfect way to kind of bring up and excavate the truths that get hidden,” because in Greek — the ancient Greeks believed that “unforgetting” was also the term for truth, aletheia, which means not Lethe river, unforgetting. And so I am unforgetting a history of not just El Salvador, but of the United States and of myself. And, you know, my book is kind of a coming out for me personally, and I’ll explain that as we go.

ROBERTO LOVATO: That’s a great question, Juan. Yeah, the opening, the introduction of the book, is 1992, right after the L.A. riots had hit. We had foundations and corporations come in, along with scholars, and it was just people interested in post-riot L.A. And we were in MacArthur Park touring, like we did. I felt like — and I say at one point I felt like, you know, I was getting tired of being like Virgil to these Dantes, you know, these aspiring Dantes wanting to see the underworld. And so, I’m showing this guy, Leland, MacArthur Park, when I’m approached by the first MS-13 member I ever met, this kid named José. And, you know, we were — and I could tell that Leland was scared out of his wits, like he was in a lion’s den or something, and he was looking to me for security.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You then go on in the book, in the subsequent chapter, to talk about your experience visiting immigrant families in detention in Karnes, Texas. And could you talk about that and also this whole effort of the federal government to put these detention centers in the most out-of-the-way places, so that even journalists have trouble getting to them?

ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, this is an example of those underworlds I’m trying to get at. Like, a lot of people don’t realize that those immigrant prisons — I refuse to call them “detention centers.” It’s a travesty to call them that. And, all my fellow journalists, it’s a travesty. You know, they put these prisons down in southern Texas precisely because immigrant rights groups won’t go down there. It becomes harder for them to go down there. And it becomes harder for journalists, say, in San Antonio, to drive all these miles down south to visit these places. And there are actually ICE memos.

And so, my journey, my own journey, begins when I meet a child and a mother who are plotting, along with other immigrant women and children and youth, to stage a protest against the awful conditions, that moved some, for example, to — mothers to slit their wrists, or some children to try to hang themselves. And so, I mean, I was reluctant, because my friends Ursula and Felipe invited me to go to this prison, and I was kind of reluctant because I had this whole story from the war and other trauma I didn’t even know that I had kind of stirring up in me, and I knew I would eventually have to tell my story. And basically, my bubble burst when a child tells me this really horrific story of what he saw in El Salvador. And at that moment, I realized, “You know what? It’s time to tell my story. It’s time to come out,” so to speak. And I do. I come out about things that I had known and things that I would learn and things that I needed to tell about myself, including my participation in the revolutionary process in El Salvador.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that, Roberto? Can you talk about your involvement with the FMLN? You’re a well-known journalist in the United States. Talk about who the FMLN were. Of course, now they’re part of the regular political process and a party in El Salvador today. But what decisions you made early on?

ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, Amy, you know, you, as a journalist, and Juan know very well that I wouldn’t get Pulitzer grants if I said, “Hey, I was an urban commando with the FMLN.” You know, that’s just not how it works. You don’t — what you have in journalism, and in literature, I would argue, are not representative of the full spectrum of political, ideological, even racial, if you look at like Latinos and — not even, Latinos aren’t a race, but all the different subracial groups of Latinos are like less — occupy like 1% of U.S. literature.

So, I made a decision, after doing work with refugee communities in the war zones andworking with refugees here in San Francisco with CARECEN, Comite de Refugiados Centroamericanos and other groups, like CISPES, etc., here to do solidarity and sanctuary work. I was becoming more conscious. I fell in love. There’s a love story in my book, which is part of the point, right? Because all you hear is, like, terror is the given of the place, like Joan Didion. And I’m like, “Actually, no, I grew up Salvadoran. Love is the given of the place, as well.”

And so, I’m in Chalatenango, El Salvador, one of the most difficult places I’ve ever seen in my life, in terms of war. And I saw really terrible things, including things done to children. And I eventually say it’s not enough for me to just do kind of like what Juan’s talking about, like nonprofit work and having all this language and getting all this funding, like people do here and in other parts of the world to be officially representing communities for very high salaries. I wasn’t really feeling that, so I decided I needed to do something else.

And I had some friends that introduced me to people in theFMLN, and they thought I could be useful working with urban commandos in logistics and things. And so, at that moment when I see this home that was bombed with all these children is the moment I stop being “American.” I stop. You can go and look at most of my journalism. I avoid using the word “American,” since 1991, because of I didn’t want anything to do with that. And so, I became an Américan, with an accent on the E, and a citizen of the United States of América, which is kind of the revolutionary imaginary taking hold of me to want a better place.

AMY GOODMAN: And the FMLN, again, for people to understand, was the rebel fighting force at a time when the U.S. was pouring millions into the military regime and the paramilitaries responsible for everything from the killing of the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, to the El Mozote massacre of 1981?

ROBERTO LOVATO: Yes, yes.The FMLN was organized against the fascist military dictatorship backed by the U.S. government, beginning with the Carter administration. And, you know, if you’re an historian like my friend Joaquín Chávez, whose excellent book Poets and Prophets of the [Resistance] is a must-read, you know, you’ll see that the U.S. involvement dates decades back. They started supporting El Salvador’s military dictatorship starting in around 1934, when they finally recognized Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who perpetrated La Matanza of 1932, which some historians will tell you is one of the most violent episodes in not just Latin American history, but in world history, in terms of the numbers of people killed per day, per week, in a concentrated place.

And so, the FMLN was — you know, there were groups in the FMLN founded by poets. This was one of the things that attracted me to it, was the nondistinction between the poetic and the political, between the revolutionary and daily life, between love and labor. And so, the FMLN was, according to the CIA, one of the most effective political, military and social movements in Latin America in the 20th century, where, for example, you could read NACLA and see that one of every three Salvadorans was organized against the state in the 1980s, according to the Universidad Centroamericana. And, you know, I mean, it taught me what it means to be a poet warrior.

It’s something that I think we need right now, which is part of the reason I wrote the book, was to share — you know, there’s all this dark, heavy stuff, but I think you’ll find there’s a lot of love, tenderness and hope in the book, because that’s the only way we got through as Salvadorans. And I think, in all my experience around the world, in a most intimate way, I’ve never seen a people with such astonishing resilience as Salvadoreños. And —

AMY GOODMAN: Roberto, we have to break, but we’re going to come back and also want to talk about your fraught relationship with your father, and this revelation in your book that he was a young witness to La Matanza of 1932, the peasant uprising in the government massacre, killings of thousands and thousands of Salvadorans. Roberto Lovato is the award-winning journalist. His memoir is just out. It’s called Unforgetting. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Días y Flores” by Silvio Rodríguez. Our guest today is Roberto Lovato, the award-winning journalist, author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Roberto, before break, you were talking about, mentioning La Matanza in 1932. A lot of people don’t realize that the FMLN of the ’70s and ’80s took its name, of Farabundo Martí, Agustín Farabundo Martí, who was one of the organizers of the peasant uprising of 1932and was also one of the founders of the Central American Communist Party.Could you talk about the links between what happened in 1932, in your understanding of it, as well as the development of the FMLN?

ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah. I mean, in my view and in the view of historians like Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Erik Ching and Greg Gould, you know, it really — the FMLN probably should have been named the Feliciano Ama — Frente Feliciano Ama para la Liberación Nacional, because it was primarily an Indigenous uprising, right? Indigenous peoples started seeing their kids, the little — the soft part of their heads started sinking in, and watching their kids die. And they rebelled. And there was also communists organizing with them. But really, the core groups of it and the local leadership was Indigenous.

And so, that, you know — and the way history works, oftentimes we erase Indigenous agency. And so, I felt it important to talk about how — you know, what historians have taught us about La Matanza, that people rose up trying to overthrow the government in what was the first communist insurrection. There were communists involved, including Farabundo Martí. And a man namedEl General, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, saw an opportunity not just to take power, because he was the vice president, but also then perpetrate what scholars at Oxford have told me is one of the single most violent episodes in world history, as far as the number of people killed per day in a concentrated space and per week in a concentrated space. And so, you know, there’s a — the records of La Matanza were buried, burned, destroyed, by and large. There’s some in — some historians in El Salvador are starting to reconstitute them and rebuild the memory and unforget, right? Because, you know, states are nothing if not manufacturers of — mass manufacturers of amnesia.

And so, you know, from that point on, you get military dictatorship, one of the longest-standing military dictatorships in the Americas. But you also get one of the most consistent left oppositions, and effective left oppositions, in the Americas in the Salvadoran people’s struggle, which is part of the reason I wrote my book, because those pathetic images of children crying and mothers screaming, the sounds, the soundbites of mothers screaming in places like Karnes, are the dominant images, along with gangs of Salvadorans, when, in fact, you’ve got this incredible, astonishingly incredible, political capability that Salvadorans have had and still have.

AMY GOODMAN: So, La Matanza, you reveal in your book — talk about your father’s connection as a witness.

ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, my father, Ramón Alfredo Lovato, Pop Ramón, known to those of us who love him, was 9 years old when this happened in January of 1932. And I didn’t even know this. I was teaching in the country’s first Central American studies program at Cal State Northridge, and we were trying to find books which you can’t find in English, except for a few, like the one by Gould and Santiago. And, you know, I was doing research on La Matanza. Then I realized, “Hey, this town, Ahuachapán, is where my dad is from.” It was one of the major centers. And my dad never said anything for decades. So then I start doing the research, and I finally ask my dad, and he reveals to me that he had seen La Matanza.

And it was an epic moment in my family history and in my own life, because it explained a lot to me about why I was such a crazy kid that used to gangster lean, like in that song, and run in certain violent and kind of dangerous circles or join the FMLN and other crazy things that I’ve done in my life, had this deep undercurrent of family history that I think a lot of us have in our families, family secrets. And I try to connect those family secrets to the secrets of nations, like with the Matanza, which was, again, covered up and buried along with mass gravesites that are still unexcavated to this day.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And speaking of family secrets, you also reveal in your book that your father, who had worked for United Airlines for many years as a ramp service worker, also had his own underground life, basically, in the Mission District of San Francisco selling contraband.

ROBERTO LOVATO: Yeah, my dad was, along with Santana’s father, involved in the contraband industry in San Francisco’s Mission District. A lot of colorful characters came out of there. And my dad was at the center of it. And my dad, a very smart guy, created a transnational network of contraband, of jewelry, electrodomestics, calculators, perfume, eventually guns. My dad was running guns between El Salvador — I mean, San Francisco and El Salvador. He wasn’t selling them to, like, the fascists or to the FMLN or anything. This was before, in the prewar era, in the ’70s. He was doing it to anybody who could afford it. But I learned about the construction of criminality at a very personal level. You know, I had shame about my dad, and I didn’t — and my dad’s activities.

And I started excavating the history. I find out that it wasn’t just my dad. It was my Mamá Tey, my grandmother, who made pupusas with me, for me and our family. And with the same hands that she made pupusas, she also transferred — she was actually the originator of this transnational network of contraband that sustained our family. And so, I’m not going to call my abuelita a criminal, or my dad a criminal. I think they were people that were trying to sustain their families by any ways they could and under like — you know, for example, they lived through an El Salvador that didn’t just see La Matanza and the genocide, but a poverty in the Great Depression that made Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath look like a wine festival.

AMY GOODMAN: Roberto Lovato, there is so much more in this stunning memoir. Roberto is an award-winning journalist and author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution.

===

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/28/el-mozote-massacre-reagan-war-on-press/

1/20 john s

A RETIRED AIR FORCE general in El Salvador admitted in court last Friday that the country’s armed forces carried out the infamous El Mozote massacre in December 1981. This acknowledgement marks the first time the Salvadoran military has taken responsibility for the atrocity.

Over a period of days, the Atlacatl Battalion, a Salvadoran army unit created and trained by the U.S., slaughtered more than 800 civilian men, women, and children in several villages in the mountains near El Salvador’s border with Honduras. The Reagan administration immediately acted to protect its Salvadoran allies, engaging in a far-reaching coverup.

There was wholesale torture and rape, and many victims were burned alive. The level of cruelty is most comparable currently to the actions of the Islamic State. One survivor remembered hearing an officer threaten to murder a soldier who wasn’t willing to kill kids.

Today, Americans may see El Mozote as an obscure tale from the misty past. But this is not the case. In fact, this week’s final, complete confirmation of the events 38 years ago holds critical lessons about the Trumpist war on the media now.

Raymond Bonner, who broke the El Mozote story for the New York Times, says that assaults on journalism by the government have “gone to an extreme [under President Trump], but it’s certainly not new. … What happened to me is an example of attacks on reporting.”

The key things to understand about this war is, first, that it didn’t start with Trump, but rather with Richard Nixon almost five decades ago. Second, the right-wing fury at journalism has never been about the press’s many faults; instead, conservatives are most enraged when reporters do their job well. Third, officials who lie successfully are not punished, but are instead rewarded by the GOP apparatus for a job well done.

the Reagan administration entered office in January 1981 filled with fervor about rolling back communism in Central America. The Cuban revolution in 1959 had been bad enough. But then the Sandinistas had overthrown Nicaragua’s dictatorship in 1979, and left-wing guerrillas in Guatemala and El Salvador threatened to do the same to their autocrats.

In retrospect, it’s clear that these were “Inevitable Revolutions,” the title of one history of the period. Tiny, cruel white oligarchies had ruled over Indigenous peasants across the region for hundreds of years, and sooner or later, the dam was going to break. But to the Reaganites, this was all the work of the international communist conspiracy, headquartered in Moscow, and had to be crushed by any means necessary.

There was a roadblock to Reagan’s plans, however: Congress was queasy about the U.S. alliance with the Salvadoran government and had required the president to certify by January 29, 1982 that El Salvador was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.” If it did not, all U.S. aid would be cut off. It was therefore unwelcome at the White House when word began circulating that something extremely bad had happened in the Salvadoran mountains. That New Year’s Eve, the head of the Salvadoran’s junta was forced to declare that rumors of a massacre were just “a guerrilla trick.”

Then came — from the perspective of the Reagan administration — catastrophe. On January 27, both the New York Times and the Washington Post published accurate, front-page stories about what had happened.

Thomas Enders, a career diplomat who at the time was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, later said that “El Mozote, if true, might have destroyed the entire effort” in El Salvador. What to do?

The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier. As was borne out by Nixon’s direct experience during Watergate, few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore, as a top Nixon aide later recalled,Nixon believed that it was necessary to “fight the press through … the nutcutters as [the president] called them, forcing our own news. Make a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.”

The Reaganites shared this perspective. News outlets were “the opposition” that had to be brutally, viciously attacked, and individual journalists were fair game as a way to discredit their employers. Bonner was therefore caught in the White House crosshairs.

The pushback began with congressional testimony by Enders. “There is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians,” he told a House subcommittee.

What about the number of victims? Bonner’s article had mentioned a list of 733 compiled by villagers, as well as a tally of 926 from a human rights organization.Elliott Abrams, who’d just taken office as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, informed the Senate that “the numbers, first of all, were not credible. … Our information was that there were only 300 people in the canton.” This was clear, conscious deceit on the part of Abrams. Both the Times and Post articles had mentioned that the massacre had taken place in several locations.

Then came the assault from the administration’s outside allies. On February 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial headlined “The Media’s War.” Americans were “badly confused” about the situation in El Salvador thanks to the U.S. press. El Mozote was not a massacre, the Journal wrote, but a “massacre.” On the one hand, the number of dead had obviously been exaggerated and on the other, maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government uniforms. Bonner was “credulous,” “a reporter out on a limb,” and, like reporters in Vietnam, a sucker for “communist sources.” One of the editorial’s authors appeared on PBS to proclaim that “obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation.”

Accuracy in Media, the conservative media criticism organization, went further. Bonner, it declared, was waging “a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.” Meanwhile, a Times editor later said, the administration was engaging in a “really vicious” whisper campaign about him.

The message was received loud and clear in the executive offices of the Times. While Bonner considers Punch Sulzberger, then the publisher of the Times, to have been “a great, great man,” he also recalls that he “supposedly said to [Times editor] Abe Rosenthal, ‘Who the hell is this guy down there that’s causing us all the trouble?’”

In August 1982, Rosenthal pulled Bonner out of Central America and back to New York for additional “training” in journalism. Bonner believes that Rosenthal made this decision not simply due to his El Mozote coverage, but because Rosenthal was a committed anti-communist who felt that Bonner was generally too sympathetic to the Salvadoran guerrillas and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

Within the Times newsroom, says Bonner, “It was certainly perceived as if I were being punished. I had a reporter who told me, ‘I’m not going to let this happen to me.’ … There is no question that this had a chilling effect on the reporting out of Central America.”

This coincided with a period of Grand Guignol violence by the Salvadoran government and its allied death squads that’s truly beyond human comprehension. About 75,000 Salvadorans were killed during this time, the per capita equivalent of about 5 million Americans today. According to a later U.N. investigation, the government was responsible for 85 percent of the murders, all committed with U.S. arms and training.

For Bonner’s part, he quit the Times three years later in 1984. “When I told Abe I was leaving there were no tears shed,” he remembers. He eventually returned to work for the paper after Rosenthal’s retirement. Now 77, he owns a bookstore in Australia.

Meanwhile, the key personnel who squelched the story went on to greater and greater heights. Enders retired from government service and enjoyed a lucrative career on Wall Street. Abrams was later a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council. Today, he is the special representative for Venezuela for the Trump administration.

Given how well pressure on the media worked with El Mozote, it’s no wonder that the U.S. right has used the same strategy over and over since. With the rise of conservative talk radio, and then Fox News, it’s become ever easier for politicians to simply ignore any inconvenient aspects of reality. Trump privately explained to journalist Leslie Stahl in 2016 that he strategically attacks journalism “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

Thus, while Bonner lived through a lot in 1981, he believes that “today it has gotten much worse.” Today, he says, “public officials simply lie with impunity,” and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it

===

https://www.webcitation.org/6BvSC8Irn?url=http://www.markdanner.com/articles/show/the_truth_of_el_mozote

===

an 220

deported to death: US sent 138 Salvadorans home to be killed

The Conversation

by Mneesha Gellman, Emerson College At least 138 people deported from the United States to El Salvador since 2013 have been killed, according to a new report by Human Right

no lnx

Deported to death: US sent 138 Salvadorans home to be killed

President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, at the InterContinental New York Barclay in New York City. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by The Conversation February 7, 2020

by Mneesha Gellman, Emerson College

At least 138 people deported from the United States to El Salvador since 2013 have been killed, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch, which investigates human rights abuses worldwide.

The 117-page report also says researchers identified at least 70 deportees who were sexually assaulted, tortured or kidnapped. Many victims were asylum-seekers attacked or killed by the gangs they originally fled.

The findings show that “the U.S. is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm,” Human Rights Watch says.

The group used court records, police reports, interviews with victims and their families and news articles to document the fates of deportees. It is the first systematic effort to find out what happened to Salvadorans whose asylum claims were rejected in U.S. immigration courts because they failed to demonstrate “credible fear” of violence in El Salvador.

International asylum laws created after the Holocaust require countries to take in people who are persecuted for their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

El Salvador has one of the world’s highest homicide rates. It is one of the main sources of migration to the U.S.

As part of its immigration crackdown, the Trump administration in September signed an agreement with El Salvador requiring the Central American country to keep asylum seekers there while they await the results of their asylum claims.

But the murders of 138 deportees belie any notion that El Salvador can protect citizens who are under threat.

Roots of impunity

Roughly the size of New Jersey, El Salvador is densely populated and highly connected by cellphone service and social media. The vulnerable groups protected under international asylum law cannot easily go under the radar or relocate if targeted by gangs, corrupt police or domestic abusers.

Hundreds of Salvadorans are killed every month. Murders, disappearances and tortures almost always go unsolved in El Salvador. Criminals, especially those with access to power, are rarely punished for their wrongdoing.

I have documented this culture of impunity across Central America and Mexico, focusing on the indigenous people, women and political dissidents who are so often victims of political violence.

This violence dates back centuries, to Spain’s bloody conquest of the Americas. As in the U.S., colonial-era brutality has lasting impacts on the region’s race, class and gender divisions.

In 1932, the massacre of indigenous Salvadorans and leftists who rebelled against dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez left between 10,000 and 30,000 dead.

Communist Party member Farabundo Martí, who led Salvadoran peasant farmers in their revolt against political corruption and unjust resource allocation, was assassinated after the massacre. But the struggle continued.

By the 1970s, dissident factions again organized against state oppression. United as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, these groups eventually waged war on the ruling ARENA party, which they blamed for oppressing the Salvadoran working class.

The subsequent Salvadoran civil war killed 75,000 people. In 1992, with intensive military support from the United States, ARENA defeated the rebels.

The 1992 El Salvador peace accords, overseen by the United Nations, were meant to bring national reconciliation. A truth commission documented widespread human rights abuses committed by state and paramilitary forces during the war. But days after the report was released, in 1993, El Salvador’s ARENA-controlled congress passed an amnesty law that excused most government and military officials.

As a result, the root causes of El Salvador’s conflict – particularly, unequal access to insufficient resources – still plague society. So does the very weak rule of law that allowed civil war criminals to go unpunished.

Neither the rightist or leftist governments that have held power since have managed to change this.

El Salvador’s defense minister recently assessed that there are more gang members than soldiers in his country. Police in El Salvador are extremely aggressive in pursuing them, and civilians can get caught in the crossfire, Human Rights Watch finds.

The resulting dangerous disarray sent 46,800 residents to seek asylum in the U.S. last year. Risking the unknown violence of migration over guaranteed violence at home is, for many Salvadorans, a logical decision.

Human security

Crime and violence in El Salvador has declined since President Nayib Bukele took office in June 2019, according to the government.

The president credits his tough-on-gangs policing with improving security in the country. But some crime analysts say the apparent drop in homicides is actually a manipulation of crime data. The government recently changed how it counts murders, eliminating deaths that result from confrontation with security forces – police killings – from the homicide category.

In any case, levels of violence in El Salvador are still among the world’s highest.

Police regularly turn a blind eye to violence by gang members, including both MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, either due to corruption or concern for their own safety. As a result, Salvadoran police frequently fail to meaningfully protect people from gang violence.

In these circumstances, deporting Salvadoran asylum-seekers may violate an international law called “non-refoulement.”

According to the 1954 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, which both the U.S. and El Salvador signed, states cannot expel refugees to a territory “where his life or freedom would be threatened.”

Migrants know El Salvador can’t protect them. That, of course, is why they flee. Now the United States government has to know that, too.

This story has been modified to more accurately characterize the methodology used by Human Rights Watch. It is an updated version of an article originally published Oct. 10, 2019.The Conversation

Mneesha Gellman, Associate Professor of Political Science, Emerson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

===

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/28/el-mozote-massacre-reagan-war-on-press

a RETIRED AIR FORCE general in El Salvador admitted in court last Friday that the country’s armed forces carried out the infamous El Mozote massacre in December 1981. This acknowledgement marks the first time the Salvadoran military has taken responsibility for the atrocity.

The Reagan administration entered office in January 1981 filled with fervor about rolling back communism in Central America. The Cuban revolution in 1959 had been bad enough. But then the Sandinistas had overthrown Nicaragua’s dictatorship in 1979, and left-wing guerrillas in Guatemala and El Salvador threatened to do the same to their autocrats.

There was a roadblock to Reagan’s plans, however: Congress was queasy about the U.S. alliance with the Salvadoran government and had required the president to certify by January 29, 1982 that El Salvador was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.” If it did not, all U.S. aid would be cut off. It was therefore unwelcome at the White House when word began circulating that something extremely bad had happened in the Salvadoran mountains. That New Year’s Eve, the head of the Salvadoran’s junta was forced to declare that rumors of a massacre were just “a guerrilla trick.”

The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier. As was borne out by Nixon’s direct experience during Watergate, few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore, as a top Nixon aide later recalled, Nixon believed that it was necessary to “fight the press through … the nutcutters as [the president] called them, forcing our own news. Make a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.”

The pushback began with congressional testimony by Enders. “There is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians,” he told a House subcommittee.

What about the number of victims? Bonner’s article had mentioned a list of 733 compiled by villagers, as well as a tally of 926 from a human rights organization. Elliott Abrams, who’d just taken office as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, informed the Senate that “the numbers, first of all, were not credible. … Our information was that there were only 300 people in the canton.” This was clear, conscious deceit on the part of Abrams. Both the Times and Post articles had mentioned that the massacre had taken place in several locations.

Then came the assault from the administration’s outside allies. On February 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial headlined “The Media’s War.” Americans were “badly confused” about the situation in El Salvador thanks to the U.S. press. El Mozote was not a massacre, the Journal wrote, but a “massacre.” On the one hand, the number of dead had obviously been exaggerated and on the other, maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government uniforms. Bonner was “credulous,” “a reporter out on a limb,” and, like reporters in Vietnam, a sucker for “communist sources.” One of the editorial’s authors appeared on PBS to proclaim that “obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation.”

===

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/what-the-right-wing-in-latin-america-means-by-democracy-is-violence/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/el-calabozo-massacre-remains-returned-38-years-200124210105414.html

San Vicente, El Salvador - Six white caskets sat in a row before an altar set up on the patio of a house in the Salvadoran community of Amatitan Abajo.

They held the remains of six people who were killed alongside 200 others by Salvadoran soldiers in what has been labelled the August 1982 El Calabozo massacre.

"We have a lot of emotions today," said Margarita Realegeno Bonilla, who waited nearly 38 years to finally lay to rest her six family members, including her parents and siblings, the youngest who was eight.

#### Ex-Salvadoran soldiers confirm El Mozote massacre victim accounts

#### El Salvador judge expands 1981 El Mozote massacre case

#### El Salvador's brutal civil war: What we still don't know

Realegeno Bonilla joined a small congregation of mainly elderly men and women who gathered to hold a burial.

"Now that God gives us the opportunity, we feel better knowing that they are going to be buried safely," Realegeno Bonilla told Al Jazeera.

Friday's ceremony was one small step forward in a decades-long crusade for justice and reparations for victims of the El Calabozo massacre, which included women, children and the elderly.

...

full?

no lnx

NEWS/LATIN AMERICA

El Calabozo massacre: Remains of six returned 38 years later

Families fight for justice nearly four decades after El Salvador soldiers shot dead more than 200 in August 1982.

by Anna-Cat Brigida

24 Jan 2020

Fix of the six coffins lay at the burial site in San Vicente, El Salvador [Anna-Cat Brigida/Al Jazeera]

How a Climate Change-Fueled Drought & U.S.-Fed Violence Are Driving Thousands from Central America

Trump is urging Mexico to deport the thousands of Central American migrants who are at or approaching the U.S. border in an attempt to seek asylum, days after U.S. border authorities fired tear gas into a crowd of asylum seekers as some tried to push their way through the heavily militarized border near San Diego. Trump tweeted, “Mexico should move the flag waving Migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries. Do it by plane, do it by bus, do it anyway you want, but they are NOT coming into the U.S.A. We will close the Border permanently if need be. Congress, fund the WALL!” This comes just days before Andrés Manuel López Obrador is sworn in as Mexico’s new president. López Obrador’s incoming government has denied it made any deal with the Trump administration to force asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their U.S. asylum claims are processed. We speak with John Carlos Frey, Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and PBS NewsHour special correspondent. He recently returned from reporting trips in Guatemala, Mexico City and Tijuana, where he was documenting the migrant caravan.

Transcript

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: To take a broader scope on this issue, you have traveled throughout Mexico and trying to deal with how—and to report on how these caravans and Central American migrants and refugees have developed. I’m wondering if you could talk about two aspects that don’t get very much attention in terms of what drives the migrants and the refugees. One is the issue of the growingdrought recently in Central America.And two is also this whole issue of the deportation of felons who were convicted in the United States, maybe raised in the United States, but were originally from El Salvador or Guatemala or Honduras, and have been deported in recent decades.

I think The Washington Post reported El Salvador alone, over a 20-year period, 95,000 people were deported from the U.S. after getting out of prison, back to El Salvador. That is 1.5 percent of the entire population of El Salvador—people that were deported back to the country after serving time here in the U.S. The impact of these criminals then going down to their countries where maybe they were born in but they don’t really know and developing the kinds of drug gangs that then force people to flee?

JOHN CARLOS FREY: You bring up two very good reasons for people to leave Central America. And the one that you were just mentioning, we have a program in California and now in the United States, where we will deport people who have Green Cards, people who are in the country legally, if you are a gang member. And it really doesn’t matter if you have been in the United States most of your life. It also doesn’t matter necessarily what crimes you may have committed. If you are a gang member, we’re going to deport you. We have every right to rescind your legal status, and we’re going to send you back to the country of origin, even if you came to the United States as a child.

That is exactly what we have done. That number, 95,000, is actually a bigger number than I even thought. But we have deported tens of thousands of gang members back to Central America, many of them back to El Salvador. And El Salvador just experienced its own civil unrest about 25, 30 years ago. We were deporting a criminal entity into a country that didn’t even have law enforcement. They were not stable. So what happened is these gangs reconstituted in El Salvador and they are now ruling the country. They joined back up in the prisons, and the criminal enterprise in El Salvador, also in Guatemala and Honduras, for the most part, are running the show. That is where the violence is coming from, a seed that we planted from the United States into countries that were not stable.

We didn’t even give any sort of a dossier or any sort of paperwork that allowed the countries to understand who and what we were deporting. We did not give them the crimes that they had committed, how much time they had served in prison or who these individuals were. We basically just said, “Here, you guys deal with this problem. We’re going to wash our hands of it.” Now we’re reaping the rewards of deporting this criminal element.

In addition to that, you mentioned the drought. There is a four- to five-year prolonged drought in Central America in a region known as the Dry Corridor. It encompasses parts of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. This year was one of the worst years of the drought. In some regions, there was 90 to 100 percent crop failure. Eighty percent of the region of this Dry Corridor is rural. It relies solely on agriculture as the base of the economy. And if the crops fail, there are no other jobs, there is no other place to go and people are starving.

I’ve interviewed dozens if not more people who have left Central America who are part of this particular migrant caravan who are hungry. They cannot feed themselves or their families. They have lost their crops. They don’t have any other way to make a living. And they are coming to the United States basically for food. I talked to a woman who was 25 years old. She was with her two-year-old. She was living on one tortilla a day. That’s all she could afford, and she came because there was just no other way for her.

So we’re not dealing with these factors that are sending people here. Putting concertina wire up at the border is not going to solve someone’s poverty, it’s not going to solve the violence in Central America and it’s certainly not going to put food on the table, which is why people are coming.

AMY GOODMAN: And you spent time just last week in Tijuana. Talk about the situation there, John.

...

pratt:

Along with his gun work, Pratt was involved during the Reagan years in a wide range of social and foreign policy issues. He was a member of the Council for National Policy, a think tank bringing together leading conservative figures to generate policy for the new administration. In 1980, he founded the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation, whichraised money for anti-gay campaigns and assisted the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue with legal defenses. In 1986, during the depths of the AIDS crisis, Pratt bought ads around the country highlighting a D.C. law forbidding health insurance companies from denying coverage and raising rates for people who test positive for HIV. "We don't think AIDS should have civil rights," Pratt told the Los Angeles Times. "The law is a dangerous and outrageous precedent for other wacko legislators to follow. [Those who support it should be] held accountable for voting to support homosexual privileges."

The following year, Pratt called for the quarantine of people suffering from AIDS. "Our judges coddle criminals instead of caring for the victims of crime," he wrote in a Family Foundation fundraising letter. "They've chased God out of our schools, defended abortions…and now they are trying to infect us and kill us with strange and horrible diseases."

Pratt's activities didn't stop at the U.S. border. Throughout the 1980s, Pratt added the last missing element to his extensive portfolio of conservative causes: foreign policy.

Pratt did more than support Reagan's arms build-up. He assumed a major role in a global operation assisting in the brutal, sometimes extralegal, execution of Reagan's "full-court press" against leftist forces in Central America and beyond. Under the direction of his friend Pat Buchanan, Pratt served as secretary for the privately run Council for Inter-American Security, or CIS. Ostensibly a think tank advocating an "activist" hemispheric foreign policy, the CIS in fact engaged in propaganda and intelligence gathering in the service of U.S. client states.

Sometimes this made a scramble of Pratt's anti-statist ideology. When it came to the ATF, he saw an American Stasi. But he was happy to help the FBI build files on activists.During Pratt's tenure, the CIS collaborated with the Bureau in tracking undocumented Salvadoran refugees living in the U.S.In his book, Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement, Ross Gelbspan documented the joint CIS-FBI effort to identify and deport political refugees back to El Salvador. The Political Asylum Project of the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that of the 154 people sent back between 1983 and 1984, over 100 were either killed or disappeared.

The CIS was part of a larger network of rightwing Cold War groups that launched Pratt well beyond his public orbit of religious conservatives focused on guns, taxes, and abortion.One CIS allied organization was the Unification Church-funded World Anti-Communist League (WACL) a notorious Who's Who federation of neo-Nazis, war criminals, and rightwing terror outfits. A Washington Post reporter who observed the League's 1979 conference counted "former Nazi SS officers, two neo-fascists from Italy reportedly wanted for terrorist acts, [and] members of Alpha 66, a right-wing Cuban exile group." (The reporter didn't know it at the time, but one of the attendees he quoted, Sam Dickson, was a white power activist and Atlanta-based Klan attorney.) The chair of WACL's US branch was Roger Pearson, a former Heritage Foundation hire of Pratt's friend Paul Weyrich. After revelations of Pearson's neo-Nazi activities, he stepped down, replaced by Elmore D. Greaves, a former organizer with the segregationist Citizens Councils.

During the 1980s and early Nineties, it was difficult to look at Pratt's network without tripping over a WACL connection. Pratt was also active in the United States Taxpayers Party, led by WACL member Howard Phillips. WACL ties carried over into a transitional phase of Pratt's activism: His work hyping Hispanic immigration and bilingual education as national security threats. In the mid-Eighties, Pratt launched another organization, English First, as a project within his Family Foundation to wage a racially charged war against bilingual education. He got help from Anthony Bouscaren, a CIS advisor who also sat on the board of WACL. Bouscaren's publishing credits included numerous articles in theneo-Nazi Roger Pearson's Journal for Social, Political and Economic Studies. This didn't stop more than a dozen GOP legislators, including Dick Armey, from joining the board.

It was during his involvement in Central American policy and supporting counterinsurgencies around the world that Pratt made multiple trips to Guatemala to observe rural "Civil Defense Patrols." Contemporary human rights observers (and two subsequent Truth Commissions) consider them "death squads" for their role in killing and torturing civilians. But Pratt found much to admire. He combined observations from these visits with similarly impressed notes on the Civilian Home Defense Forces,vigilante patrols in Ferdinand Marcos' Philippines, for a slim book published by the Gun Owners Foundation in 1990, Armed People Victorious. In it, he praises the leadership of Efrain Rios Montt, the country's military leader during 1982 and 1983 who greatly expanded the civil defense patrols. Twenty years later, Guatemalan judges would find Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. One Amnesty International Report from Montt's tenure detailed massacres in 60 Indian villages over a three-month period, leaving more than 2,500 dead. As late as 2001, Pratt was publically praising Montt as a "powerful Christian leader." In the concluding chapter of Armed People Victorious, titled "Bringing the Lessons Home," Pratt writes:

The War on Drugs can be won the same way the guerilla insurgencies were pushed back in Guatemala and the Philippines… The history of the United States for years before and after the founding of the Republic was the history of an armed people with functioning militias involved in civil defense… While the United States has forgotten its successes in this area, other countries have rediscovered them. It is time that the United States return to reliance on an armed people. There is no acceptable alternative.

Having defeated communism abroad, might not similar tactics work against enemies within? After the election of Bill Clinton, a significant chunk of gun culture would begin wondering the same thing — and about enemies more diverse than drug dealers. Just as he did during the social and foreign policy clashes of the Cold War, Larry Pratt would make sure he was right in the middle of things.

V. Storms of Fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War

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https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/05/445382231/how-el-salvador-fell-into-a-web-of-gang-violence

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/look-future-how-tpp-could-create-environmental-nightmares

he air was hazy from distant wildfires on August 29 when a gift arrived on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in southeast Montana. Carvers from the Lummi Tribe in Washington state brought a totem pole as a sign of support for those fighting the Otter Creek project, a proposed strip mine and rail spur on the Northern Cheyenne Tribe’s traditional lands.

At a ceremony marking the pole’s arrival, ranchers, whose families have been on the land for generations, and tribal members, whose families go back even further, joined together to speak of the sacredness of the land and water, and of their duty to protect this inheritance for generations to come

The new mine would extract around 1.3 billion tons of coal.Arch Coaland its partners would blast a new rail spur through hills, across ranches, and along the Tongue River to connect the mine to the Burlington Northern main line. Open train cars would carry coal to a proposed export terminal to be built on the Lummi Tribe’s traditional lands. From there, the coal could be shipped to Asia; burning it would emit billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Although some welcome the jobs associated with this project, thousands—from southeast Montana to the Pacific coast—have expressed opposition, citing concerns about pollution, noise, impacts on fisheries, and climate change.

But local leaders who resist mining, fracking, and pipelines face a gauntlet of challenges. The people of Denton, Texas, for example, overwhelmingly adopted a fracking ban, even though opponents outspent them nearly 10 to 1. But then the Texas legislature overturned their ban with a law that preempts local ordinances like Denton’s.

Even when local leaders get state and national support, corporations can still have the last word. Provisions in many trade agreements, including NAFTA, allow foreign corporations to sue governments for lost profits. According to Manuel Pérez-Rocha, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, these investor-state dispute settlement provisions are increasingly pitting governments against foreign mining or drilling companies in front of trade panels made up of three attorneys empowered to make decisions that supersede local, state, and federal law.

Here’s one example: In 2009, the Canadian-based Pacific Rim mining company (now owned by Australian-based OceanaGold) sued El Salvador for refusing to allow the company to mine for gold. El Salvador had banned the project due to widespread water contamination. The lawsuit demands $300 million from the small, impoverished country. Even if El Salvador prevails, it will be out millions of dollars in legal costs, according to Pérez-Rocha.

Now that the text has been officially released, we know that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would extend this sort of investor-state provision to countries that represent 40 percent of the global economy.

How would this apply to the Otter Creek dispute? Because Arch Coal is a U.S. corporation, Pérez-Rocha told me, it could not sue under investor-state provisions, unless the company sold out to a foreign company based in one of the countries covered by one of these trade agreements. As shown by the El Salvador case, that kind of buyout is not unusual, Pérez-Rocha says.

The TPP and other global trade pacts take away the power of governments to protect the environment. As I’ve traveled across the United States, visiting reservations, hollowed-out rust belt cities, and farming towns, I’ve met people working to combat climate change and racial exclusion, and to rebuild local food systems and economies. I believe that work represents our best shot at navigating the crises now unfolding around us. Instead of making global laws that increase the power of giant corporations, our policies should support people in communities everywhere who are building a better world.

'Something Horrible’ in El Salvador

Joan Didion JULY 14, 1994 ISSUE

The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War

by Mark Danner

Vintage, 304 pp., $12.00 (paper)

In December of 1981 in El Salvador, twenty-one months after the murder of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in San Salvador and twelve months after the murder of the four American Maryknoll women outside San Salvador and eleven months after the murder of the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency and two of his American aides at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador, which is to say at a time when the government of the United States had already demonstrated the ability to tolerate grave insults to its Central American policy, certain events occurred in certain remote villages north of the Torola river in Morazán province. In what has since become the most familiar of those villages, El Mozote, the events in question began late on a Thursday afternoon, December 10, a time when the village was crowded with refugees from areas believed less safe, and were concluded at dawn on Saturday.

Later that day, in Los Toriles, two kilometers to the southeast, similar events occurred, as similar events had already occurred or would within a few hours occur in Arambala and La Joya and Jocote Amarillo and Cerro Pando and Joateca and La Ranchería. These events were later and variously described to Mark Danner by thetwo American embassy officials assigned to investigate them,Todd Greentree and Major John McKay, as “something bad,” “something horrible,” a case in which “there had probably been a massacre, that they had lined people up and shot them,” a case in which “abuses against the civilian population probably took place”; a case that presented as its most urgent imperative the need to craft a report that would “have credibility among people who were far away and whose priorities were—you know, we’re talking about people like Tom Enders—whose priorities were definitely not necessarily about getting at exactly what happened.”

On December 10, 1992, eleven years to the day after the commencement of what has become known as the Mozote massacre (the largest number of those killed on that long December weekend were killed during the thirty-six hours spent by members of the Salvadoran army’s Atlacatl Battalion in El Mozote), four American forensic experts submitted to the United Nations Truth Commission the results of their analysis of skeletal remains and artifacts recovered by a team of Argentinian forensic anthropologists originally assembled to reconstruct evidence of their own country’s dirty war. Working exclusively with material exhumed from what had been the sacristy of the Mozote church, the Americans were able to identify the bones of 143 human beings, 136 of whom were children and adolescents. Of the remaining seven adults, six were women, one in the third trimester of pregnancy. The average age of the children was six.

The report prepared for the United Nations noted that there may have been a greater number of deaths in the sacristy, which was one of several sites mentioned by survivors as places where bodies would be found, since “many young infants may have been entirely cremated” (much of the village had been burned before the Atlacatl left El Mozote) and “other children may not have been counted because of extensive fragmentation of body parts.” Of the ten officers who, according to the report prepared for the United Nations, commanded the units participating in the Morazán operation, three are now dead, and four are still serving in the Salvadoran army. None has been officially charged on any count related to the massacre.

A year before, Tutela Legal, the human rights office of the Archbishopric of San Salvador, had compiled what may be the final and most comprehensive list of all those known or believed to have died in El Mozote and the surrounding villages. The Tutela Legal list numbered 767 men, women, and children, the youngest the two-day-old grandson of a day laborer named Miguel Márquez (the grandfather was also killed, as were his son, his daughter-in-law, two of his daughters, and seven of his other grandchildren), the oldest a man named Leoncio Díaz, who was said to be 105 years old and to have had a 100-year-old companion named Leoncia Márquez, who was also killed. Of the 767 victims cited on the Tutela Legal list, 358 were infants and children under the age of thirteen.

This of course is not a new story, and the fact that it is not a new story is in many ways the point of Mark Danner’s dispassionate, meticulously documented, and for these reasons conclusive book, The Massacre at El Mozote. The essential facts of the Mozote massacre were published on January 27, 1982, on the front pages of both The New York Times and The Washington Post, accompanied by photographs taken by Susan Meiselas, who had walked into Morazán from Honduras with Raymond Bonner of the Times. Bonner reported seeing the charred skulls and bones of what appeared to him to be several dozen men, women, and children. Allowing that it was “not possible for an observer who was not present at the time of the massacre to determine independently how many people died or who killed them,” he reported that the surviving relatives and friends of the victims believed the dead to number 733 and the killing to have been done “by uniformed soldiers” during an Atlacatl sweep of the region.

Alma Guillermoprieto, who was then a stringer for The Washington Post and who entered Mozote a few days after Bonner and Meiselas had left, also reported seeing bodies and body parts and quoted the same survivors, as well as the Salvadoran ambassador to Washington, Ernesto Rivas Gallont, who dismissed the reports from Morazán as the “type of story that leads us to believe there is a plan,” the plan being either to derail the Salvadoran election scheduled for March 1982 or “to take credit away from the certification President Reagan must make to Congress.” This “certification,” during 1982 and 1983 a semiannual requirement for continued aid to El Salvador, involved asserting that its government was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights” and was “achieving substantial control over all elements of its own armed forces, so as to bring to an end the indiscriminate torture and murder of Salvadoran citizens by these forces.”

The Reagan administration made its certification to these points on January 28, 1982, the day after Bonner’s and Alma Guillermoprieto’s extensive reports from Morazán appeared in the Times and the Post. Mark Danner’s true subject in The Massacre at El Mozote, then, is not the massacre itself but the way in which the story of the massacre, which was carried out by troops trained by the US Special Forces and equipped with US manufactured M-16s and with ammunition manufactured for the US government at Lake City, Missouri, came to be known and discounted in the United States, the way in which the story of El Mozote “was exposed to the light and then allowed to fall back into the dark.”

Reports that something bad had happened in Morazán began to circulate almost immediately. The Reverend William L. Wipfler at the New York office of the National Council of Churches first heard the story from a contact at Socorro Jurídico, which was then the legal aid office of the Archbishopric of San Salvador. Wipfler left a message for Raymond Bonner at the Mexico City bureau of the Times, and also sent a cable, dated December 15, 1981, asking Ambassador Deane Hinton in San Salvador for “confirmation or otherwise” of “reliable reports received here [indicating] that between December 10 and 13 a government joint military and security forces operation took place in Morazán Department which resulted in over 900 civilian deaths.”

Hinton did not reply until January 8, by which time the guerrillas’ Radio Venceremos was back in operation (to at least temporarily knock out the Venceremos transmitter had been one goal, perhaps the single successfully realized goal, of the Atlacatl’s Morazán operation) and broadcasting a detailed account of the massacre from a survivor named Rufina Amaya. Rufina Amayahad witnessed the killing of her husband and four of her children, ages nine, five, three, and eight months, but in the confusion and terror of the event had been inadvertently overlooked as the soldiers corralled groups of struggling and screaming women, many of them torn from their infants and children, to be killed and then burned.

“I do not know what your sources are but the only sources that I have seen alleging something like this are clandestine Radio Venceremos reports,” Hinton’s January 8 cable to the National Council of Churches read in part. “Frankly, I do not consider Radio Venceremos to be a reliable source.”Since Radio Venceremos did not restore its ability to broadcast until well after the National Council of Churches query was sent, that Hinton would devote an extraordinary ten of this cable’s twelve paragraphs to illustrations of Radio Venceremos unreliability seems in retrospect to suggest a certain crisis of confidence, if not a panic, at the embassy.

In fact, definitely before January 8 and probably closer to mid-December, Todd Greentree, then a junior reporting officer at the embassy in San Salvador and now the desk officer for Nicaragua at the State Department, had relayed to Hinton not only a report from his own sources on the left about a massacre in Morazán but alsoan offer from the FMLN to guide Greentree there. “I knew the guerrillas would never have masqueraded something like this, would never have fabricated it, if they were offering safe-conduct,” Greentree told Danner. “I was convinced that something had gone on, and that it was bad. I mean, it was pretty clear, if they were going to do this, that something must have happened.”

Hinton’s decision was that Greentree could not go in under guerrilla protection. “I should emphasize that I never got the feeling that they just wanted this to go away,” Greentree told Danner about the meeting in which this decision was taken. “But there were political and military restraints that we were operating under.” What discussion there may have been of an independent investigation (at least ten of the fifty-five American military advisers Congress then allowed in El Salvador were assigned to the Atlacatl) is unknown, although Danner was told by one of the advisers assigned to the Atlacatl that someone from the embassy Milgroup (Military Advisory Group) had called the Atlacatl base at La Libertad a few days after the massacre “and talked to the Special Forces people and told them they wanted Monterrosa [Lt. Col. Domingo Monterrosa Barrios, the Atlacatl commander] to come in—they wanted to talk to him about something that had happened during the operation.”

Monterrosa had declined to come in, a suggestive illustration of the level of control the United States then had over the military forces it was funding. Whether or not the embassy decision to refuse the FMLN offer to guide Greentree to the site of the massacre was discussed with Washington also remains shrouded in the subjunctive. “However much we might have wanted more information, no one in State was going to make that call,” Danner was told by Peter Romero, at the time of Mozote an El Salvador specialist at the State Department.

Most of the interested players, then, knew about Morazán, in outline if not in detail, well before January 6, when Bonner and Susan Meiselas, followed a few days later by Alma Guillermoprieto, first walked into El Mozote. Not until January 30, however, three days after the story had appeared on the front pages of the Times and the Post, did the embassy dispatch Todd Greentree and Major John McKay, who was then in the defense attaché’s office at the embassy and is now a colonel attached to NATO in Brussels, to Morazán. Greentree and McKay did not exactly get to El Mozote, although they did fly over it. Greentree’s impression from the air was that “El Mozote had been pretty much destroyed.”

Once on the ground in Morazán, Greentree and McKay, accompanied by a squad of the Atlacatl, interviewed those residents of the northern villages who had reached the refugee camp outside San Francisco Gotera. Although the Americans later recalled being able to “observe and feel this tremendous fear,” they did not elicit eyewitness accounts of a massacre, nor had they expected to. “You had a bunch of very intimidated, scared people, and now the Army presence further intimidated them,” McKay told Danner. “I mean, the Atlacatl had supposedly done something horrible, and now these gringos show up under this pretense of investigating it, but in the presence of these soldiers. It was probably the worst thing you could do. I mean, you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know what the Army people were there for.” Greentree and McKay then set out for El Mozote, and got to within an hour’s walk of what had been the village before the Atlacatl soldiers accompanying them refused to go further. “In the end, we went up there and we didn’t want to find that anything horrible had happened,” McKay told Danner. “And the fact that we didn’t get to the site turned out to be very detrimental to our reporting—the Salvadorans, you know, were never very good about cleaning up their shell casings.”

That evening, back at the embassy in San Salvador, Greentree wrote a report, the overriding aim of which appears to have been “credibility,” summarizing his and McKay’s findings. Here is the point at which El Mozote entered the thin air of policy. “The end of Bob White’s tour, and the transition period before Hinton arrived [Robert White had preceded Hinton as ambassador], and the first six months of Hinton’s tour—those were the absolute worst days, really out of control,” Greentree told Danner by way of explaining why the conviction that what was known or suspected in country would not be “credible” in Washington had by then increased exponentially. “And the fact that Bob White and everybody in the Embassy had been so thoroughly traumatized by the murders of the nuns, and the AFL-CIO guys [the two Americans who were killed with the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency at the Sheraton in San Salvador], and just the general sort of out-of-control way the military was—it meant that everything we reported could be taken as suspect.”

The following day, after review and revisions, Greentree’s report went to the State Department over Hinton’s name. This was the cable containing the careful and soon to be repeated assertions that it was “not possible to prove or disprove excesses of violence against the civilian population of El Mozote by government troops” and that “no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone, nor that the number of civilians killed even remotely approached number being cited in other reports circulating internationally.” The Greentree cable also contained, deep in its text, a curious warning from one of the interviewees, the mayor of Jocoaitique, who according to the cable “intimated that he knew of violent fighting in El Mozote” but was “unwilling to discuss deportment of government troops” and who then made a comment so coded that it could stand as a veiled but exact expression of the embassy position on what did or did not take place in Morazán. What the cable quoted the mayor of Jocoaitique as having said to Todd Greentree and Major McKay was this: “This is something one should talk about in another time, in another country.”

That part of the embassy cable did not make it into the statement made two days later to the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs by Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas O. Enders. (Nor would it appear in the sanitized version of the cable released under the Freedom of Information Act to Raymond Bonner in 1983.)1 The Enders statement is arresting not only for what it says and does not say but for its tone, which suggests an extreme version of a kind of exaggerated hauteur commonly translated as entitlement in the northeastern United States. “Many of you have read,” he said, addressing what he called “special pleading” in the matter of death and disappearance statistics, “about something called the Legal Aid Office of the Archbishopric—Socorro Judico [sic] is its Spanish name; it is often cited in the international media. It strangely lists no victims of guerrilla and terrorist violence. Apparently they do not commit violence.”

This was a level of seigneurial dismissal often emulated but never quite mastered by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams and other regular defenders of administration policy in Central America. “There is another organization, the Central American University, that collects statistics too,” Enders continued, referring to UCA, the Jesuit José Simeón Cañas University of Central America. “Its bias may be apparent from the fact that it does include a category of persons killed by what I believe Congressman Bonker referred to as paramilitary organizations. And they are called in Spanish ajusticiados, referring to persons that have received justice at the hands of their executioners.” Only then did Enders turn his attention to what he described as “allegations” of massacres, including Mozote. “We sent two embassy officers down to investigate the reports,” Enders said, inadvertently illuminating the particular distance between Washington and Morazán, which in local usage is said to be not “down” but “up” from San Salvador. Enders continued:

It is clear from the report they gave that there has been a confrontation between the guerrillas occupying Mozote and attacking Government forces last December. There is no evidence to confirm that Government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operations zone, or that the number of civilians remotely approached the 733 or 926 victims cited in the press. I note they asked people how many people there were in that canton and were told probably not more than 300 in December, and there are many survivors including refugees now.

Enders said this on February 2. On February 1, however, Deane Hinton, in response to what he apparently construed as careless use of his reply to the National Council of Churches, had sent a corrective cable to the State Department. This cable read in part:

I would be grateful if department would use extreme care in describing my views on alleged massacre. Case in point is description in para 3 of REFTEL referring to my letter…as “denying the incident.” My letter did not “deny” incident: it reported that at that time I had no confirmation and argued from available evidence from Radio Venceremos and from lack of other reports that I had no reason to believe Venceremos reports. I still don’t believe Venceremos version but additional evidence strongly suggests that something happened that should not have happened and that it is quite possible Salvadoran military did commit excesses. Allegations that it was unit from Atlacatl battalion in El Mozote remain to be confirmed or discredited.

Several days later, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Elliott Abrams echoed Enders in his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The El Mozote case was, Abrams said, “a very interesting one in a sense.” (“Interesting” was at the time a word much in use, as were “strange” and “unusual.” Enders for example had noted that Socorro Jurídico “strangely lists no victims of guerrilla and terrorist violence.” I recall watching Jeane Kirkpatrick during this period whip an audience to a frenzy with little silken whips of innuendo as she described how “interested,” even “bemused,” she was by the “unusual standards,” the “extraordinarily, even uniquely demanding standards” imposed by the certification requirement.) The reason El Mozote was “interesting” to Abrams was this:

…because we found, for example, that the numbers, first of all, were not credible, because as Secretary Enders notes, our information was that there were only three hundred people in the canton.

Abrams went on to wonder why a massacre that had occurred in mid-December, if indeed a massacre had occurred at all, had not been “publicized” until late January.

Ten years later, in an interview, Abrams was asking the same question, to the same innuendo: “If it had really been a massacre and not a firefight, why didn’t we hear right off from the FMLN? I mean, we didn’t start hearing about it until a month later.” Abrams, in other words, was still trying to negotiate what became with the exhumation of the sacristy unnegotiable, still trying to return discussion to the familiar question of whether or not a massacre had actually occurred. Enders, when he talked to Danner, had transcended this now inoperative line of attack, ascending effortlessly to the big-picture argument against the existence of a massacre: “Coming on top of everything else, El Mozote, if true, might have destroyed the entire effort. Who knows? I certainly thought that when I first heard about it.” In other words it had been necessary to deny the massacre because had there been a massacre the “effort” would have become, again in Enders’s word, “unfundable.”

The effort did not become unfundable. The effort instead became the most expensive attempt to support a foreign government threatened by an insurgency since Vietnam.2 Progressively cruder interpretations of what had been the surgically precise statements made by the embassy came to dominate, during the spring and summer of 1982, discussion of this country’s role in Central America. By February 10 of that spring The Wall Street Journal was noting editorially that “extremists” in El Salvador had “learned long ago the trick of dressing in military uniforms to confuse their victims.” (This appears to have been the source for Ronald Reagan’s later assertion that “communist operatives” were dressing in “freedom fighter uniforms” to discredit the Nicaraguan contras.)Shrill excoriations of Raymond Bonner, who necessarily had to be cast as having what George Melloan of The Wall Street Journal called “a political orientation,” became commonplace.

Bonner was a graduate of Stanford Law School, had been a prosecutor in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, and had served as a Marine officer in Vietnam.The Marine major who went up to Morazán with Todd Greentree, John McKay, had been with Bonner in Vietnam, where McKay lost an eye. “We could not have said, ‘My God, there’s been a massacre,”’ McKay told Danner about the cable the embassy sent to Washington as a report of his and Greentree’s trip to Morazán. “But, truth be known, the ambiguity of the cable that went out—in my own conscience I began to question it. And then when I saw the New York Times piece, and the picture, that really got me thinking. Bonner and I had gone to Quantico together, went to Vietnam together.” In the late summer of 1980, at a time when Bonner had spent time in Bolivia and Guatemala but made only a few short visits to El Salvador, he was asked his opinion of US policy in El Salvador. “Ask me about Bolivia, or Guatemala, or any country, I’ll probably have an opinion,” Bonner recalled having said. “But El Salvador, boy, I just don’t know. I guess we’re doing the right thing.”3

Bonner, then, might have seemed an unlikely target for the campaign then being mounted against him in Washington and New York. For those waging this campaign (notably The Wall Street Journal), however, the question of “political orientation” was answered once and for all in August 1982, when the Times abruptly withdrew Bonner from Central America. According to A.M. Rosenthal, then the executive editor of the Times, Bonner was withdrawn because he “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.” Actually Bonner had spent a good part of 1981 on the Metro desk at the Times, but Rosenthal suggested that those who believed Bonner to have been withdrawn for reasons other than “training” did so because they resented him, Rosenthal. “I was an agent of change in the Times,” he said, “and a lot of people didn’t like my politics.”

In many ways this tends to beg the point, burying the issue as it does in the self-referential. Whatever reason or reasons Rosenthal may have had for withdrawing Bonner, it was the sheer fact of that withdrawal, the fact of that apparent failure to back up a reporter who had put the paper on the line with a story denied by the government, that spoke so eloquently to those who wanted to discredit the reporting on El Mozote.That the Times withdrew Bonner was seen, immediately and by wider numbers of people than were actually knowledgeable about El Salvador or administration policy, as “proof” that he had been wrong about El Mozote: as recently as a few years ago it was possible to hear it casually said about Bonner that the Times “had to pull him out,” that he had “bought into a massacre.”

“For more than a year now we’ve been following the campaign that we victimized former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner,” The Wall Street Journal noted editorially in 1993. “The excavation of children’s bones in Mozote is supposed to vindicate Mr. Bonner and discredit what we said…we did not fire Mr. Bonner in the first place. The New York Times did. Or, more precisely, after then-Managing Editor A.M. Rosenthal undertook his own reporting visit to Salvador, it pulled Mr. Bonner off the beat and back to New York, where he left the paper.” In defense of its own reasonableness, the Journal noted that in its original 1982 attack on Bonner it had “offered not one word of criticism of Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post.”[different article explains why?]

Danner includes, among the documents reproduced at the end of The Massacre at El Mozote, the full text of both Bonner’s and Alma Guillermoprieto’s stories. There is no substantive difference between the two in either the reporting or the qualifying of the story, but there were certain marginal distinctions on which critics of Bonner could seize. Guillermoprieto referred to herself as “this correspondent” and said that she had been taken into Morazán by “the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front”; Bonner referred to himself as “a visitor who traveled through the area with those who are fighting against the junta that now rules El Salvador,” i.e., the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front. Guillermoprieto began: “Several hundred civilians, including women and children, were taken from their homes in and around this village and killed by Salvadoran Army troops during a December offensive against leftist guerrillas, according to three survivors who say they witnessed the alleged massacres.” She then proceeded to describe the bodies she herself had seen. Bonner began: “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.” He then proceeded to describe the bodies he himself had seen. Bonner’s statement is the less varnished of the two, but to call it different is to resort to a point of journalistic convention so narrowly defined as to be merely legalistic.

There seemed at the time at least two clear reasons that Bonner, not Guillermoprieto, became the target of choice. One reason was that Bonner, unlike Guillermoprieto, continued to report on a daily basis from El Salvador and so, all through the spring and into the summer of 1982, remained a stubborn mote in Deane Hinton’s ability to project the situation as the State Department wanted it projected. “I’m just afraid he’s going to get himself killed,” I recall an embassy official saying about Bonner during a lunch with Hinton in June of 1982; the tone here was the macho swagger never entirely absent from American embassies on hardship status. “That would be a tragedy.” The other clear reason was that Benjamin C. Bradlee and The Washington Post backed up their reporter; A.M. Rosenthal and The New York Times did not.

The Mozote massacre occurred only six years after most of us watched the helicopters lift off the roof of the Saigon embassy and get pushed off the flight decks of the US fleet into the South China Sea. There are now more than twice as many years between us and Mozote than there were between Mozote and those helicopters. This is not an insignificant time line, and suggests, in retrospect, a third reason that Raymond Bonner’s report from Morazán elicited an acrimony that Alma Guillermoprieto’s did not. Bonner was an American. Alma Guillermoprieto was born in and was then living in Mexico, a fact that was in some way understood to render her ineligible for casting as a member of what was sometimes called “the adversary culture,” the culture that was construed as hostile to the interests of American business and the American government, the culture that was even then drawing parallels between El Salvador and Vietnam.

Certain parallels were inescapable, since El Salvador was seen, by both the American military and the American policy community, as an opportunity to “apply the lesson” of Vietnam.The counterinsurgency doctrine that rationalized such operations as the 1981 sweep of Morazán was intended as a “revision” of the failed counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam (the revision for El Salvador placed a central emphasis on correcting “root causes,” or winning popular support by “democratizing” Salvadoran society), yet it had come to sound dispiritingly the same. The word “pacification” was in use, as was the phrase “third force,” usually in reference to José NapoleónDuarte.

“The only territory you want to hold is the six inches between the ears of the campesino,” Colonel John C. Waghelstein, who became commander of the Milgroup not long after Mozote, said when he spoke at the American Enterprise Institutein 1985 on “LIC [Low-Intensity Conflict] in the Post Vietnam Period.”4 As late as 1986, in The Wall Street Journal, an American military adviser was quoted describing a community event sponsored by a Salvadoran army unit as “winning hearts and minds.” The event involved clowns, mariachis, and speeches from army officers calling on peasants to reject the guerrillas. “This is low-intensity-conflict doctrine in action,” the adviser said.5

Again as in Vietnam, the doctrine was met with resistance on the part of those charged with carrying it out. “Attempts to address root causes during [this] period enjoyed less success than did efforts to stabilize the military situation,” four American military officers observed in their 1988 American Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El Salvador, the so-called “colonels’ report” prepared for the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.

American officers recognized… [that] the government had to transform itself into an institution perceived as effective, impartial, and committed to bringing about genuine reform. Meaningful implementation of this concept has eluded the Salvadorans and their American advisers.

In a 1991 Rand Institute report prepared for the Department of Defense,6 Benjamin C. Schwarz noted that “the greed and apparent tactical incompetence of Salvadoran officers has so exhausted American experts posted to El Salvador that all the individuals interviewed for this report who have served there in the past two years believe that the Salvadoran military does not wish to win the war because in so doing it would lose the American aid that has enriched it for the past decade.”

In San Salvador as in Saigon, this had long been accepted as one of many taxing givens that made the posting so difficult to share with those who were planning the effort in Washington. Deane Hinton, who would not talk to Danner, emerges in The Massacre at El Mozote as the ultimate example of the career foreign service officer trying to execute an extremely doubtful policy in an even more doubtful situation. (In his role as the good soldier of American foreign policy, Deane Hinton left El Salvador in 1983 for Pakistan, a more remote but equally doubtful situation, and then returned to Central America to mop up the debris left by the contra and then the Panama efforts. Alma Guillermoprieto, whose work since El Mozote has been especially acute on the immediacy with which Washington dreams become Central and South American responsibilities, notes in her essential The Heart That Bleeds that, as late as 1992 in Hinton’s Panama embassy, the preferred way to refer to the 1989 invasion was as “la liberación.”7 )

“This is a suicide mission,” an unidentified embassy official in San Salvador said when Warren Hoge of The New York Times asked, not long after Mozote, if assignment to El Salvador could advance a foreign service career. “Someone’s got to be nuts to be here. How many people do you think profited from having worked in Vietnam?”8 What made the San Salvador embassy a suicide mission was, of course, the certain knowledge that the facts of the situation would be less than welcome at the other end of the cable traffic. “There was no secret about who was doing the killing,” Danner was told by Howard Lane, the public affairs officer at the embassy at the time of El Mozote. “I mean, you formed that view within forty-eight hours after arriving in the country, and there was no secret at all about it—except, maybe, in the White House.”

What Danner details in The Massacre at El Mozote is the process by which actual eyewitness accounts (Bonner, Guillermoprieto) and photographs (Meiselas) came to be discounted by large numbers of Americans for no other reason than that the government, presenting no conflicting evidence, referred to the accounts (the photographs seemed rather eerily not to exist in anyone’s argument) as describing an event that was intrinsically unconfirmable, rendering the accounts by definition untrue. “Accurate information,” Enders said as he began his February 2, 1982, statement on Capitol Hill. “I think we have all found out that is very hard to establish.” He continued, first questioning the possibility of ever determining who, if indeed there had been “deaths,” had been responsible for them, then raising the ultimate question, the coup de grâce question, the one that had to do with the true interests of those who reported such deaths:

The responsibility for the overwhelming number of deaths is never legally determined nor usually accounted for by clear or coherent evidence. Seventy percent of the political murders known to our embassy were committed by unknown assailants. And there is much special pleading going on also in this.

What is especially striking about Enders, as he presents himself in The Massacre at El Mozote, is his apparent inability to recognize any contradiction between what he said in 1982 to the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs and what he said a decade later to Danner. Danner at one point asked Enders about a rumor, believed by a number of prominent Salvadorans, that two American advisers had observed the Mozote operation from a base camp below the Torola river. This was the answer Enders gave: “Certainly, one of the issues I remember raising between us and the Embassy was: Were there any American advisers on this sortie? The Embassy made a great effort to talk to advisers who were with the Atlacatl to try to find out the truth.” Any admission of knowledge, Enders conceded, “would have ruined those guys’ careers—they would have been cashiered. So no one’s going to volunteer, ‘Hey, I was up there.”’ The effect of such a disclosure on administration efforts to continue funding the war, Enders said, “would have been devastating. American advisers with a unit that committed an atrocity? Devastating. Can you imagine anything more corrosive of the entire military effort?”

Enders had recognized at the time, then, the existence of a “sortie,” even the possibility of an “atrocity” (the atrocity if not the sortie was in the subjunctive), and had raised the question of whether there had been “American advisers” present. Yet what Enders had said in 1982 was this: “…frankly, we do not have people who go out with the units as advisers, you know. These are military trainers. They stay behind.” The idea that there was a difference between “advisers” and “trainers,” another of the many legalistic distinctions at that time employed to rhetorical advantage, seems not to have been consistently held even by Enders.

Danner describes what happened to the story of El Mozote during the days and months after its initial disclosure as “a parable of the cold war.” It was that, and as such a parable Mozote is irresistibly legible, but it was also something else. “There have also been many fewer allegations of massacres during this reporting period than last,” Thomas Enders was able to say in July 1982, when the question of certification once again came before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “This may be in part,” he said, still the loyalist but still careful, fewer allegations of massacres, may be, in part, “because many earlier reports proved to be fabricated or exaggerated.”9

At the same hearing, Nestor Sanchez, then deputy assistant secretary of defense for Inter-American affairs, was able to single out “the first quick-reaction battalion trained by US instructors in El Salvador” not only for “its tactical capability in fighting the guerrillas” but also for “its humane treatment of the people.”10 That was the Atlacatl.Just six years after Vietnam and in the face of what was beginning to seem a markedly similar American engagement, Mozote, by which we have come to mean not exactly the massacre itself but this systematic obfuscation and prevarication that followed the disclosure of the massacre,was the first evidence that we had emerged a people again so yearning to accept the government versionas to buy into a revision of history in which those Americans who differed, those Americans who for reasons of their “political orientation” would “fabricate” reports of a massacre carried out by a unit noted for its “humane treatment of the people,”were once again our true, and only truly sinister, enemy.

Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: US Policy in El Salvador (Times Books, 1984), p. 342.?

Benjamin C. Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: The Frustrations of Reform and the Illusions of Nation Building (RAND, 1991), p. 2.?

Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. xxi.?

Benjamin C. Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador, p. 22.?

Clifford Krauss and Tim Carrington, “US Effort to Win ‘Hearts and Minds’ Gains in El Salvador,” The Wall Street Journal, September 8, 1986, quoted in Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine, p. 55.?

Benjamin C. Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador.?

Alma Guillermoprieto, The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now (Knopf, 1994).?

Warren Hoge, The New York Times, February 28, 1982.?

Hearings and Markup before the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, Second Session, on HJ Res. 494, June 2 and 22; July 29; and August 3, 10, and 17, 1982, p. 17.?

Hearings and Markup before the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs,p49?

George Melloan

George Melloan retired in after a 54-year writing and editing career at The Wall Street Journal. In his last assignment he was Deputy Editor, International, of the editorial page and author of a weekly op-ed column titled Global View. He moved to New York in 1962 to join the Journal’s Page One department as an editor and rewrite specialist. From 1966 to 1970 he was a foreign correspondent based in London, covering such major stories as the Six-Day War in the Middle East, the Biafran War in Nigeria and an attempted economic reform in the Soviet Union.

After joining the editorial page in New York in 1970, Mr. Melloan became deputy editor in 1973. In 1990, he took responsibility for the Journal’s overseas editorial pages, writing editorials and columns for the Journal’s foreign and domestic editions about such momentous events as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the open door policy that brought billions of foreign investment into China, fueling its enormous economic growth over a period of 25 years.

Mr Melloan was winner of the Gerald Loeb award for distinguished business and financial journalism in 1982 and twice in the 1980s won the Daily Gleaner award of the Inter-American Press Association for his writings about the rising Soviet influence in Central America. In 2005, he received theBarbara Olson Award for excellence and independence in journalism from The American Spectator.

He and his wife, Jody, live in Westfield, N.J. In 1978, they authored “The Carter Economy,” (John Wiley) an analysis of the prospects for the Carter administration based on its performance in its first year in office. They have three children and one grandchild. Mr. Melloan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relationsand the Dutch Treat Club in New York. He still writes occasionally for the Journal.

- See more at: http://authors.simonandschuster.com/George-Melloan/65281824#sthash.F5GGPjCz.dpuf

wiki

The El Mozote Massacre took place in and around the village of El Mozote, in Morazán department, El Salvador, on December 11, 1981, when the Salvadoran Army killed more than 800 civilians^[1] during the Salvadoran Civil War.

In December 2011, the El Salvador government apologized for the massacre.^[2]

[hide]

Background:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

In 1981, various left-wing guerrilla groups coalesced into the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front to battle El Salvador's right-wing government.^[3] Prior to the massacre, unlike many villages in the area, El Mozote had a reputation for neutrality. While many of its neighbors were largely Roman Catholic, and therefore often influenced by liberation theology and sympathetic to the guerrillas, El Mozote was largely Evangelical Protestant. The village had sold guerrillas supplies on occasion, but was also "a place where the guerrillas had learned not to look for recruits".^[4]

Prior to the massacre, the town's wealthiest man, Marcos Díaz, had gathered the citizens to warn them that the army would soon pass through the area in a counterinsurgency operation, but that he had been assured that the town's residents would not be harmed if they remained in place. Concerned that fleeing the town would cause them to be mistaken for guerrillas, the townspeople elected to stay, and extended an offer of protection to peasants from the surrounding area, who soon flooded the town.^[4]

Mark Danner reconstruction of events:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

In his 1994 book, The Massacre at El Mozote, US journalist Mark Danner compiled various reports to reconstruct an account of the massacre:

December 10:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

On the afternoon of December 10, 1981, units of the Salvadoran army's Atlacatl Battalion (named after an indigenous fighter who fought the Spanish in the 16th century) arrived at the remote village of El Mozote after a clash with guerrillas in the vicinity.^[5] The Atlacatl was a "Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion" specially trained for counter-insurgency warfare. It was the first unit of its kind in the Salvadoran armed forces and was trained by United States military advisors.^[6] Its mission, Operación Rescate ("Operation Rescue"), was to eliminate the rebel presence in a small region of northern Morazán where the FMLN had a camp and a training center.

El Mozote consisted of about twenty houses situated on open ground around a square. Facing onto the square was a church and, behind it, a small building known as "the convent", used by the priest to change into his vestments when he came to the village to celebrate mass. Near the village was a small schoolhouse.

Upon arrival, the soldiers found not only the residents of the village but also campesinos who had sought refuge from the surrounding area. The soldiers ordered everyone out of their houses and into the square. They made them lie face down, searched them, and questioned them about the guerrillas. They then ordered the villagers to lock themselves in their houses until the next day, warning that anyone coming out would be shot.^[5] The soldiers remained in the village during the night.

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Victims_Of_The_Mozote_Massacre,_Moraz%C3%A1n,_El_Salvador,_January_1982.jpg)

Victims Of The Mozote Massacre, Morazán, El Salvador, January 1982

December 11 and 12:{:{[:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}::(style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-weight:normal;margin-left:1em;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate"):}:edit]

Early the next morning, the soldiers reassembled the entire village in the square. They separated the men from the women and children and locked them in separate groups in the church, the convent, and various houses.^[7]

During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture, and execute the men in several locations.^[8] Around noon, they began taking the women and older girls in groups, separating them from their children and machine gunning them after raping them.^[9] Girls as young as 10 were raped, with soldiers reportedly heard bragging how they especially liked the twelve-year-old girls.^[10] Finally, they killed the children at first by slitting their throats, then by hanging them from trees, with one child as young as two years old.^[11] After killing the entire population, the soldiers set fire to the buildings.

The soldiers remained in El Mozote that night but the next day went to the village of Los Toriles, some 2 km away and carried out a further massacre. Men, women and children were taken from their homes, lined up, robbed and shot and their homes then set ablaze.^[12]

News of the massacre first appeared in the world media on January 27, 1982, in reports published by The New York Times^[13] and The Washington Post. Raymond Bonnerwrote in the Times of seeing "the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles."^[13] The villagers gave Bonner a list of 733 names—mostly children, women, and old people—all of whom, they claimed, had been murdered by government soldiers.^[13][14]Initial reports and controversy:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Alma Guillermoprieto of the Post, who visited the village separately a few days later, wrote of "dozens of decomposing bodies still seen beneath the rubble and lying in nearby fields, despite the month that has passed since the incident ... countless bits of bones—skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column—poked out of the rubble."^[15]

Both reporters cited Rufina Amaya, a witness who had escaped into a tree during the attack. She told the reporters that the army had killed her husband and her four children, the youngest of whom was eight months old, and then lit the bodies on fire.^[13]

The conservative press-watch organization Accuracy in Media accused the Times and Post of timing their stories to release them just before the congressional debate; five months later, Accuracy in Media devoted an entire edition of its AIM Report to Bonner, in which its editor Reed Irvine declared that "Mr. Bonner had been worth a division to the communists in Central America".^[15] Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders attacked Bonner and Guillermoprieto before a Senate committee, stating that though there had been a battle between guerrillas and the army, "no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians." Enders also repeated the claim that only 300 people had lived in Mozote, making it impossible for the death toll to have reached that reported in the Times and Poststories.^[16] On February 8, Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, told the committee that "it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas".^[17]Salvadoran army and government leaders denied the reports and officials of the Reagan administration called them "gross exaggerations."^[15] The Associated Press reported that "the U.S. Embassy disputed the reports, saying its own investigation had found ... that no more than 300 people had lived in El Mozote."^[14]

In February, in an editorial titled "The Media's War", The Wall Street Journal criticized Bonner's reporting as "overly credulous" and "out on a limb". In Time magazine, William A. Henry III wrote a month later: "An even more crucial if common oversight is the fact that women and children, generally presumed to be civilians, can be active participants in guerrilla war. New York Timescorrespondent Raymond Bonner underplayed that possibility, for example, in a much-protested January 27 report of a massacre by the army in and around the village of Mozote."^[15] U.S. Ambassador Deane Hintoncalled Bonner an "advocate journalist".^[18] Bonner was recalled to New York in August and later left the paper.^[15]

Although attacked less vigorously than Bonner, Alma Guillermoprieto was also a target of criticism. A Reagan official wrote a letter to the Post stating that she had once worked for a communist newspaper in Mexico, a claim which Guillermoprieto denied.^[15]

Later investigation:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

On October 26, 1990, a criminal complaint was filed against the Atlacatl Battalion for the massacre by Pedro Chicas Romero of La Joya. Romero had survived the massacre himself by hiding in a cave above the town.^[19]

In 1992, as part of the peace settlement established by the Chapultepec Peace Accords signed in Mexico City on January 16 of that year, the United Nations-sanctioned Commission on the Truth for El Salvadorinvestigating human rights abuses committed during the war supervised the exhumations of the El Mozote remains by an Argentinian team of forensic specialists beginning November 17. The excavation confirmed the previous reports of Bonner and Guillermoprieto that hundreds of civilians had been killed on the site.^[20]

The Salvadoran Minister of Defense and the Chief of the Armed Forces Joint Staff informed the Truth Commission that they had no information that would make it possible to identify the units and officers who participated in Operación Rescate. They claimed that there were no records for the period. The Truth Commission stated in its final report:

"There is full proof that on December 11, 1981, in the village of El Mozote, units of the Atlacatl Battalion deliberately and systematically killed a group of more than 200 men, women and children, constituting the entire civilian population that they had found there the previous day and had since been holding prisoner ... there is [also] sufficient evidence that in the days preceding and following the El Mozote massacre, troops participating in "Operation Rescue" massacred the non-combatant civilian population in La Joya canton, in the villages of La Rancheria, Jocote Amatillo y Los Toriles, and in Cerro Pando canton."^[5]

"That in the United States it came to be known, that it was exposed to the light and then allowed to fall back into the dark, makes the story of El Mozote—how it came to happen and how it came to be denied—a central parable of the Cold War."^[4]In 1993, El Salvador passed an amnesty law for all individuals implicated by UN investigations, effectively exempting the army from prosecution.^[19] That year, American journalist Mark Danner published an article in the December 6 issue of The New Yorker. His article, "The Truth of El Mozote", caused widespread consternation, for it rekindled the debate regarding the United States' role in Central America during the violence-torn 1970s and 1980s. He subsequently expanded the article into a book, The Massacre at El Mozote (1994). In a prefatory remark, Danner wrote:

In 1993, a special State Department panel that examined the actions of U.S. diplomats vis-a-vis human rights in El Salvador concluded that "mistakes were certainly made ... particularly in the failure to get the truth about the December 1981 massacre at El Mozote."^[21] In his study of the media and the Reagan administration, On Bended Knee, U.S. author Mark Hertsgaard wrote of the significance of the first reports of the massacre:

"What made the Morazan massacre stories so threatening was that they repudiated the fundamental moral claim that undergirded US policy. They suggested that what the United States was supporting in Central America was not democracy but repression. They therefore threatened to shift the political debate from means to ends, from how best to combat the supposed Communist threat—send US troops or merely US aid?—to why the United States was backing state terrorism in the first place."^[22]

Though a later court decision overturned the amnesty for defendants suspected of "egregious human rights violations", attempts by Salvadoran lawyers to reopen the case repeatedly failed.^[6]

Subsequent follow-up:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

On March 7, 2005, the Organization of American States's Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reopened an investigation into the El Mozote massacre based on the evidence found by the Argentine forensic anthropologists.^[6] As of December 2011, activists continued to lobby the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to hear the case.^[2]

In a January 2007 report in The Washington Post, a former Salvadoran soldier, José Wilfredo Salgado, told of returning to El Mozote several months after the massacre and collecting the skulls of the youngest victims, whose remains were exposed by recent rains, for "candleholders and good-luck charms."^[23]

In December 2011, the Salvadoran government formally apologized for the massacre in a ceremony in the town. Foreign Minister Hugo Martinez, speaking on the government's behalf, called the massacre the "blindness of state violence" and asked for forgiveness.^[2]

In October 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered El Salvador to investigate the El Mozote massacre and bring those responsible to justice. The court ruled that an amnesty law did not cover the killings.^[24]

References:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Ian Urbina (March 8, 2005). "O.A.S. to Reopen Inquiry Into Massacre in El Salvador in 1981". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved November 4, 2012.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-BBC_2-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-BBC_2-2) "El Salvador sorry for El Mozote massacre in 1981". BBC News. December 10, 2011. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved November 4, 2012.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Enemies of War: El Salvador Civil War". Public Broadcasting Service. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. RetrievedNovember 4, 2012.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-NY_4-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-NY_4-2) Mark Danner (December 6, 1993). "The Truth of El Mozote".The New Yorker. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved November 4, 2012.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-CTES_5-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-CTES_5-2) "From Madness to Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador: Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador" (PDF). Commission on the Truth for El Salvador. March 15, 1993. Retrieved November 4,2012.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-NYT38_6-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-NYT38_6-2) Ian Urbina (March 8, 2005). "O.A.S. to Reopen Inquiry Into Massacre in El Salvador in 1981". The New York Times. Archivedfrom the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved November 4, 2012.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 67.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 69–81.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 78.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 71.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 77.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 81.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-ny-1982_13-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-ny-1982_13-2) ^d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-ny-1982_13-3) Raymond Bonner (January 27, 1982). "Massacre of Hundreds Reported In Salvador Village". The New York Times. RetrievedNovember 4, 2012.(subscription required)
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-ap-12feb82_14-1) Richard Boudreaux. "Many Die but No Agreement on How Many and Why," Associated Press, February 12, 1982. Retrieved 2008-05-04.^[dead ^link]
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-CJR_15-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-CJR_15-2) ^d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-CJR_15-3) ^e(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-CJR_15-4) ^f(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-CJR_15-5) Mike Hoyt (Jan–Feb 1993). "The Mozote massacre".Columbia Journalism Review. Archived from the original on November 16, 2007.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Stanley Meisler. "El Mozote Case Study". Columbia School of Journalism. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved November 4, 2012.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Robin Andersen (2006). *A Century of Media, a Century of War*. Peter Lang. p. 89. ISBN 9780820478937. Retrieved November 4,2012.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Bernard Weinraub, "Envoy Says Salvadoran Plan Is Intact," The New York Times, June 12, 1982, 3 (cited in John F. Kirch, "Raymond Bonner and the Salvadoran Civil War - 1980 to 1983" presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Toronto, Canada, August 2004)
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre#cite_ref-NYT39_19-1) Douglas Martin (March 9, 2007). "Rufina Amaya, 64, Dies; Salvador Survivor". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved November 4, 2012.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Tim Golden (October 22, 1992). "Salvador Skeletons Confirm Reports of Massacre in 1981". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved November 4, 2012.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ George S. Vest et al. (July 1993). "Report of the US Secretary of State's Panel on El Salvador". US State Department via ncsu.edu.Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. RetrievedNovember 4, 2012.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Mark Hertsgaard (1989). On bended knee: the press and the Reagan presidency. Schocken Books. p. 190. ISBN 9780805209600.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Manuel Roig-Franzia (January 29, 2007). "Former Salvadoran Foes Share Doubts on War". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on November 4, 2012. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "El Salvador told to investigate 1981 El Mozote massacre". BBC News. December 11, 2012. Retrieved December 11, 2012.

Bibliography:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Danner, Mark (2005). The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. Granta. ISBN 1862077851.

External links:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

The UN Truth Commission report on El Mozote (excerpts)
Testimony of Rufina Amaya: Sole survivor of the massacre (in Spanish)
"The Dead: Victims at El Mozote and Nearby Villages". SOA Watch. Retrieved January 22, 2012. - list of names initially compiled by Tutela Legal, a church-run human rights group in El Salvador, and updated by Mark Danner, author of The Massacre at El Mozote

Categories:

how magna carta became minor:

the charter of the forest imposed limits to privatization. the robin hood myths capture the essence of its concerns (and it is not too surprising that the popular tv series of the 1950s, “the adventures of robin hood,” was written anonymously by hollywood screenwriters blacklisted for leftist convictions). by the seventeenth century, however, this charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality.

With the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized, a category that continues to shrink to virtual invisibility. in bolivia, the attempt to privatize water was, in the end, beaten back by an uprising that brought the indigenous majority to power for the first time in history. the world bank has just ruled that the mining multinational pacific rim can proceed with a case against el salvador for trying to preserve lands and communities from highly destructive gold mining. environmental constraints threaten to deprive the company of future profits, a crime that can be punished under the rules of the investor-rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.” and this is only a tiny sample of struggles underway over much of the world, some involving extreme violence, as in the eastern congo, where millions have been killed in recent years to ensure an ample supply of minerals for cell phones and other uses, and of course ample profits

THE CHARTER OF THE FOREST IMPOSED LIMITS TO PRIVATIZATION. THE ROBIN HOOD MYTHS CAPTURE THE ESSENCE OF ITS CONCERNS (AND IT IS NOT TOO SURPRISING THAT THE POPULAR TV SERIES OF THE 1950S, “THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD,” WAS WRITTEN ANONYMOUSLY BY HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITERS BLACKLISTED FOR LEFTIST CONVICTIONS). BY THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, HOWEVER, THIS CHARTER HAD FALLEN VICTIM TO THE RISE OF THE COMMODITY ECONOMY AND CAPITALIST PRACTICE AND MORALITY.

WITH THE COMMONS NO LONGER PROTECTED FOR COOPERATIVE NURTURING AND USE, THE RIGHTS OF THE COMMON PEOPLE WERE RESTRICTED TO WHAT COULD NOT BE PRIVATIZED, A CATEGORY THAT CONTINUES TO SHRINK TO VIRTUAL INVISIBILITY. IN BOLIVIA, THE ATTEMPT TO PRIVATIZE WATER WAS, IN THE END, BEATEN BACK BY AN UPRISING THAT BROUGHT THE INDIGENOUS MAJORITY TO POWER FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY. THE WORLD BANK HAS JUST RULED THAT THE MINING MULTINATIONAL PACIFIC RIM CAN PROCEED WITH A CASE AGAINST EL SALVADOR FOR TRYING TO PRESERVE LANDS AND COMMUNITIES FROM HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE GOLD MINING. ENVIRONMENTAL CONSTRAINTS THREATEN TO DEPRIVE THE COMPANY OF FUTURE PROFITS, A CRIME THAT CAN BE PUNISHED UNDER THE RULES OF THE INVESTOR-RIGHTS REGIME MISLABELED AS “FREE TRADE.” AND THIS IS ONLY A TINY SAMPLE OF STRUGGLES UNDERWAY OVER MUCH OF THE WORLD, SOME INVOLVING EXTREME VIOLENCE, AS IN THE EASTERN CONGO, WHERE MILLIONS HAVE BEEN KILLED IN RECENT YEARS TO ENSURE AN AMPLE SUPPLY OF MINERALS FOR CELL PHONES AND OTHER USES, AND OF COURSE AMPLE PROFITS

2/15 the nation

Before Bill O’Reilly was, well, Bill O’Reilly, he worked for a time as a foreign correspondent for CBS Nightly News, anchored by Dan Rather. O’Reilly talks about that period of his career in two of his books, and in both mentions that in early 1982 he reported from northeastern El Salvador, just after the infamous El Mozote Massacre. “When the CBS News bureau chief asked for volunteers to check out an alleged massacre in the dangerous Morazán Territory, a mountainous region bordering Nicaragua, I willingly went.”

El Mozote is a small, hard-to-reach hamlet. The massacre took place on December 11, 1981, carried out by US-trained Atlacatl Battalion, which was not just trained but *created* by the United States as a rapid response unit to fight El Salvador’s fast-spreading FMLN insurgency. The killing was savage beyond belief: between 733 and 900 villagers were slaughtered, decapitated, impaled and burned alive.

The story of the massacre was broken on the front page ofThe New York Timesby the journalist Raymond Bonner and in *The Washington Post* by Alma Guillermoprieto; both stories were published on January 27, 1982, and accompanied by photographs taken by Susan Meiselas. Bonner and Meiselas got to El Mozote, after hearing about the massacre, by walking for days in from Honduras. Guillermoprieto wrote about seeing “countless bits of bones—skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column” poking “out of the rubble.” Bonner noted the “charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles.” Later, Mark Danner reported on the massacre in detail, first in a lengthy New Yorker essay and then in a book.

Aside from the brutality of the killing, El Mozote is distinguished by the fact that Washington moved quickly to cover it up. It was, in a way, the first massacre of the “second Cold War,” the Reagan administration’s drive to retake the third world; what My Lai was to the 1960s, El Mozote was to the 1980s(later, in 1989, Atlacatl would commit another infamous crime: the execution of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter).

In addition to describing the massacre, Danner documents the cover-up in detail: the US embassy in El Salvador immediately disputed Bonner’s and Guillermoprieto’s reporting, as did New Right organizations like Accuracy in Media. Thomas Enders, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for inter-American Affairs, andElliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for human rights, denied the killing. Abrams said “it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.” The Wall Street Journalcalled Bonner “overly credulous” and “out on a limb” and placed the word massacre in “scare quotes.” The Timessided with the critics, and Bonner eventually left the paper, after first being transferred to the business section.

O’Reilly doesn’t give an exact date for when he travelled to El Salvador, but he writes that it was just before the Falklands War. In other words, probably in March 1982, between the first reports of the “alleged massacre,” in late January, and Argentina’s early April invasion of the Malvinas. Here’s O’Reilly’s account, from his book, The No Spin Zone:

A few weeks after taking the CBS job I was flown to El Salvador to report on the war going on there at the time. I drew an assignment that sent me to the Morazán province in the mountainous northeastern part of that beautiful country. This was ‘Indian country,’ a place where the communist guerrillas (‘los muchachos’) operated with impunity. It was a dangerous place, and my crew—driver, producer, and cameraman—was not thrilled to be going there. It took us a full day to drive to Morazán from San Salvador, the capital city, because all the bridges had been blown up and we had to ford the rivers in our van. This was slow going, making us easy targets. Our only protection was a message painted in black letters over and over again on the sides of the van: periodistas—no dispare(Journalists—don’t shoot).

O’Reilly continues along these lines, emphasizing the danger he and his crew faced. He recounts being given the “local war news” by a Salvadoran army colonel:“The ‘muchachos’ had wiped out a small village called Meanguera a few miles to the south because its mayor was deemed friendly to the government. The atrocity had not been confirmed, though, because nobody in his right mind would go into the guerrilla-controlled areas.”

Note that O’Reilly doesn’t mention the massacre at El Mozote. He rather focuses on a supposed killing committed by leftist insurgents in nearby Meanguera (Meanguera, a municipal town center, is nine kilometers away from the hamlet of El Mozote). It is extremely unlikely that O’Reilly would not have known about the El Mozote massacre. Not only was it reported on in all the major papers, the Reagan administration’s denials had themselves become a story (The Wall Street Journalran its attack on Bonner on February 10).

In any case, O’Reilly went to Meanguera and not El Mozote. Leigh Binford, an anthropologist who wrote a great book on the larger context of the massacre, tells me that “all of these municipal centers sustained attacks by the FMLN; they were, after all, where the repressive forces (National Guard or Treasury Police) were housed, and from which they had been making forays into the countryside over the course of at least a year to kill, harass, capture, and torture for some time.” So it is very possible that Meanguera was attacked by the rebels. But it certainly wasn’t “wiped out.” In other words, going to Meanguera in early 1982 would be as if Seymour Hersh, when he first learned of the My Lai massacre, decided to investigate events the next town over.

Here’s what O’Reilly writes in his book about his report: when he finally arrived in Meanguera, “the place was leveled to the ground and fires were still smoldering. But even though the carnage was obviously recent, we saw no one live or dead. There was absolutely nobody around who could tell us what happened. I quickly did a stand-up amid the rubble and we got the hell out of there.”

He continues to emphasize his courage (writing that a Salvadoran military official said that he had “cojones” for having travelled to Meanguera). Then, having made it back to San Salvador safely, he filed his story: “I explained that while a scorched-earth policy was clearly in effect in remote village—the evidence was right there on tape—it was impossible to say just who was doing the scorching. Could be the muchachos[that is, the guerrillas], could be the government. The ninety-second package contained great video and a fairly impressive ‘on the scene in a very bad place’ stand-up by yours truly.”

O’Reilly tells a version of this story in two different books, since it supposedly captures a key moment in his personal narrative, a moment when he stood up to the “liberal establishment”—that is, CBS News—and eventually becomes who he is today. His editor apparently didn’t broadcast the report until O’Reilly forced him to do so.

I’ve located the broadcast and there are a number of problems with how O’Reilly tells the story in his book....

mining

Living under the constant threat of assassination, Francisco Pineda courageously led a citizens' movement that stopped a gold mine from destroying El Salvador's dwindling water resources and the livelihoods of rural communities throughout the country. Learn more at Link.

...n 2002, Canadian mining giant Pacific Rim began the exploration phase for a gold and silver mine in Cabañas. Growing concern over the environmental consequences for the region’s forests and the Rio Lempa was largely ignored by the government. That changed in 2004 when Pineda discovered that the creek supplying irrigation to his crops had completely stopped flowing. Pineda walked along the water’s edge and found Pacific Rim’s pumps siphoning the creek to its exploration area upstream. Recognizing the potentially devastating situation, he and his neighbors immediately approached local government officials with their concerns about the water supply, but were told that the mine was moving forward regardless of local protest. Officials claimed that the opportunities for development and employment outweighed potential problems, but upon closer inspection, Pineda and his colleagues realized that the local population was not qualified for the highly technical jobs Pacific Rim would create. They then set in motion a people’s movement that would succeed in halting the mine, but would have deadly consequences for many involved....

mcm

US pressuring El Salvador to buy Monsanto GM seeds

U.S. Government Ties El Salvador USD 277 M Aid Package to Monsanto’s GMO Seeds

Posted on Jun 8 2014 – 4:37pm by Sustainable Pulse

The President of the El Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technologies (CESTA), Ricardo Navarro, has demanded that the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Mari Carmen Aponte, stops pressurizing the Government of El Salvador to buy Monsanto’s GM seeds rather than non-GMO seeds from domestic suppliers.

El-Salvador aid

“I would like to tell the U.S. Ambassador to stop pressuring the Government (of El Salvador) to buy ‘improved’ GM seeds,” said Navarro, which is only of benefit to U.S. multinationals and is to the detriment of local seed production, Verdad Digital reported last week.

In recent weeks, the U.S. has been pushing the El Salvadoran Government to sign the second Millennium Challenge Compact. One of the main conditions on the agreement is allegedly for the purchasing of GM seeds from Monsanto.

U.S.-Funded War in El Salvador Casts Shadow over Romney/Ryan Campaign

by Brendan Fischer [1] — August 16, 2012 - 8:39am

Topics: Election 2012 [2], Democracy [3], Politics [4]

Amidst reports that Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital with funds from investors tied to 1980s Salvadoran death squads, his new running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is getting foreign policy briefings from a man who actively covered-up some of the worst atrocities committed by those same death squads.The GOP's vice-presidential candidate also earned his political stripes working under neoconservative Republicans who funneled billions in U.S. aid to those military hitmen. Though the war in El Salvador was just one chapter in history, Romney and Ryan's relationship with that war may provide a snapshot into their worldview.

Between 1979 and 1992, an estimated 75,000 people were killed in the conflict in El Salvador and countless others were "disappeared" or displaced, an astonishing number for a country the size of Massachusetts. A United Nations Truth Commission estimated [6] that the right-wing, military-led government was responsible for 85 percent of the violence while the left-wing insurgency fighting against vast economic and political inequality, including farmers, teachers, priests and union activists, was responsible for only 5 percent. Much of the violence was attributable to clandestine military or paramilitary death squads, which committed countless assassinations and acts of brutal violence against suspected political dissidents.

Recent reports suggest that some of the same members of the Salvadoran oligarchy that backed the death squads gave Romney the startup funds for Bain Capital.

Romney's Early Bain Capital Funders Tied to Salvadoran Death Squads

Last week, the Huffington Post's Ryan Grim and Cole Stangler reported [7] on how Romney went to Miami in 1983, at the height of El Salvador's civil war, to raise $9 million from Salvadoran expatriate families to start Bain Capital. This seed money amounted to 40 percent of Bain's startup funds. Although Romney claimed that he had vetted the backgrounds of the investors, some of their families had been identified by the U.S. ambassador and others as closely tied to either death squads or death squad leader and ARENA Party founderRoberto d'Aubuisson (known as "Blowtorch Bob" for his use of blowtorches to torture political prisoners).

D'Aubuisson was later found responsible for ordering the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, a prominent advocate for the poor and critic of the Salvadoran government (who the Vatican has now placed in the process of canonization to become a saint). In the United States, though, the Reagan administration foreign policy team would actively deny d'Aubuisson's involvement in the assassination, as well as the Salvadoran government's involvement in other human rights atrocities, so as to justify a heavy flow of military aid to the country's government as part of Reagan's Cold War-era policy to suppress any chance of another Cuba emerging in Latin America. A key player in those official denials was Elliot Abrams, an Assistant Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan who still boasts that he "supervised U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean." [8]

In recent months, Abrams has been advising Romney's Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan on foreign policy.

Abrams Key Denier of Human Rights Abuses by Salvadoran Government

Of the Romero assassination, Abrams told the Washington Post in 1993 [9] that "anybody who thinks you're going to find a cable that says that Roberto d'Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool." But as the Post noted in that same article, the U.S. Embassy sent at least two such cables to Washington fingering d'Aubuisson -- the December 21, 1981 cable, for example, describes: "A meeting, chaired by Maj. Roberto d'Aubuisson, during which the murder of Archbishop Romero was planned. During the meeting, some of the participants drew lots for the privilege of killing the archbishop."

:{:{

}:}:But Abrams is perhaps best known for denying one of the worst atrocities of the war, the massacre at El Mozote, where in December 1981 U.S-trained government soldiers marched into a village and murdered around 800 civilians, many of whom were women and children. The men were tortured before being shot, and girls as young as 10 were raped before having their throats slit. Abrams, who at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, dismissed reports published in the New York Times and Washington Post about the massacre, telling a Senate committee tasked with certifying the Salvadoran government's human rights record that the reports of deaths "were not credible" and suggesting the guerrillas had "significantly misused" the stories for propaganda. The U.N. Truth Commission later confirmed the newspapers' reports on the massacre, and the Salvadoran government (which elected its first left-wing president ever in 2009) officially apologized for the event in December of last year.

These and other denials helped justify another ten years of United States funding for the Salvadoran military and its death squads.The tiny country would receive$6 billion from the U.S. over the course of its civil war, making it the second-highest recipient of U.S. aid behind Israelduring that period, despite mounting death tolls and continued atrocities.

Elliot AbramsAbrams has remained unrepentant about U.S. policy in El Salvador, calling it [9] "one of fabulous achievement." He was convicted in 1991 of two misdemeanors for unlawfully withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned by the first President Bush.

Abrams, Neocons Passing the Torch to VP Pick Ryan

This week,The Daily Beastfirst reported [10] that Abrams' latest act is advising Republican GOP candidate Ryan on foreign policy. Abrams told the website Ryan "knows more about foreign policy than people may think, in view of his concentration on the economy." Other right-wing foreign policy experts told The Daily Beast that despite Ryan's professed fiscal conservatism, he, like Reagan, supports spending billions or trillions to preserve U.S. military power and international influence.

Ryan has long been mentored by neoconservative Republican leaders who advanced U.S. policy in El Salvador. His first job in D.C. was as an aide to Sen. Bob Kasten of Wisconsin, a cheerleader for sending billions to El Salvador's brutal military government and who in the 1980s chaired the Senate foreign operations appropriations subcommittee responsible for approving those funds.

After Kasten lost his seat to Russ Feingold in 1992, Ryan became a speechwriter for the right-wing think tank Empower America, which was founded by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Jack Kemp. As a foreign policy adviser to Reagan in 1980 Kirkpatrick famously defended the rape, murder, and torture of four American Catholic missionaries (three of whom were nuns and one a lay missionary) at the hands of El Salvador's government forces, claiming "the nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists." Kirkpatrick went on to become Reagan's UN Ambassador. Kemp, who Ryan recently identified [11] as a key mentor, was also a major supporter of U.S. funding to El Salvador's military government.

Even if Romney can distance himself from the death squad-linked Salvadoran investors that provided the seed money for his vast wealth, Ryan's political upbringing and his being mentored by a man of Abrams' pedigree makes it clear that the tragedies of El Salvador's civil war and this dark chapter in U.S. history will continue to cast a shadow over the Romney - Ryan campaign.

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

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Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/08/11710/us-funded-war-el-salvador-casts-shadow-over-romneyryan-campaign

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[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35275/brendan-fischer

[2] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/us-government/election-2012

[3] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/democracy

[4] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/politics

[5] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.prwatch.org%2Fnews%2F2012%2F08%2F11710%2Fus-funded-war-el-salvador-casts-shadow-over-romneyryan-campaign&linkname=U.S.-Funded%20War%20in%20El%20Salvador%20Casts%20Shadow%20over%20Romney%2FRyan%20Campaign

[6] http://www.usip.org/publications/truth-commission-el-salvador

[7] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/mitt-romney-death-squads-bain_n_1710133.html

[8] http://www.speakersaccess.com/elliott-abrams

[9] http://www.prwatch.org/files/Anybody_who_thinks_you_re_go.doc

[10] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/11/defense-hawks-rejoice-paul-ryan-s-your-man.html

[11] http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417864n

Bain:

Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads

Posted: 08/08/2012 9:38 am Updated: 08/08/2012 1:05 pm

Ryan Grim

ryan@huffingtonpost.com

cole.stangler@huffingtonpost.com

In 1983, Bill Bain asked Mitt Romney to launch Bain Capital, a private equity offshoot of the successful consulting firm Bain & Company. After some initial reluctance, Romney agreed. The new job came with a stipulation: Romney couldn't raise money from any current clients, Bain said, because if the private equity venture failed, he didn't want it taking the consulting firm down with it.

When Romney struggled to raise funds from other traditional sources, he and his partners started thinking outside the box. Bain executive Harry Strachan suggested that Romney meet with a group of Central American oligarchs who were looking for new investment vehicles as turmoil engulfed their region.

Romney was worried that the oligarchs might be tied to "illegal drug money, right-wing death squads, or left-wing terrorism," Strachan later told a Boston Globe reporter, as quoted in the 2012 book "The Real Romney." But, pressed for capital, Romney pushed his concerns aside and flew to Miami in mid-1984 to meet with the Salvadorans at a local bank.

It was a lucrative trip. The Central Americans provided roughly $9 million -- 40 percent -- of Bain Capital's initial outside funding, the *Los Angeles Times* reported recently. And they became valued clients.

"Over the years, these Latin American friends have loyally rolled over investments in succeeding funds, actively participated in Bain Capital's May investor meetings, and are still today one of the largest investor groups in Bain Capital," Strachan wrote in his memoir in 2008. Strachan declined to be interviewed for this story.

When Romney launched another venture that needed funding -- his first presidential campaign -- he returned to Miami.

"I owe a great deal to Americans of Latin American descent," he said at a dinner in Miami in 2007. "When I was starting my business, I came to Miami to find partners that would believe in me and that would finance my enterprise. My partners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Dueñas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski, and Diego Ribadeneira."

Romney could also have thanked investors from two other wealthy and powerful Central American clans -- the de Sola and Salaverria families, who the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe have reported were founding investors in Bain Capital.

While they were on the lookout for investments in the United States, members of some of these prominent families -- including the Salaverria, Poma, de Sola and Dueñas clans -- were also at the time financing, either directly or through political parties, death squads in El Salvador.The ruling classes were deploying the death squads to beat back left-wing guerrillas and reformers during El Salvador's civil war.

The death squads committed atrocities on such a mass scale for so small a country that their killing spree sparked international condemnation. From 1979 to 1992, some 75,000 people were killed in the Salvadoran civil war, according to the United Nations. In 1982, two years before Romney began raising money from the oligarchs, El Salvador's independent Human Rights Commission reported that, of the 35,000 civilians killed, "most" died at the hands of death squads. A United Nations truth commission concluded in 1993 that 85 percent of the acts of violence were perpetrated by the right, while the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which was supported by the Cuban government, was responsible for 5 percent.

When The Huffington Post asked the Romney campaign about Bain Capital accepting funds from families tied to death squads, a spokeswoman forwarded a 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article to explain the campaign's position on the matter. She declined to comment further.

"Romney confirms Bain had investors in El Salvador. But, as was Bain's policy with any big investor, they had the families checked out as diligently as possible," the Tribune wrote. "They uncovered no unsavory links to drugs or other criminal activity."

Nobody with a basic understanding of the region's history could believe that assertion.

By 1984, the media had thoroughly exposed connections between the death squads and the Salvadoran oligarchy, including the families that invested with Romney. The sitting U.S. ambassador to El Salvador charged that several families, including at least one that invested with Bain, were living in Miami and directly funding death squads. Even by 1981, El Salvador's elite, largely relocated to Miami, were so angered by the public perception that they were financing death squads that they reached out to the media to make their case. The two men put forward to represent the oligarchs were both from families that would invest in Bain three years later. The most cursory review of their backgrounds would have turned up the ties.

The connection between the families involved with Bain's founding and those who financed death squads was made by the Boston Globe in 1994 and the Salt Lake Tribune in 1999. This election cycle, Salon first raised the issue in January, and the *Los Angeles Times* filled out more of the record earlier this month.

There is no shortage of unsavory links. Even the Tribune article referred to by the Romney campaign reports that "about $6.5 million of $37 million that established the company came from wealthy El Salvadoran families linked to right-wing death squads."

The Salaverria family, whose fortune came from producing cotton and coffee, had deep connections to the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), a political party that death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuissonfounded in the fall of 1981. The year before, El Salvador's government had pushed through land reforms and nationalized the coffee trade, moves that threatened a ruling class whose financial and political dominance was built in large part on growing coffee. ARENA controlled and directed death squads during its early years.

On March 24, 1980, Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador and an advocate of the poor, was celebrating Mass at a chapel in a small hospital when he was assassinated :{on **D'Aubuisson's orders**}:, according to a person involved in the murder who later came forward.

The day before, Romero, an immensely popular figure, had called on the country's soldiers to refuse the government's orders to attack fellow Salvadorans.

"Before another killing order is given," he advised in his sermon, "the law of God must prevail: Thou shalt not kill."

In 1984, Robert White, the former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, named two Salaverria brothers -- Julio and Juan Ricardo -- as two of six Salvadoran exiles in Miami who had directly funded death squads, repeating in sworn congressional testimony a claim he'd made earlier as ambassador. The group became known as the "Miami Six." White testified that a source close to the Miami Six had notified the U.S. embassy of their activities in January 1981.

White was pushed out of his job by the incoming Reagan administration in 1981; he was considered insufficiently supportive of the Salvadoran ruling class. (D'Aubuisson endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1984.) When contacted by phone recently, White reiterated his claim about the Salaverria brothers, but said he couldn't reveal his source's identity in order to protect the source.

"The Salaverria family were very well-known as backers of D'Aubuisson," White told The Huffington Post. "These guys were big-money contributors. ... They were total backers of D'Aubuisson and the extremist solution, including death squads."

Alfonso Salaverria was a close associate of Orlando de Sola, a leading death-squad figure, and, like him, supported D'Aubuisson.

The Salaverria family also violently resisted land reform efforts. When the Salvadoran government seized about 140 of the country's largest farms in March 1980, 73-year-old Raul Salaverria was the only landowner to openly resist, the Washington Post reported at the time. A brief exchange of gunfire between government forces and Salaverria's people resulted in two injuries, and 1,500 weapons were allegedly found on the property.

Eight years later, workers in an agrarian reform co-operative whose land once belonged to the Salaverrias barely escaped an assassination attempt. "Members of the co-op suspect the former owners, the Salaverria family, were behind the violence," a 1988 Human Rights Watch report said. The family denied involvement.

Francisco de Sola and his cousin, Herbert Arturo de Sola, also invested early in Bain, according to the Los Angeles Times. Two other members of the de Sola family were "limited partners," according to the Boston Globe, but the Romney campaign declined to provide The Huffington Post with their names. The de Sola family was one of El Salvador's most powerful coffee growers and a financier of the ARENA party.

Herbert's brother was the notorious Orlando de Sola, who resisted the peace negotiations toward the end of the civil war. The Romney campaign acknowledges Orlando de Sola's connection to death squads but insists he is not representative of the de Sola family investors. While Romney told the Tribune in 1999 that the backgrounds of the families had been checked diligently, he had explained to the Boston Globe in 1994 that Bain's due diligence included only the backgrounds of the individual investors, not their family members. "We investigated the individuals' integrity and looked for any obvious signs of illegal activity and problems in their background, and found none. We did not investigate in-laws and relatives." Deflecting the association with Orlando, Strachan, whom Romney had charged with vetting the investors, described him that same year to the Globe as "the black sheep of the family. ... He was kicked out of the family business."

Yet there is strong evidence that Orlando was anything but a black sheep in the de Sola family. Indeed, he was a leading public face of the Salvadoran elites in Miami, speaking, for example, on behalf of the El Salvador Freedom Foundation, the organization which arranged a U.S. press conference for D'Aubuissonas part of its public relations activities on behalf of the oligarchs and ARENA. An Associated Press story from April 1981 includes Orlando de Sola and Alfonso Salaverria speaking on behalf of the oligarchs in exile. The story also makes reference to White's charges regarding the funding of death squads, indicating that the charges were already well known by that point.

But the ties run deeper still. In 1990, Orlando de Sola, D'Aubuisson and founding Bain investor Francisco de Sola allegedly assassinated two left-wing activists then in Guatemala, according to a report by that country's government, which cited its intelligence sources. The activists had just held a meeting with then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who was attempting to broker a Salvadoran peace deal.

Francisco de Sola later pleaded his and his cousin Orlando's innocence to the U.S. ambassador. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights looked further into the killings and concluded that elements of the Salvadoran right were indeed the mostly likely assassins, but said that it couldn't confirm the guilt of the de Solas or D'Aubuisson. It deemed the investigation incomplete and called for a deeper look. The three men were never charged.

Francisco de Sola is now president of the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development. His assistant, Ada Chang, said that he was traveling and unavailable to comment, but she confirmed to HuffPost that he had been accused of murdering the two leftists in 1990. Whether he committed the crime or not, the fact that Guatemalan intelligence would associate him with Orlando de Sola and D'Aubuisson, and place them in Guatemala together, casts further doubt on Strachan's claim that Orlando de Sola was merely a "black sheep" who had been "kicked out of the family business."

Orlando de Sola, who is serving an unrelated prison sentence for fraud, told the Los Angeles Times that he did not personally benefit from the Bain investments. "I would say their relationship with Bain Capital was a step to diversify into foreign investments," he said of his family.

Ricardo Poma was the first investor Romney thanked when he traveled to Miami in 2007. The head of the Poma Group, he became one of the three members of the Bain Capital investment committee, according to Strachan's memoir. The Poma family were financiers of D'Aubuisson's ARENA party.

The Regalado-Dueñas family, like many of El Salvador's other powerful clans, amassed much of their wealth and political power through the coffee industry. Along with the Alvarez family, they also helped to found Banco Comercial, one of the biggest banks in El Salvador.

The Regalado-Dueñas and Alvarez families were leading supporters of ARENA. Arturo Dueñas "regularly supplied" the head of an ARENA-affiliated "paramilitary unit ... with a variety of official Salvadoran documents," according to a redacted 1984 CIA document, which uses the euphemism for death squad. (Salvadoran government documents were used by death squads to assemble lists of people to kill.)

Miguel Dueñas and Ricardo Poma did not respond to requests for comment. The Salaverria brothers are dead, according to Ambassador White.

Jeffery Paige, author of "Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America" and a professor at the University of Michigan, has studied the political economy of Central American oligarchies. Romney's claim to have checked out the backgrounds of the families and come away satisfied befuddles Paige.

"These people benefited from one of the most exploitative and repressive agricultural systems in Latin America. That's why they had a revolution," Paige said. "This money, certainly there wasn't much concern where it came from and what these people had done to make that money."

Sergio Bendixen, who now does polling for President Barack Obama, spent a significant amount of time in El Salvador in the early '80s, doing political polling for Univision. He said that he met D'Aubuisson on many occasions and found him to be one of the warmest, most charming and charismatic people he has ever met. But he said D'Aubuisson was also very upfront about what he saw as the justifiable use of death squads.

"There were 10 or 30 bodies in the street every morning," Bendixen recalled of his time there. "D'Aubuisson said it was necessary. The message needed to be sent [that] if you were associated with the communists or socialists, you had to be killed. He said it was an instrument in keeping the violence down, because others would see the consequences."

Bendixen suggested that a cursory look would have shown Romney what those families were involved with. "If anybody tries to tell you there was a line, a Chinese wall, between ARENA and the death squads, that's just not the way it was," he said.

The Salvadoran elite in Miami talked openly at the time, he said, of supporting the death squads battling the rebels. It wasn't a source of shame, Bendixen recalled, but a source of pride. "They were proud of the fact that they were supporting their country against the communists," he said.

As Romney now seeks support from the Latino community in his campaign for president, his knowledge of Bain's all-too-few degrees of separation from Salvadoran death squads may become a topic of interest.

"Under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. sent billions of dollars to the murderous regime, which utilized that aid to fund the military and death squads in an effort to preserve the unjust privileges of the Salvadoran oligarchy," said Arturo J. Viscarra, an immigration lawyer, who, like many other Salvadorans, emigrated to the United States in order to escape the civil war. He said his family left the country in 1980 after his father began receiving death threats.

"To now learn that a man that may become president of the U.S. deserves some of his success due to the incredible inequality that the U.S. helped to preserve in El Salvador is ironic," Viscarra said. "It's morbidly funny.”

The U.S. involvement in the bloodshed is now seen as a black mark on the nation's record. When President Obama visited Central America in March 2011, he made a symbolic stop at Romero's grave, lighting a candle for the archbishop.

Romney, however, has shown no public remorse for signing up such investors, although the concept of culpability is not foreign to him.When he returned to Miami in 2007, he condemned those who had financed torture and other human rights abuses during the Salvadoran civil war -- just not those he was connected to.

"These friends didn't just help me; they taught me," Romney said. Ricardo Poma "Ricardo's brother had been tortured and murdered by rebel terrorists in El Salvador. Miguel Regalado-Dueñas himself had been chained to a floor in Guatemala for weeks and tortured. And their torturers were financed by Fidel Castro. I learned from these friends about the human cost when Castro has money."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/mitt-romney-death-squads-bain_n_1710133.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

diff highlint

huffpo

===

Romney was worried that the oligarchs might be tied to "illegal drug money, right-wing death squads, or left-wing terrorism," Strachan later told a Boston Globe reporter, as quoted in the 2012 book "The Real Romney." But, pressed for capital, Romney pushed his concerns aside and flew to Miami in mid-1984 to meet with the Salvadorans at a local bank.

It was a lucrative trip. The Central Americans provided roughly $9 million -- 40 percent -- of Bain Capital's initial outside funding, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. And they became valued clients.

When Romney launched another venture that needed funding -- his first presidential campaign -- he returned to Miami.

Romney could also have thanked investors from two other wealthy and powerful Central American clans -- the de Sola and Salaverria families, who the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe have reported were founding investors in Bain Capital.

While they were on the lookout for investments in the United States, members of some of theseprominent families -- including the Salaverria, Poma, de Sola and Dueñas clans -- were also at the time financing, either directly or through political parties, death squads in El Salvador. The ruling classes were deploying the death squads to beat back left-wing guerrillas and reformers during El Salvador's civil war.

When The Huffington Post asked the Romney campaign about Bain Capital accepting funds from families tied to death squads, a spokeswoman forwarded a 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article to explain the campaign's position on the matter. She declined to comment further.

"Romney confirms Bain had investors in El Salvador. But, as was Bain's policy with any big investor, they had the families checked out as diligently as possible," the Tribune wrote. "They uncovered no unsavory links to drugs or other criminal activity."

Nobody with a basic understanding of the region's history could believe that assertion.

By 1984, the media had thoroughly exposed connections between the death squads and the Salvadoran oligarchy, including the families that invested with Romney. The sitting U.S. ambassador to El Salvador charged that several families, including at least one that invested with Bain, were living in Miami and directly funding death squads.Even by 1981, El Salvador's elite, largely relocated to Miami, were so angered by the public perception that they were financing death squads that they reached out to the media to make their case. The two men put forward to represent the oligarchs were both from families that would invest in Bain three years later. The most cursory review of their backgrounds would have turned up the ties.

The connection between the families involved with Bain's founding and those who financed death squads was made by the Boston Globe in 1994 and the Salt Lake Tribune in 1999. This election cycle, Salon first raised the issue in January, and the Los Angeles Times filled out more of the record earlier this month.

There is no shortage of unsavory links. Even the Tribune article referred to by the Romney campaign reports that "about $6.5 million of $37 million that established the company came from wealthy El Salvadoran families linked to right-wing death squads."

The Salaverria family, whose fortune came from producing cotton and coffee, had deep connections to the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), a political party that death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson founded in the fall of 1981. The year before, El Salvador's government had pushed through land reforms and nationalized the coffee trade, moves that threatened a ruling class whose financial and political dominance was built in large part on growing coffee. ARENA controlled and directed death squads during its early years.

On March 24, 1980, Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador and an advocate of the poor, was celebrating Mass at a chapel in a small hospital when he was assassinated on D'Aubuisson's orders, according to a person involved in the murder who later came forward.

The day before, Romero, an immensely popular figure, had called on the country's soldiers to refuse the government's orders to attack fellow Salvadorans.

"Before another killing order is given," he advised in his sermon, "the law of God must prevail: Thou shalt not kill."

In 1984, Robert White, the former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, named two Salaverria brothers -- Julio and Juan Ricardo -- as two of six Salvadoran exiles in Miami who had directly funded death squads, repeating in sworn congressional testimony a claim he'd made earlier as ambassador. The group became known as the "Miami Six." White testified that a source close to the Miami Six had notified the U.S. embassy of their activities in January 1981.

White was pushed out of his job by the incoming Reagan administration in 1981; he was considered insufficiently supportive of the Salvadoran ruling class. (D'Aubuisson endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1984.) When contacted by phone recently, White reiterated his claim about the Salaverria brothers, but said he couldn't reveal his source's identity in order to protect the source.

Alfonso Salaverria was a close associate of Orlando de Sola, a leading death-squad figure, and, like him, supported D'Aubuisson.

The Salaverria family also violently resisted land reform efforts. When the Salvadoran government seized about 140 of the country's largest farms in March 1980, 73-year-old Raul Salaverria was the only landowner to openly resist, the Washington Post reported at the time. A brief exchange of gunfire between government forces and Salaverria's people resulted in two injuries, and 1,500 weapons were allegedly found on the property.

Francisco de Sola and his cousin, Herbert Arturo de Sola, also invested early in Bain, according to the Los Angeles Times. Two other members of the de Sola family were "limited partners," according to the Boston Globe, but the Romney campaign declined to provide The Huffington Post with their names. The de Sola family was one of El Salvador's most powerful coffee growers and a financier of the ARENA party.

Herbert's brother was the notorious Orlando de Sola, who resisted the peace negotiations toward the end of the civil war. The Romney campaign acknowledges Orlando de Sola's connection to death squads but insists he is not representative of the de Sola family investors. While Romney told the Tribune in 1999 that the backgrounds of the families had been checked diligently, he had explained to the Boston Globe in 1994 that Bain's due diligence included only the backgrounds of the individual investors, not their family members. "We investigated the individuals' integrity and looked for any obvious signs of illegal activity and problems in their background, and found none. We did not investigate in-laws and relatives." Deflecting the association with Orlando, Strachan, whom Romney had charged with vetting the investors, described him that same year to the Globe as "the black sheep of the family. ... He was kicked out of the family business."

Yet there is strong evidence that Orlando was anything but a black sheep in the de Sola family. Indeed, he was a leading public face of the Salvadoran elites in Miami, speaking, for example, on behalf of the El Salvador Freedom Foundation, the organization which arranged a U.S. press conference for D'Aubuisson as part of its public relations activities on behalf of the oligarchs and ARENA. An Associated Press story from April 1981 includes Orlando de Sola and Alfonso Salaverria speaking on behalf of the oligarchs in exile. The story also makes reference to White's charges regarding the funding of death squads, indicating that the charges were already well known by that point.

But the ties run deeper still. In 1990, Orlando de Sola, D'Aubuisson and founding Bain investor Francisco de Sola allegedly assassinated two left-wing activists then in Guatemala, according to a report by that country's government, which cited its intelligence sources. The activists had just held a meeting with then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who was attempting to broker a Salvadoran peace deal.

UPDATE: Oct. 24 -- Francisco de Sola told The Huffington Post that his cousin Orlando was very much a "black sheep" and that D'Aubuisson spoke out against other members of the de Sola family for supporting dialogue as a way to resolve the conflict. Indeed, there is no evidence that Francisco de Sola himself financed death squads nor that he financed ARENA prior to 1988; he did so afterward in support of a more moderate direction for the party. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which reviewed the Guatemalan government report that linked D'Aubuisson, Orlando de Sola and Francisco de Sola to the murder of the two left-wing activists, described the charges as "surprising and unsubstantiated."

Orlando de Sola, who is serving an unrelated prison sentence for fraud, told the Los Angeles Times that he did not personally benefit from the Bain investments. "I would say their relationship with Bain Capital was a step to diversify into foreign investments," he said of his family.

Ricardo Poma was the first investor Romney thanked when he traveled to Miami in 2007. The head of the Poma Group, he became one of the three members of the Bain Capital investment committee, according to Strachan's memoir. The Poma family were financiers of D'Aubuisson's ARENA party.

The Regalado-Dueñas family, like many of El Salvador's other powerful clans, amassed much of their wealth and political power through the coffee industry. Along with the Alvarez family, they also helped to found Banco Comercial, one of the biggest banks in El Salvador.

The Regalado-Dueñas and Alvarez families were leading supporters of ARENA. Arturo Dueñas "regularly supplied" the head of an ARENA-affiliated "paramilitary unit ... with a variety of official Salvadoran documents," according to a redacted 1984 CIA document, which uses the euphemism for death squad. (Salvadoran government documents were used by death squads to assemble lists of people to kill.)

Miguel Dueñasand Ricardo Poma did not respond to requests for comment. The Salaverria brothers are dead, according to Ambassador White.

Sergio Bendixen, who now does polling for President Barack Obama, spent a significant amount of time in El Salvador in the early '80s, doing political polling for Univision. He said that he met D'Aubuisson on many occasions and found him to be one of the warmest, most charming and charismatic people he has ever met. But he said D'Aubuisson was also very upfront about what he saw as the justifiable use of death squads.

Romney, however, has shown no public remorse for signing up such investors, although the concept of culpability is not foreign to him. When he returned to Miami in 2007, he condemned those who had financed torture and other human rights abuses during the Salvadoran civil war -- just not those he was connected to.

"These friends didn't just help me; they taught me," Romney said. "Ricardo's brother had been tortured and murdered by rebel terrorists in El Salvador. Miguel [duena] himself had been chained to a floor in Guatemala for weeks and tortured. And their torturers were financed by Fidel Castro. I learned from these friends about the human cost when Castro has money."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/mitt-romney-death-squads-bain_n_1710133.html

===

===

Roberto D'Aubuisson in xian fellowship? (cf exminister)

===

El Salvador — The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, pleads with President Carter "Christian to Christian" to stop aiding the military government slaughtering his people. Carter refuses. Shortly afterwards, right-wing leader Roberto D'Aubuisson has Romero shot through the heart while saying Mass. The country soon dissolves into civil war, with the peasants in the hills fighting against the military government. The CIA and U.S. Armed Forces supply the government with overwhelming military and intelligence superiority. CIA-traineddeath squads roam the countryside, committing atrocities like that of El Mazote in 1982, where they massacre between 700 and 1000 men, women and children. By 1992, some 63,000 Salvadorans will be killed.

---

SoA?

Argentina	Leopoldo :{Galtieri:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Roberto Eduardo Viola
Bolivia	Hugo Banzer Suárez, Luis Arce Gómez
Chile	Raúl Iturriaga
Ecuador	Guillermo Rodríguez
El Salvador	Roberto D'Aubuisson
Guatemala	Marco Antonio Yon Sosa^{[^^34]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation#cite_note-33) Efrain :{Rios Montt:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:^{[^^35]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation#cite_note-34)
Panama	Manuel :{Noriega:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Omar Torrijos
Peru	Vladimiro Montesinos, Juan Velasco Alvarado

but just one radio class?

===

The FBI and other agencies also redefined the terms "terrorism" and "foreign intelligence" to reflect a broad and self-serving interpretation; and then argued their investigations into social change groups met the terms of specific legal language allowing the FBI greater investigative latitude in probes involving political violence and foreign spying. The result was that by 1983, FBI agents and private security specialists had launched broad intrusions into the lives of ordinary citizens engaged in otherwise legal activities.

Ross Gelbspan is the author of a forthcoming book on the FBI's campaign from 1981 to 1985 against groups critical of U.S. policy in Central America. Gelbspan says "While the FBI conducts legitimate criminal investigations, its carrying out of unauthorized politically-motivated police activity is more than just history." For proof, Gelbspan (a veteran Boston Globe reporter who helped pen a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative series) points to documents obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act, lawsuits, and Congressional hearings which show that in an FBI probe of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), "the FBI took at face value allegations by right-wing security specialists that members of (CISPES) were terrorists or foreign agents."

The FBI probe of CISPES moved beyond surveillance to attacks on CISPES, its members and allies. Thousands of citiens were referenced in secret dossiers. The FBI also used the services of right-wing sleuths including a network of conservative campus activists who attended meetings and then submitted reports to the FBI. "The CISPES probe by the FBI was not an aberration by a handful of field agents," says Gelbspan refuting widely published reports. "It was clearly approved at the highest levels of the Bureau and was apprently sanctioned by the NSC and the White House."

"Looking at the CISPES investigation in light of other political investigations dating back to the 1950's, one gets the distinct impression that the FBI sees its mandate as neutralizing or disabling every political movement that has the potential for bringing about significant changes in the American political system," argues Gelbspan.

Kit Gage, the Washington representative of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation (NCARL) agrees with Gelbspan. "We know first hand the kind of havoc the FBI can wreak on a group exercising its First Amendment rights," says Gage who has leafed through FBI files recording "38 years of surveillance on NCARL and its predecessors which produced 130,000 pages of files but not one criminal conviction." What is well documented "is an incredible amount of harassment and disruption of our organization," Gage charges. "Since the FBI seems unable to regulate itself," says Gage, "NCARL is currently seeking legal remedies in the form of legislation that would limit FBI investigations solely to criminal activity." Hundreds of law school professors have endorsed NCARL's proposed legislation.

El Salvador mozote

Transcript

More:

How a Climate Change-Fueled Drought & U.S.-Fed Violence Are Driving Thousands from Central America

Transcript

George Melloan

Contents

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Mark Danner reconstruction of events:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

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U.S.-Funded War in El Salvador Casts Shadow over Romney/Ryan Campaign

Romney's Early Bain Capital Funders Tied to Salvadoran Death Squads

Abrams Key Denier of Human Rights Abuses by Salvadoran Government

Abrams, Neocons Passing the Torch to VP Pick Ryan

Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads