el mozote bak

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/elliott-abrams-mozote/

...Joining in this campaign was the Reagan administration’s reliable ally in ideological warfare, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which accused Bonner and Guillermoprieto of being “overly credulous” of the peasants’ accounts and dismissed their eyewitness reporting and interviewing as little more than a “propaganda exercise.” Journaleditor George Melloan told a television interviewer that what was really at work here was that the fact that “obviously” Timesreporter Raymond “Bonner has a political orientation,” and compared his reporting to that of Herbert Matthews’s “glorification of Fidel Castro in the 1950s” that “became a permanent embarrassment to The New York Times.” Accuracy in Media, then an influential conservative pressure group, treated numerous television talk shows to accusations that Bonner and Guillermoprieto were engaging in a deliberate hoax no less serious than that undertaken in the 1930s by Walter Duranty, the infamous Timescorrespondent who sought to whitewash Joseph Stalin’s mass murders. In its newsletter, the group charged Bonner with conducting “a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.”

However badly sourced and ideologically transparent, the campaign of vilification apparently worked. In August 1982, the Timesrecalled Bonner to New York and assigned him to the financial desk, and he eventually left the paper to pursue a freelance career. Other journalists took his example as a warning.

In the decades since this debacle, two things have become obvious: The first is that the El Mozote massacre was even worse than the reporters were able to determine at the time, and the second is that the US officials at the time, including especially Enders and Abrams, were lying on behalf of the killers. In 1993, after a postwar United Nations–sponsored “truth commission” discovered evidence that more than a thousand people, mostly women (many of whom had apparently been raped), the elderly, and young children, were killed in the massacre, Enders finally admitted to a reporter, “I now know that the materials that we and the embassy passed on to Congress were wrong.” Abrams, however, has never recanted. Ten years after the massacre, he continued to try to obfuscate the truth, demanding to know, “if it had really been a massacre and not a firefight, why didn’t we hear about it right off from the FMLN [then a leftist rebel group]? I mean, we didn’t start hearing about it until a month later.”

Beginning in 2016, a Salvadoran judge reopened the cases against the military men accused of ordering the killings. And now in that trial, in late January, Juan Rafael Bustillo, a former commander of the Air Force, testified, according to Reuters, that the massacre had been conducted “at the behest” of Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, who commanded the elite US-trained and -equipped Atlacatl Battalion.

Bonner and Guillermoprieto have now been thoroughly vindicated. But what is perhaps most significant about this event from the standpoint of US politics is the fact that it helped to launch Elliott Abrams on a career that was literally built on the defense of mass murder and genocide and his willingness to lie on behalf those who carried it out and smear the reputations of anyone who sought to try to stop or expose it. I have written about Abrams’s remarkable ability to escape any sanction for his role as a cheerleader for murderous dictators—no matter how horrific—repeatedly for more than 30 years. (See, for instance, here and here and here and here and here.)It revealed itself most gruesomely in Guatemala, where he supported and defended Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s then-dictator, later convicted of carrying out “acts of genocide”in the legally binding words of Guatemala’s United Nations–backed Commission for Historical Clarification—against the indigenous people in the Ixil region of the department of Quiché, and then again through his participation with Oliver North et al. in Reagan’s illegal shenanigans in the Iran/Contra scandal. (Abrams was eventually convicted of having misled Congress, before being pardoned by George H.W. Bush along with virtually every other convicted Iran/Contra criminal.)

kind of long

no lnx

"which son of a bitch says that?” It was December 11, 1981 in El Mozote, a small town in El Salvador, and the major wanted to know which one of his men had refused to kill the children.

The military had just spent an entire day murdering its hundreds of inhabitants. Now, just the town’s kids were left. Gathered outside a schoolhouse in which a number of the children were being kept, the soldiers had had an argument. Some didn’t want to kill the kids, many of whom were under twelve years old and some of whom were infants. The major, without hesitation, walked over, scooped a little boy from a crowd of kids, flung him into the air, and speared him with a bayonet as he came back down. There was no more arguing.

The boy was one of over eight hundred slaughtered that day and the next, thirty-five years ago.

El Mozote was neither the first nor the last mass atrocity in El Salvador’s nightmarish civil war. The rape and murder of four US churchwomen by the National Guard, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero while he held mass, the massacre of at least three hundred civilians at Sumpúl River, a similar mass killing a year later at Lempa River, the execution-style murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America — the list of horrors goes on and on, and is so long and brutal that it risks overshadowing the daily dumpings of bullet- and torture-riddled bodies of those who dared to speak out against the hard-right government on city streets and in public parks during the Salvadoran Civil War, which stretched from 1980 to 1992.

The overwhelming majority of these atrocities was carried out by the Salvadoran National Guard and the death squads to which many of their soldiers and other sympathizers belonged. Their aim was to destroy the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN in its Spanish acronym), a coalition of leftist guerrillas with strong support throughout the country; any workers, peasants, and religious workers who sympathized with them; and any other dissenters who disagreed with the program of the corrupt, right-wing government, which could not have existed or endured without US backing.

At its height, the United States was giving over $1 million a day to the Salvadoran government in various forms of training, arms, military advising, and other aid in an attempt to prevent a Sandinista-style takeover by the FMLN and its supporters. “By the late 1980s,” Walter LaFeber writes, US aid “approached 100 percent of the Salvadoran government budget.”

During the war, no suppression of democracy and egregious human rights violations by El Salvador’s government went too far for the United States, particularly under Ronald Reagan. Every murder of civilians, every rape, every execution of leftist-sympathizing clergy, every mass killing of innocents was justified by a zealous anticommunism that sought to maintain crushing levels of poverty and wealth and political power in the hands of a tiny, brutal, US-friendly elite with no popular support but the full backing of American power behind it.

The El Mozote Massacre was unique in the sheer number of innocent lives lost, and perhaps for the wanton brutality exhibited during it. It should be remembered for these reasons. But it should also be remembered because it was not unique.

Quantitatively, it was the largest atrocity committed in El Salvador during the civil war and one of the worst in the history of the Americas; qualitatively, it was of a piece with US policy of tacitly encouraging or looking askance at such acts, then covering them up.

Over eight hundred innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered over two days at El Mozote and surrounding hamlets. Not only was the loss of these lives not enough to convince the United States to change its brutal course in El Salvador, but the Right sprang into action to downplay the massacre and attack the journalists who first reported it.

Operation Rescue

The killings, which are most clearly laid out in Mark Danner’s The Massacre at El Mozote, an expanded version of a New Yorker article, came during Operation Rescue, an eleven-day scorched-earth operation aimed at the La Guacamaya region, just south of El Mozote and the location of the command post of the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), Morazán’s leading guerrilla group and one of the five members of the FMLN.

La Gaucamaya also happened to be home to Radio Venceremos, an underground radio station that specialized in spreading guerrilla propaganda, reporting on guerrilla and social-movement organizing, and merciless mockery of the government. The station enraged the Salvadoran military. Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa Barrios, the commander of the Atlacatl battalion unit which carried out the operation, said that “so long as we don’t finish off this Radio Venceremos, we’ll always have a scorpion up our ass.”

Atlacatl was trained and equipped by the US government. Monterrosa himself had spent some of his early years attending courses at the School of the Americas, which has long churned out Latin American soldiers responsible for subsequent human-rights abuses and coups throughout the hemisphere.

The battalion landed in Perquín, Morazan, on December 8 and, after recruiting ten locals against their will as guides, began moving southward. Along the way, the more than one-thousand-strong battalion killed seven men in a nearby village whose names matched a list of suspects while aircrafts bombed the hillsides around El Mozote. At one point, bombs fell close to the town and damaged its school.

It was the kind of situation that might have prompted people to flee the town and escape what appeared to be almost certain, approaching death. The guerrillas, who themselves were packing up and escaping in advance of the operation — including Radio Venceremos, whose members lugged heavy radio equipment as they fled — tried to warn some townspeople to join them.

But the locals had every reason to stay in El Mozote. Days before, Marcos Díaz, the owner of the town’s general store, had been informed by an officer about the coming operation, and told that while anyone found in El Mozote would be spared, those outside would not. Later, speaking to a gathering of hundreds of townspeople, Díaz — who was the richest man in town and well-respected — put his reputation at stake, insisting that nobody leave. Most did not. Upon hearing this news, many inhabitants of the surrounding towns made the trek up to El Mozote, seeking refuge.

Beyond this, however, it was inconceivable that El Mozote would become a target of government forces. The guerrillas had never been able to establish a foothold in this town of mostly Protestant evangelicals, who tended to look sourly on communism. Many townspeople also likely reasoned that their odds would be better staying in a town without guerrillas than to be caught somewhere else with them, which would almost certainly result in death.

So it was that hundreds of people were sheltering in the town when the soldiers arrived on the evening of December 10 (coincidentally, the forty-third anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The battalion wasted no time.

Marching into its deserted streets, soldiers banged on the doors, ordering the inhabitants out. They did not find any guerrillas or the equipment for Radio Venceremos. Shouting and pushing, the hundreds of Atlacatl members gathered the people into the street, some carrying infants or holding onto children, and ordered them to lie face down.

The gathered prisoners laid in the street for an hour while soldiers walked up and down, hitting and kicking the civilians, pointing their rifles at them and bellowing insults and questions amid the children’s crying. When Marcos Dìaz protested that he had been assured no harm would come to the town, he was met with laughter from the soldiers. The soldiers then began collecting jewelry and other valuables from the townspeople, before sending them back into their homes, warning them against showing “even so much of their noses.”

According to Danner’s account, the soldiers knew there were no guerrillas among the townspeople. By this point, there were no longer any lists of suspects. Rather, their aim — at least to begin with — was to interrogate the townspeople and find out how the guerrillas were transporting their supplies and where they were getting their weapons. The townspeople had no such information.

At 5 AM the next day, before the sun had risen, the soldiers again pulled the sleepless townspeople from their houses, pushing them with their rifle butts, and made them form two lines: one for the women and children, another for the men. After standing for hours, the women were sent to the house of a local merchant while the men were taken to the local Church of the Three Kings. According to the Tutela Legal report later produced on the atrocity, even the soldiers didn’t know what was to come next.

Monterrosa called a meeting with several other high-ranking officers, after which they gave an order: exterminate the people. All of them.

The thirty to forty men of the third section of the Fifth Company, under Lieutenant Salvador Augusto Guzmán Parada, were helicoptered in, while the rest of the battalion was withdrawn and forbidden from entering the town without authorization...[gets horrible]...

...

might assume that a massacre on a scale as unfathomable as El Mozote would have been a watershed moment in a conflict like the Salvadoran Civil War, a time when the conflict’s principal purveyors of misery might take a hard look at themselves and change course. It was not, and they did not. Mark Danner concludes that the massacre served its purpose.

El Mozote was, above all, a statement. By doing what it did in El Mozote, the Army had proclaimed loudly and unmistakably to the people of Morazán, and to the peasants in surrounding areas as well, a simple message: In the end, the guerrillas can’t protect you, and we, the officers and the soldiers, are willing to do absolutely anything to avoid losing this war — we are willing to do whatever it takes.

Lucia Annunziata, an Italian reporter who was in El Salvador, told Danner,

The point [of El Mozote] was to create a turning point, a watershed, to turn the tide, and to do it by scaring the hell out of the enemy. It was a deliberate demonstration of cruelty to show them that the guerrillas couldn’t protect them. And [Domingo Monterrosa] understood that you do this as cruelly, as brutally as possible; you rape, impale, whatever, to show them the cost.

If the massacre was intended to strike so much fear into the hearts of guerrillas and their supporters that they would give up their arms, it failed. The war dragged on for more than a decade. Despite the lopsided advantage the government held over the FMLN in weapons, funding, and training, the guerrillas eventually fought the army to a draw. They continued to launch significant military offensives and maintain significant public support.

But the FMLN was decimated, exhausted, and unable to penetrate a government that had been designed and long ruled by the far right. It would be twenty years before they could restructure themselves from a military organization, designed for guerrilla warfare and constantly incurring mass casualties of their own forces and Salvadoran civilians in events like El Mozote, to a political one and win a presidential election — during which time the Right was able to advance sweeping neoliberal reforms and loot the state for personal enrichment.

In this respect, then, atrocities like El Mozote were a success.

Historian Greg Grandin writes that it was not any “public relations schemes designed to win hearts and minds but, according to a 1991 Defense Department study, ‘lavish brutality’ conducted by the death squads and security forces that prevented a guerrilla victory in El Salvador. … [T]he containment of the rebels was ‘not the result of reform but the consequences of the murder of thousands of people.’”

El Mozote showed what the Salvadoran regime was capable of, and what the US government was willing to tolerate, excuse, and cover for in service of supposed anticommunism.

After it became clear that the Atlacatl battallion had decapitated men in a church and bayoneted a child to death and slaughtered entire families, the obvious questions for the Reagan administration were: are these crimes barbaric enough to convince you to change course? Is there any limit to the kind of vile acts you will excuse in order to pursue your foreign policy aims?

The answer to both questions, provided by El Mozote and its aftermath: a resounding “no.” endit

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

very long]

...

Late in December, the F.M.L.N. got in touch with Raymond Bonner, of the Times, and informed him that his long-standing request to visit guerrilla-held territory would be approved; he would be welcome to come to Morazán in early January. Also around that time, a guerrilla patrol stumbled upon some campesinos cowering in a ravine, and discovered among them a near-hysterical woman of thirty-eight, whose legs and arms and face were scored with cuts. The peasants said that they had come upon her near a river — found her crouched there nearly naked, her limbs and body smeared with blood and covered with thorns. “I could hardly speak,” Rufina Amaya recalls. “I talked and cried, talked and cried — couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, just babbled and cried and talked to God.”

Now the guerrillas had found her, and they rejoiced when they realized who she was. “They were all happy that there was at least one survivor,” Rufina says. “They all came up around me and hugged me. I didn’t know what was going on, who they were, what they wanted.” She was taken to El Zapotal and interviewed, and before long the voice of Rufina Amaya, telling in careful detail the story of what had happened in El Mozote, was broadcast throughout El Salvador.

On December 31st, the General Command of the Morazán front of the F.M.L.N. issued “a call to the International Red Cross, the O.A.S. Human Rights Commission, and the international press to verify the genocide of more than nine hundred Salvadorans” in El Mozote and the surrounding hamlets. “We ask these organizations to be the eyes of the world’s conscience,” the comandantes said.

That night, at the same time that Radio Venceremos was broadcasting a Mass “in memory of the thousand massacred,” El Salvador’s provisional President, José Napoleón Duarte, felt obliged to take to the airwaves and deny the accusations personally. The entire massacre story, he said, was “a guerrilla trick” meant to smear his government at the very moment when the United States Congress was considering aid to El Salvador.

Duarte was right in at least one respect: though the El Mozote controversy appeared to center on what had happened in a handful of hamlets in a remote region of El Salvador, the real point of focus had shifted to Washington — and, in particular, to Congress, which was perceived as the weak spot in the armor of the Salvadoran government. It was Congress that voted the money that paid for the American guns and helicopters and military advisers; and in recent years, as the atrocities had grown ever more frequent, Congress had done so with increasing reluctance. Two days before Duarte’s speech, Reagan had signed Congress’s amendment of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which required the President to “certify” that the Salvadoran government “is making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights” and “is 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.” If such a certification was not delivered to Congress by January 29th, and convincingly defended, all funds and assistance for El Salvador would be immediately suspended.

Now all sides prepared for the debate over certification, which would provide concerned congressmen, church leaders, heads of human-rights groups, and others with a new opportunity to document the abuses committed by the Salvadoran government in prosecuting the war. Administration officials, meanwhile, both in Washington and in the Embassy in San Salvador, prepared to defend the government and demonstrate that, despite appearances, the Salvadorans were improving in their respect for human rights. Many of these officials viewed the certification requirement with singular contempt.

“If Congress felt so strongly about human-rights abuses, it could have simply cut off aid,” Elliott Abrams, who had just been sworn in as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, told me. “But Congress didn’t cut off aid, because it didn’t want to risk being blamed, if the guerrillas won as a result, for ‘losing’ El Salvador. Instead, they required certification — which is to say, they agreed to fund the war while reserving the right to call us Fascists.” Deane Hinton, the United States Ambassador at the time, later told an interviewer that he viewed certification “as a way for the Congress … to be for and against something at the same time.” He went on to say that congressmen “didn’t want to take the responsibility to deny resources to the government of El Salvador and on the other hand they didn’t want to endorse it, so they created a certification procedure and made the rest of us jump through the hoop, and the President had to certify it,” and added, “It is a political cop-out by a lot of congressmen.”

At the root of this “political cop-out,” in the unspoken view of many Administration officials, was a simple truth: that when it came down to either supporting the Salvadoran government, however unseemly its methods, or allowing a victory by the guerrillas the choice was clear — and the only difference between the people in the Administration and the hypocrites in Congress was that the Reagan officials were not afraid to say it straight out. Abrams told me, “I used to say to people, ‘I mean, I can see arguing for an F.M.L.N. victory on political grounds or economic grounds — but on human-rights grounds? I mean, that’s crazy.’ ” Abrams stood the human-rights argument on its head, contending that to argue for an aid cutoff was, in effect, to argue for a guerrilla victory, and that at the end of the day, however badly the Salvadoran government behaved, those collective atrocities could never approach the general disaster for human rights that an F.M.L.N. victory would represent.

Abrams was not alone in taking this line of argument, which appears to have been aimed at persuading those — conservative Democrats most prominently — who, however much they deplored human-rights abuses in El Salvador, nonetheless worried about taking the blame for any advance of Communism in the hemisphere. The day after the certification was delivered to Congress, the State Department sent out a cable, overSecretary of State Haig’s name, urging American diplomats to describe the El Salvador policy as “a grit-your-teeth policy: to support a reformist junta, with a lot of bad eggs in and around it, in order to avoid a Somoza-Sandinista choice. For critics to narrow their focus to the teeth-gritting without considering the policy’s larger aims is shallow and unfair.” For those who “can’t take” the current Salvadoran government, Haig wrote, “the honest response is not to say the junta is — surprise — beset and flawed, but rather to make the case that it’s acceptable to the United States if El Salvador goes the Cuban way.”

It was against this background that Ambassador Hinton and the State Department began receiving reports about a massacre in Morazán. “Coming on top of everything else, El Mozote, if true, might have destroyed the entire effort,” Thomas O. Enders, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, told me. “Who knows? I certainly thought that when I first heard about it.”

The Embassy began a counterattack, following a pattern that it held to throughout: undermining the reports not by investigating the facts but by casting doubt on their source. In response to the request from the Reverend Wipfler, of the National Council of Churches, Hinton cabled back, on January 8th, that he did “not know what your sources are but the only sources that I have seen alleging something like this are clandestine Radio Venceremos reports.” The Ambassador then quoted in full a heavy-handed Venceremos text from January 2nd, in which El Mozote was compared repeatedly to My Lai; added that he “found it interesting” that a guerrilla communiqué two days earlier had not mentioned El Mozote at all; and concluded that he did not “consider Radio Venceremos to be a reliable source.”

Hinton — who declined to be interviewed for this account — must have known that the National Council of Churches could not have got its information from Radio Venceremos. (Among other things, Wipfler’s cable was sent before the station had resumed broadcasting.) He himself had probably already received reports from sources of his own that something had happened in Morazán;after all, no fewer than ten American advisers were working with the Atlacatl at the time. According to one of them, members of the Milgroup — the Military Advisory Group at the Embassy — had telephoned the Atlacatl base in La Libertad within a few days of the massacre. “They called up and talked to the Special Forces people and told them they wanted Monterrosa to come in — they wanted to talk to him about something that had happened during the operation,” this adviser told me. “But Monterrosa just climbed into his helicopter and said, ‘If they want to talk to me, I’ll be out with my troops.’ He wasn’t going to go in and talk to those guys. He said, ‘If I go in and let them talk to me about this thing, I’ll never be able to get anyone to go out there and fight for me again.’ And then he got into his helicopter and took off” — heading back to Morazán.

...But this is speculation. In the event, the dead of El Mozote did not really come into the discussion at all.

On February 10th, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy editorial headed “The Media’s War,” in which it noted that the public’s “perceptions are badly confused” on the war in El Salvador, and attributed much of that confusion to “the way the struggle is being covered by the U.S. press.” Most notable were several paragraphs that took up the question of El Mozote:

Take the recent controversy over charges of a “massacre” by an elite battalion of the El Salvadoran army. On January 27, Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post simultaneously reported on a visit to rebel territory, repeating interviews in which they were told that hundreds of civilians were killed in the village of Mozote in December. Thomas O. Enders, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, later cast doubt on the reports. There had been a military operation but no systematic killing of civilians, he said, and anyway the population of the village was only 300 before the attack in which 926 people supposedly died.

When a correspondent is offered a chance to tour rebel territory, he certainly ought to accept, and to report what he sees and hears. But there is such a thing as being overly credulous. Mr. Bonner reported “it is clear” the massacre happened, while Miss Guillermoprieto took pains to say that reporters had been “taken to tour” the site by guerrillas with the purpose of showing their control and providing evidence of the massacre. In other words, whatever the mixture of truth or fabrication, this was a propaganda exercise.

Realistically, neither the press nor the State Department has the power to establish conclusively what happened at Mozote in December, and we’re sure the sophisticated editors of the Times recognize as much. Yet as an institution, their paper has closed ranks behind a reporter out on a limb, waging a little campaign to bolster his position by impugning his critics. A “news analysis” charged the government of sowing confusion by questioning press reports “without presenting detailed evidence to support its position.” The analysis posed the question of “how American diplomats gather information abroad,” but not the same question about American reporters.

Oddly missing from these paragraphs, and from the rest of that very long editorial, was any acknowledgment that the two reporters had actually seen corpses — in Guillermoprieto’s case, at least, dozens of corpses— and that Meiselas had taken photographs of those corpses. Instead, the editorial said that the two journalists “repeat interviews in which they were told that hundreds of civilians were killed in the village of Mozote,” and then said immediately afterward that Enders “later cast doubt on the reports” — as if Enders, or his representatives, had actually made it to the village, as if the kind of evidence he was purveying were no different from what were, after all, two eyewitness accounts, if not of the events themselves, then of their aftermath. The reporting done by the journalists and by the Embassy officials is repeatedly yoked together, as if the two parties had visited the same sites, seen the same evidence, talked to the same people, and merely drawn different conclusions. Neither party, the editorial declared, “has the power to establish conclusively what happened at Mozote” — the implication being, as the Administration itself had argued repeatedly in its defense of its Salvadoran allies, that, since there is no “conclusive” account, nothing can be truly known. The idea that much of a journalist’s business consists of a studied sifting of what is said and what is observed, of a careful wrestling with gradations of evidence, and a continual judgment of the credibility of witnesses — this notion is nowhere present in the sixteen paragraphs of the Journal’s editorial.

Seven days after the Journal’s attack on the Times’ “overly credulous” reporter, the State Department received a cable over the name of the Ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte, reporting on a visit by an Embassy official and a House Foreign Affairs Committee staff member to the refugee camp at Colomoncagua, to which many of the refugees from Morazán had fled two months before. According to the cable, the refugees described to the American diplomat “a military sweep in Morazán December 7 to 17 which they claim resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties and physical destruction, leading to their exodus.” The cable went on to say that “names of villages cited coincide with New York Times article of January 28 same subject.” The reporting officer added that the refugees’ “decision to flee at this time when in the past they had remained during sweeps … lends credibility to reportedly greater magnitude and intensity of … military operations in Northern Morazán.” This information was not made public.

Six months after the Journal’s attack on him, Raymond Bonner was gone from Central America. Since the El Mozote story and the controversy surrounding it, Bonner had been under great pressure, enduring a steady fusillade of criticism from the Embassy and the State Department, as well as from various right-wing American publications for whom Bonner had come to symbolize the supposed “leftward tilt” of reporting in Central America. In August, 1982, Bonner received a telephone call in his Managua hotel room informing him that he should report to the Metro desk in New York.

The Times’ decision to remove a correspondent who had been the focus of an aggressive campaign of Administration criticism no doubt had a significant effect on reporting from El Salvador. The New York Times editors appeared to have “caved” to government pressure, and the Administration seemed to have succeeded in its campaign to have a troublesome reporter — the most dogged and influential in El Salvador — pulled off the beat.

The public position of A. M. Rosenthal, then the executive editor of the Times, has always been, as he told me by telephone, that “at no time did anybody in the United States government suggest to me, directly or indirectly, that I remove Mr. Bonner,” and, further, that “anyone who would approach the New York Times and suggest to me that I remove or punish a correspondent would have to be an idiot. To imply that a man who devoted himself to journalism would remove a reporter because of the U.S. government or the C.I.A., or whatever, is ridiculous, naïve, cruel, and slanderous.”

According to Rosenthal, Bonner was removed because he had never been fully trained in the Times’ particular methods. Bonner, he said, “didn’t know the techniques of weaving a story together … I brought him back because it seemed terribly unfair to leave him there without training.” Bonner had been trained as a lawyer, had been an assistant district attorney and a Nader’s Raider, and had joined the Times as a stringer in Central America. Seymour Topping, then the managing editor, told me that “because we were considerably pressed at the time in getting people into the field in Salvador, we short-circuited what would be our normal process of training people on Metro to learn the style and methods of the Times.” Bonner, Topping went on, “had done a first-class job of investigative journalism, and there was never any question that he had come up with the facts — that his stories were true. But, if he had been more experienced, the way he had written his stories — qualified them, etc. — would have left him much less open to criticism.”

But “training” was not the only issue — for that matter, as Bonner pointed out to me, he had spent a good part of 1981 on the Metro desk — and, at least in Rosenthal’s case, the question of Bonner’s “journalistic technique” seems to have been inextricably bound up with what the executive editor came to perceive as the reporter’s left-wing sympathies. “If anybody ever asked me to withdraw him, he’d still be there,” Rosenthal told me, and certainly the idea that the government simply pressured the Times into withdrawing Bonner is wrong. Rosenthal suggests that others have promoted this version of the story because “I was an agent of change in the Times, and a lot of people didn’t like my politics”; but conversations with a number of Times reporters and editors, former and current, persuaded me that the campaign against Bonner was more effective than it might have been because of Rosenthal’s own politics. Several people told me that Rosenthal had made no secret that he was unhappy with Bonner, because the reporter, as one characterized the editor’s view, “was too willing to accept the Communist side of the story. He was very vocal that Bonner was sympathetic to the Communist side in Central America.” The criticism from the right — led by the Wall Street Journal editorial on El Mozote — “resonated with Abe, because it reinforced his own suspicions about Bonner. There seemed to be a growing audience out there that agreed with Abe.” Several current and former Times employees (none of whom would speak for attribution) pointed to a scene in a Georgetown restaurant a few weeks after the El Mozote story ran — it was the evening of the annual Gridiron dinner — in which Rosenthal criticized Bonner and angrily described the sufferings that Communist regimes inflict on their people.

(Bonner finally left the Times in 1984; in 1987, he began writing for The New Yorker — as did, two years later, Alma Guillermoprieto. He left the magazine in 1992; he is now writing special assignments for the Times.)

El Mozote represented the climax of the era of the great massacres. It was not the last of them — most notably, in August of 1982 the Atlacatl, in an operation similar to that in El Mozote, killed some two hundred people at El Calabozo, in the Department of San Vicente — but after El Mozote the Army relied less and less on search-and-destroy operations that entailed large-scale killing of civilians. It may be that the guerrillas’ use of El Mozote for propaganda and the controversy that followed in the United States led senior officers to begin to realize the potential cost of such slaughter. It may be that the highly visible denunciations in Congress finally lent the Embassy’s habitual scoldings a bit more credibility. (Even someone as firmly contemptuous of congressional pressure as Elliott Abrams acknowledges that “the good-cop, bad-cop routine with Congress was very effective” and that “there was some positive impact there in reducing the killing.”) It may be that the officers realized that lesser massacres — of forty people or fewer, say — could accomplish as much without attracting so much attention.

More important, the key Salvadoran officers no doubt realized that El Mozote had accomplished its purpose. It was not only that in much of north- ern Morazán the civilians had fled beyond the border — that in several key areas the water had been taken from the fish. It was what El Mozote had meant — what it had said — to those who remained. For El Mozote was, above all, a statement. By doing what it did in El Mozote, the Army had proclaimed loudly and unmistakably to the people of Morazán, and to the peasants in surrounding areas as well, a simple message: Whatever the circumstances, the guerrillas can’t protect you, and we, the officers and the soldiers, are willing to do absolutely anything to avoid losing this war — we are willing to do whatever it takes.

By late 1982, the tide had begun to turn in Morazán, which is to say not that the Army had begun to win but that it had become less than certain that it would lose. The preceding March, the elections for the Constituent Assembly, on which the Reagan Administration had set much store, had been a huge political success for Administration policy, with a much higher turnout than had been expected. By exerting enormous pressure, the Administration had succeeded in blocking Roberto d’Aubuisson, the best known of the ultra-rightists, from becoming provisional President. Instead, the officers and party leaders and the Americans had agreed upon Alvaro Magaña Borja, a wealthy aristocrat and international banker with many old friends in the officer corps, as a compromise.

The successful elections and the consequent emergence of the highly presentable, English-speaking Magaña helped the Administration placate Congress. (By the July certification report, the Administration had altered its language from “no evidence to confirm” to “no evidence to support” allegations of “large-scale massacres allegedly committed by government forces” — in direct contradiction of what Hinton, and even Greentree, had reported.) Congress more than doubled military aid, from thirty-five million dollars to eighty-two million, and increased economic aid to more than twice that. Not only were the Americans sending new, top-of-the-line equipment and plenty of ammunition but they were expanding the Army — training hundreds of officers and soldiers in the States. Most important, Colonel Jaime Flores, apparently because of rather too blatant irregularities in his payroll in San Miguel, incurred the wrath of Magaña, and was consequently “promoted” from command of the all-important Third Brigade to command of the less important First Brigade, and, finally, to that of San Salvador’s Fire Department. To replace Flores in San Miguel, Magaña drew on the obvious — the inevitable — choice: Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa.

Monterrosa thus became the military commander of the entire eastern zone of El Salvador, and entered upon the period of his greatest renown. Very often, the Army publicity people or the American press people steered reporters straight to the dynamic colonel. “He was a phenomenon,” Lucia Annunziata, who travelled frequently with Monterrosa as a correspondent for La Repubblica, told me. “The Americans were always telling us that here he was, here was the new breed of officer they were always promising. He had embraced completely the anti-Communist ideology of the Americans. By then, he talked not like some kind of butcher but like an American. He was completely full of this idea of conquering hearts and minds.”

...

no lnx GUK

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/14/el-salvador-massacre-el-mozote

el Salvador massacre: forensics teams dig for remains as US envoy faces grilling

El Salvador

Trump’s Venezuela envoy praises Reagan-era policies

Site thought to be El Mozote mass grave yields little

Heather Gies in El Mozote

Fri 15 Feb 2019 Last modified on Tue 5 Mar 2019

A forensic team works at the village of El Mozote amid a search for bodies.]

Thirty-eight years after he lost his mother, five siblings, and five nieces and nephews during El Salvador’s brutal civil war, Santos Alvaro Pereira still breaks down in tears when he recalls their murder.

Pereira’s relatives were among nearly 1,000 civilians – including 533 children – who were slaughtered by US-trained troops in and around the village of El Mozote in December 1981.

Eighteen former army officers now face trial for crimes against humanity and other charges related to the massacre.

This week, the memory of El Mozote – and the legacy of US cold war-era intervention in Central America – was evoked in Washington DC as the Democratic representative Ilhan Omar grilled Donald Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, about US policies in Latin America.

‘Finally, they will pay’: justice beckons for survivors of El Salvador massacre

But for survivors of the massacre, the pain has never gone away.

On Thursday, Pereira, 59, had hoped to finally learn the whereabouts of his sister Maria, her husband, and their five children – murdered at the ages of 10, nine, seven, five, and three – when forensic experts investigated a potential mass grave at the village.

A court had ordered the exhumation after a local resident, Florentín Ramos, 26, and his father noticed children’s clothes and bone fragments in the topsoil when they went to plant cacao trees.

As the team of anthropologists sifted through the dirt on a hillside outside the village, Pereira said through sobs that he still hoped to give his relatives a proper burial.

But after about an hour, the Argentinian forensic expert Silvana Turner, who led the exhumation, said that bones at the site were not human.

Pereira hardened when he heard that the day would bring no answers. “We have to keep looking,” he said.

“We want justice.”

The massacre came in the early stages of a civil war between leftwing rebels and the US-backed government that eventually claimed 75,000 lives – most at the hands of state forces, according to a United Nations truth commission.

At El Mozote, soldiers from the Atlacatl Battalion – an elite counterinsurgency unit trained, armed, and funded by the US – lined up, interrogated, tortured, and executed villagers. They started with the men before turning to the women and children, gang-raping women and girls.

A forensic team sets a sign to identify the potential gravesite.]

The army also burned houses and crops as part of a “scorched earth” campaign against guerrilla strongholds, where all villagers were suspected of collaborating with the rebels.

An amnesty law passed shortly after the 1992 peace deal shielded the perpetrators from prosecution for more than two decades. The supreme court declared the blanket amnesty unconstitutional in 2016, opening the door to bring civil war-era human rights crimes to trial. El Mozote now serves as a test case.

“[The trial] could transform Salvadoran society by saying that crimes against humanity and grave violations are human rights will not go unpunished,” said El Salvador’s deputy human rights ombudsperson, Carlos Rodriguez, standing beside the exhumation site. “This would send an important message to current and future governments.”

The trial is also likely to cast a spotlight on the US role in the conflict, at a time when Abrams was assistant secretary of state for human rights.

After El Mozote, Abrams dismissed reports of a massacre as a propaganda ploy by leftist rebels and their allies in human rights groups. In a 1982 Senate foreign relations committee hearing, Abrams claimed reports of the death toll were “not credible”.

On Wednesday, Omar noted that Abrams had once described US policy in El Salvador as a “fabulous achievement”.

Ilhan Omar takes Trump's Venezuela envoy to task over his political past

December 11 and 12 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

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

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

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

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ 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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 67.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 69–81.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 78.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 71.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 77.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Danner 2005, p. 81.
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ 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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ 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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ 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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ 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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ 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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ 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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ 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;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "El Salvador told to investigate 1981 El Mozote massacre". BBC News. December 11, 2012. Retrieved December 11, 2012.

Bibliography

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

External links

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:

History of El Salvador

- Human rights in El Salvador

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

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

Links:

[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

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 Timesand 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," theTribune 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 Tribunein 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**:(style="background-color:#fff200;"):}:, 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'Aubuissonendorsed 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 mozote bak

December 11 and 12 edit]

Later investigation

Subsequent follow-up

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

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

el mozote bak

December 11 and 12edit]

Later investigation

Subsequent follow-up

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

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

December 11 and 12 edit]