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by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 2:44 am

The Agony of El Salvador
by Raymond Bonner; Raymond Bonner is a New York Times reporter who recently returned from a two-month assignment in El Salvador.
February 22, 1981

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

A cherubic, 14-year-old boy in pressed shirt, clean pants and shined shoes led the way up a narrow, twisting mountain path. Behind him came a chunky woman in her early 20's, a rainbow sewn on the front of her maroon sweatshirt, carrying a new grenade launcher made in the United States and covered with protective grease. Another woman followed, the front pockets of her new olive green military jacket bulging with Soviet-made hand grenades; she led a horse burdened with burlap bags of corn in which the shapes of automatic rifles could just barely be seen.

At intervals that would minimize casualties in case of an ambush came an accountant, bank clerk, printer and college student, each taking a turn at shouldering heavy crates of grenades and ammunition. They hiked for two hours through tunnels of trees and beside fields of prickly hemp bushes, past clusters of mud huts where peasants offered them oranges and wished them ''Godspeed,'' until they reached their camp, hidden in a tropical forest on the side of a volcano. Only a few days before, an army search-and-destroy mission had passed within a few hundred yards of the site, but now, on this warm January evening, expectations were high among the guerrillas. They were making the final preparations for an attack on a nearby city, their mission in a long-awaited, nationwide offensive to overthrow El Salvador's junta.

Today, six weeks later, the Government remains in power. The guerrillas' call for a general strike and popular insurrection went largely unheeded, and they failed to gain control of an area where they could safely establish a provisional government. Yet the guerrillas have demonstrated that, after decades of political and economic repression, a revolutionary movement in El Salvador has achieved enough power and popular support to take on the army and survive. Until a couple of years ago, few North Americans knew whether San Salvador was the name of the capital or the country. The five million people of this Massachusetts-sized nation are jammed into a narrow, mountainous corridor hard to find on a map, shoved against the Pacific Ocean by neighboring Guatemala and Honduras and just across the bay from Nicaragua. It has no oil, virtually no minerals, an insignificant industrial base; the per-capita income is less than $700, one of the lowest in the Western hemisphere.

But tiny El Salvador has suddenly burst upon the world stage. In the fall of 1979, a coup by moderate army officers led to the establishment of a junta with both civilian and military representatives. Economic reforms, including a major redistribution of land, were undertaken, but they were accompanied by repression. According to El Salvador's Human Rights Commission, a private organization, 13,194 people have been killed in political violence in the last year, most of them by Government security forces and rightist paramilitary groups. (The death toll of a civil war of the same proportions in the United States would be almost 500,000 people - the population of a New Orleans.) The Marxist-led guerrillas, growing ever stronger and bolder, have kidnapped businessmen and bombed banks. Thousands of Salvadoran families have been forced by the escalating warfare to flee from their villages, settling in makeshift refugee centers in the cities and in camps across the border in Honduras.

The turmoil has forced a new international perception of El Salvador's geopolitical significance. The cold war could become hot here. Many in Washington worry about an updated version of the old domino theory, with the blocks falling much closer to home. Just 19 months ago, a socialist, pro-Cuban government took power in next-door Nicaragua. If El Salvador follows suit, can the right-wing regime in Guatemala, already under attack from its own impoverished peasants, be far beyond? Would that threaten the stability of the entire region, and the precious oil reserves of Mexico and Venezuela as well?

A raging controversy has developed over what policy the United States should pursue in El Salvador. The Carter Administration propped up what it considered to be a ''centrist,'' non-Marxist regime, supporting - in fact, pushing - the economic changes, in part as a means of diminishing the appeal of the leftists. That support continued despite the increasing violence of Government security forces against the political opposition. A few days before Mr. Reagan's inauguration, a United States ban on shipments of lethal weapons to El Salvador ended with the arrival there of helicopters, automatic rifles, grenade launchers and ammunition.

Some of President Reagan's advisers are urging him to increase political and military support. Alexander M. Haig Jr., the new Secretary of State, has charged the Soviet Union with ''unprecedented'' risk-taking in Latin America, and Administration aides charge that the guerrilla forces in El Salvador have received major political or military support from the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua. Just this month, documents allegedly captured from the insurgents were made public that described a guerrilla leader's shopping tour for weapons to the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Eastern European capitals. When Mr. Reagan removed Ambassador Robert E. White, a career Foreign Service officer who had opposed United States military involvement, from his post in San Salvador, and this month made Frederic L. Chapin, a diplomat with extensive Defense Department experience, acting head of mission there, it was seen by many as a certification of a change in United States policy.

For all the concern about El Salvador's becoming ''another Cuba,'' there are other fears that it will become ''another Vietnam,'' that it will lead to the in-volvement of the United States on one side of another nation's revolution. Last month, for example, in Berkeley, Calif., several thousand people demonstrated against United States involvement in El Salvador. Teach-ins are being organized in Boston, New York and other cities. The United States Catholic Conference has urged that Washington not provide military aid to the junta. Thousands protested in Frankfurt, Germany. And in Mexico City, where high-ranking Government officials have been critical of this steppedup United States military activity, 25,000 people marched in a demonstration sponsored by unions and leftist groups; it was one of the largest anti-Yankee protests there in recent years.

The protestors scorn talk of an international Communist conspiracy in El Salvador. There is no evidence, they say, of any direct Soviet involvement: Some of the guerrilla field commanders have been trained in Cuba, and some of their arms were made in the Soviet Union and China and transhipped through Cuba, but the only foreign military advisers known to be in El Salvador are from the United States. And arms-shopping tours, they say, are not restricted to the guerrillas; an association of Salvadoran businessmen has hired a Washington lobbyist to help the junta get more military aid from the United States.

Moreover, as one insurgent leader said in an interview, the major guerrilla organizations ''are more anti-Soviet than your Mr. Haig.'' Whether or not that is true, it is likely that, as an American diplomat noted: ''Even if it were not for Cuba and the Soviet Union, we'd have a revolution here.'' Why? Here is the explanation of Jose Napoleon Duarte, the 55-yearold leader of El Salvador's staunchly anti-Communist Christian Democratic Party and President of the ruling junta:

''This is a history of people starving to death, living in misery. For 50 years, the same people had all the power, all the money, all the opportunities. Those who did not have anything tried to take it away from those who had everything. But there were no democratic systems available to them, so they have radicalized themselves, have resorted to violence. And of course this second group, the rich, do not want to give up anything, so they are fighting.''

A company president educated in the United States offered the same explanation in fewer words: ''It is a class war.'' Until recently, the top 5 percent of the population received 38 percent of the income. Fewer than 2 percent owned more than half of the viable farmland, which they planted with coffee, sugar cane and cotton for export. Malnutrition is endemic in El Salvador, and the infant mortality rate is twice that of Cuba, four times that of the United States. Functional illiteracy among the peasants approaches 95 percent.

And some 60 percent of El Salvador's population is rural, living in isolated valleys or mountain hamlets. Wooden-yoked oxen draw carts that ride on solid wooden wheels. Hundreds of thousands of peasants live in hovels made of packed mud; naked children with swollen bellies and open sores wander among the grunting pigs, garbage and flies. Their mothers and sisters trudge for an hour or more to the nearest well for water, carried in gourd-shaped plastic containers balanced on their heads.

Meanwhile, in San Salvador, at the foot of a forested volcano, brick walls hide $500,000 houses. Many of them are now abandoned, their owners off to what were once their second homes in Miami and Guatemala City.

There is also a middle class in this capital city of 500,000 people, a consumer class that has burgeoned within the last decade.Owners of Toyotas and Datsuns fill up at Esso and Shell stations before heading for a McDonald's or for the shopping center where they can buy Sears clothes at prices slightly higher than those in the United States or browse in reverberating record shops. But behind the middle-class neighborhoods of new, two-story houses on tree-lined, paved cul-de-sacs are the rutted dirt roads of the urban poor. Scruffy children play among the chickens and cows in front of tin shanties while their mothers warm tortillas over fires laid in stones.

There is comparable poverty in Mexico and India, comparable contrast between rich and poor, without violent class warfare. Why in El Salvador? Part of the answer can be found in the nation's failure to evolve even a flawed democratic process. That path to change has always been blocked - by the army.

In 1932, the military put down a rebellion of peasants and workers who were seeking a minimum wage and unemployment benefits; more than 30,000 people were slain. And ever since, El Salvador has been the fiefdom of an oligarchy consisting of wealthy landowners and the army, with a military leader in the presidency. By all objective accounts, the only honest election during this period was in 1972, when Mr. Duarte was chosen President, backed by a coalition that included Social Democrats and a Communist front as well as the Christian Democrats.

A short, stocky man with an engineering degree from the University of Notre Dame, Mr. Duarte was operating a construction firm when, in 1960, he attended a meeting of businessmen and other Salvadorans concerned that Communism seemed to be the only alternative to rule by the military. It was, he said, the start of his political career. He went on to become a founder of the Christian Democratic Party and, eventually, a three-term Mayor of San Salvador before his presidential victory in 1972. But the army voided the election, and Mr. Duarte was exiled before he could be sworn in.

Meanwhile, the guerrilla movement was growing: A Communist leader had resigned from the party to form the Popular Forces of Liberation; the People's Revolutionary Army was attracting disillusioned young Catholics. The roots of the movement were primarily among peasants and workers, with student support. It was a far cry from the leftist guerrilla movements the United States had opposed in the 1960's in Brazil and Uruguay, which had been manned largely by middle-class radicals.

There was internal conflict within the Salvadoran guerrilla groups over the means to accomplish their goals. But in 1977, after another election result favoring a moderate coalition was blocked by the army, the armed leftists began to cooperate in a campaign of ''destabilization'' that included strikes, street protests and kidnappings.

The process by which Mr. Duarte finally became President of the junta began on Oct. 15, 1979, when a group of young Army officers deposed the right-wing Government of Gen. Carlos Humberto Romero. The resulting junta, composed of three liberal civilians and two colonels, fell apart less than three months later; the civilians resigned after failing to oust the conservative Colonel Jose Guillermo Garcia as Minister of Defense. Three other civilians were named in their stead, but one of them quit 10 weeks later to protest the accelerating political repression. Mr. Duarte, who had returned from nearly eight years of exile in Venezuela, took his place on the junta. Violence precipitated another crisis last December when four American missionaries -three nuns and a lay worker -were murdered. The United States reacted by suspending military aid and demanding a restructuring of the Government that would guarantee enough civilian control of the armed forces to reduce the violence.

But negotiations between the colonels and Mr. Duarte's Christian Democrats moved the junta further right. Its most liberal member was forced out. Moreover, though the military agreed to Mr. Duarte's becoming President of the junta, Colonel Garcia again survived efforts to oust him as Minister of Defense, and another colonel became Vice President of the junta and Commander in Chief of the armed forces.

Said a Latin American diplomat at the time of the changes: ''If Garcia is minister of defense and Duarte is not commander in chief, then Mr. Duarte is an adornment.'' Privately, United States officials also had their doubts about whether Mr. Duarte and the reorganized junta had the power and resolve to control the Government's security forces by punishing officers and soldiers responsible for killing civilians. Last March, a few days after Mr. Duarte joined the junta, the Government announced one of the most sweeping land-redistribution programs ever attempted in Latin America. More than 250 estates larger than 1,235 acres became peasant cooperatives, the former owners to be compensated with long-term bonds. Other programs have been promised that will effectively transfer ownership of thousands of additional acres to the peasants.

Fifty-five-year-old Leonar Quirola stood in front of the small, packed-mud hut on the San Isidro plantation, 30 miles west of San Salvador. Barefoot, gesticulating with hands grown strong from days spent grinding corn for tortillas for her family of 14, she was complaining that her husband and sons work harder and earn less money harvesting coffee than they did while laboring in San Isidro's closed sugar refinery. But then she paused and added: ''Life is better now.'' She has a say in her future. According to the president of the cooperative that now owns the lush, 3,700-acre plantation, the members have voted to build a second water well and to construct new housing, rather than distribute any profits this year.

El Salvador's Institute for Agrarian Transformation has reported that 14.9 percent of the country's total farmland is now owned by cooperatives. Given the average family size of 6.6 persons, more than 386,000 Salvadorans have benefitted from the conversion of the largest estates. Another 200,000 families would be included in the cooperatives formed by the breakup of farms larger than 247 acres - the second, yet-to-be-implemented stage of the agrarian reforms. The final stage, known as the ''land-to-the-tiller'' program, would give an estimated 150,000 peasant families title to the thousands of separate plots, most of them no larger than two acres, which they now work as sharecroppers.

The chief motivation of most United States and Salvadoran officials in supporting these programs has been clearly political. ''The purpose of land reform was not to help the poorest because they were poor,'' said a Salvadoran who worked with the United States Agency for International Development, which has supplied economic and technical assistance to the El Salvador Government, ''but to keep them from joining the left.''

Roy L. Prosterman, a United States law professor who was an adviser on land reform in El Salvador as he had been in Vietnam in the 1960's, last spring told a hostile group of businessmen in San Salvador why they should support the program: ''The left fears land reform. It deprives them of their most valuable weapon in implementing revolution because they can no longer appeal to the landless.''

But a Marxist university professor in El Salvador offered a different reason for the left's opposition to the partially implemented tiller program. The goal of land reform, he argued, should not be the creation of more landowners, but a fairer distribution of the wealth - which is to say, food - and an increase in food production. He favors the integration of the tiny, inefficient plots into cooperatives.

The start of El Salvador's land distribution program last March was accompanied by the nationalization of the businesses exporting coffee, cotton and sugar cane; the three crops account for 75 percent of the country's foreign-exchange earnings. The Government also took control of 51 percent of the stock of all banks; 20 percent of what remained was made available to the employees and the rest to the public, with individual ownership limited to 2 percent.

Even while the initial agricultural and economic reforms were going forward, the junta's political repression continued, and the leftist groups moved toward unity. The various armed guerrilla groups joined forces in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), which takes its name from the leader of the 1932 peasant uprising. And the Democratic Revolutionary Front (F.D.R.) was organized to coordinate the efforts of more than 40 organizations, ranging from moderate priests and professional people to Social Democrats and dissident Christian Democrats and including the guerrillas.

The first president of the F.D.R. was Enrique Alvarez Cordova, a wealthy landowner who had resigned as Minister of Agriculture in the first junta in 1979 because of the military's domination of the Government. In November 1980, uniformed soldiers surrounded a Jesuit high school where leaders of the F.D.R. were meeting. A group of heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes entered the building and brought out the front members; Mr. Alvarez and five others were later assassinated.

Mr. Alvarez's successor is 49-year-old Guillermo Manuel Ungo, whose reserved manner and measured speech reflect his career as a lawyer and professor at El Salvador's Jesuit-run Catholic University. Mr. Ungo has been threatened with death if he stays in El Salvador, and he travels around the world seeking international support for the leftist movement. As the president of the F.D.R., he is the leader of El Salvador's left, opposite number to Mr. Duarte, though once they were political partners.

A founder of El Salvador's Social Democratic Party, Mr. Ungo was Mr. Duarte's Vice Presidential running mate in 1972 and was appointed to the junta after the October 1979 coup. But he resigned and eventually allied his Social Democrats with the Marxist left because he felt the army high command was blocking promised change and because the violence was escalating. He now says of his one-time partner: ''Duarte's personal obsession for power and his primitive anti-Communism have all come out. He was willing to ally himself with the army and oligarchy.'' Mr. Duarte, in turn, charges that Mr. Ungo is being ''used by the Communists.''

In an interview last month, Mr. Ungo said, ''You can be a leftist and a socialist without necessarily being a Communist.'' He added: ''People generally believe that peaceful methods are synonymous with democracy, while an armed insurrection is undemocratic. But this is pure fiction in a country like ours that has lived in antidemocracy where 'peaceful methods' were instruments of domination, repression and control.''

He is believed to have had a moderating influence on the guerrillas, who now claim that they accept the need in any future regime for political pluralism, a private sector and international nonalignment. On one point, however, the guerrillas remain adamant: They want a thorough overhaul of the military and full civilian control.

A wide cross-section of Salvadorans agree. Even a Government minister recently commented privately, ''It would probably be a good idea.'' The military is routinely accused of being responsible for much of the violence. The bodies of the four American Roman Catholic missionaries, for example, were found in a crude grave along a dirt road near the El Salvador international airport. Peasants who live in the area say that the road was regularly patrolled by the National Guard, and United States diplomats have charged that Government security forces were involved in the slayings. A few weeks ago, an army truck dumped the bodies of 22 young men and women in a pile on the asphalt parking lot behind the modern multistory judicial center in the capital. The Government said they were ''subversives.'' According to a Government official, more than 200 leaders of the new farm cooperatives have been killed, and 80 cooperatives are now paying ''protection money'' to local military commanders.

Much of the killing is also done by quasi-independent right-wing organizations. The Government itself, for example, organized and armed the dreaded ORDEN (the acronym for the Democratic Nationalist Organization) in the 1970's to control the countryside. And separate death squads operate with impunity if not official immunity. One such, the Maximilio Hernandez Martinez Anti-Communist Brigade, is named after the general who suppressed the peasant rebellion in 1932.

The right-wing death squads are financed in part by wealthy families who have fled to Miami or Guatemala City. ''I know one man who has given more than $2 million,'' Mr. Duarte said. Government soldiers, he added, often moonlight for the paramilitary groups; they are paid $40 a month and given life insurance policies.

Leftist guerrillas, meanwhile, have kidnapped and killed businessmen, raided plantations, burned buses and bombed banks and department stores.

''The difference in the violence,'' said a conservative priest, ''is that the left kills selectively - members of ORDEN and Government security forces. Killing by the right and the army is more indiscriminate. When they sweep through a village looking for leaders and leftist sympathizers, they kill a lot of innocent peasants.''

Tens of thousands of Salvadorans have left their mountain villages to get out of the way of violence. Most have settled in towns, subsisting as best they can. Several hundred camped out in a school; more than a thousand live in a field behind the headquarters of the archbishop in San Salvador. Thousands more have fled the country to refugee camps in Honduras.

Though the Roman Catholic Church, like the rest of the nation, is divided in its political allegiances, the clergy have been hard hit. An archbishop, nine priests, a seminary student about to be ordained and the four missionaries from the United States have been murdered. According to Bishop Arturo Rivera Damas, the Apostolic Administrator who is the acting head of the church in El Salvador, ''Most of the persecution against the church is done by members of the Government security forces and right-wing paramilitary organizations.''

The first priest to die in the political violence was a Jesuit, the Rev. Rutilio Grande. As he once explained in a letter to his superiors, he had been preaching to the impoverished peasants that ''their hunger, their diseases, their infant mortality, their unemployment, their unpaid wages were not the will of God, but the result of the greed of a few Salvadorans and of their own passivism.'' On March 12, 1977, he was on his way to celebrate mass in the dusty rural village where he was born, when gunmen hiding in bushes on both sides of the road opened fire on his white Volkswagen. Most of the priests who have been killed or threatened were encouraging peasants to demand improvements in their lives or, like the American nuns, distributing food and clothing.

Priests say that Father Grande's assassination brought about the ''conversion'' of the Archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who became one of the country's most vocal human-rights advocates - until he was assassinated last March while celebrating mass.

''The situation demands a strong moral voice, a clear statement by the church,'' said a priest last month. ''But (acting Archbishop) Rivera Damas can't make it. He has no job security.'' Another priest suggested that Bishop Rivera Damas is influenced by El Salvador's four other bishops, who are ''still serving the oligarchy.'' The Vatican, he added, ''doesn't want another bishop speaking out like Romero did.'' ''The United States policy of supporting important political, social and economic changes has made a profound difference here - has given the people of this country an alternative to the MarxistLeninist program. This was one time we supported, with active diplomacy and an ample supply of economic assistance, a progressive reform Government in Latin America.''

Those were the comments, last December, of United States Ambassador Robert E. White. Two months later, following the Inauguration of President Reagan, he was relieved of his post.

Mr. White had represented a President who had taken a somewhat new approach to Latin America. In the past, when its economic and/or political interests were thought to be threatened, the United States often interfered forcefully on behalf of military dictatorships and right-wing governments - with the C.I.A. in Guatemala in 1954, for example, or with the Marines in the Dominican Republic in 1965. But Mr. Carter actually supported the ouster of Gen. Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Nicaragua in 1979. And when the civilian-military junta took over in neighboring El Salvador later that year, Mr. Carter came forward with economic aid. He hoped that the country would develop into a democratic, non-Communist alternative - a model for the rest of Latin America.

But as the Carter Administration came to a close, there was increasing concern over the growth of the guerrilla movement and over alleged shipments of weapons to the guerrillas from Nicaragua, Cuba and other leftist nations. Mr. Carter responded by sending in lethal weapons and military advisers. Mr. Reagan is expected to provide at least as much support; he may, in fact, go much further.

One option, of course, would be to send in United States troops to help subdue the guerrillas - the ''Vietnam'' scenario. El Salvador does have a mountainous terrain, but it is a much smaller nation than Vietnam. The United States military might be more successful there - assuming that the Salvadoran guerrillas were not reinforced by Cubans and other foreign troops. Intervention, however, would inevitably damage the image of the United States in the rest of the world while the Salvadoran left would gain new international support from democratic countries. Moreover, unless the causes of the current civil war are addressed, another guerrilla movement would most likely be fighting in El Salvador within a few years. Poverty and political repression, as Mao Zedong suggested, are the waters in which guerrillas swim.

Mr. Reagan has another option of a very different kind: to seek a negotiated settlement of the civil war. The political leaders of the left say they are prepared to talk. Their strength within the opposition front has been bolstered by the recent failure of their military counterparts to overthrow the junta. Mr. Ungo has even said, ''We want to talk to Washington,'' and overtures have been made to the Reagan Administration. Moreover, the guerrillas are under pressure from Nicaragua's Sandinist Government to look for a political settlement. In January, Washington suspended economic aid to Nicaragua after accusing the Nicaraguans of allowing their territory to be used for the shipment of Cuban weapons to El Salvador's guerrillas. The Nicaraguans have denied the charge, but the Sandinistas believe that their relations with Washington will be in turmoil unless the political situation in neighboring El Salvador is stabilized.

Meanwhile, Mr. Duarte and others in the junta have said that they are willing to negotiate with the leftists. Even before the United States election, Salvadoran Government and business leaders were openly expressing their preference for Mr. Reagan's views on Latin America over Mr. Carter's emphasis on human rights. Thus, the new President's encouragement of a settlement would carry great weight.

Mr. Duarte has announced plans for the drawing up of a constitution that would, he hopes, lead to elections in 1982. Diplomats and Government officials, including Mr. Duarte, acknowledge that a political party representing views to the left of the current junta would do well - particularly with Mr. Ungo on the ballot. Of course, the Government would have to end the repression that now accompanies its reforms before the leftists would participate in elections.

Most Salvadorans, exhausted after years of civil strife, are now troubled by the involvement of the major powers in their country. ''I fear we are becoming a pawn,'' a businessman said a few days after the increase in United States military aid was announced last month. ''We are capable of solving our own problems if only everyone would just leave us alone.''

by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 2:48 am

Kirkus Review: Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador, by Raymond Bonner
June 4, 1984

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

As a New York Times reporter in El Salvador, Bonnet was singled out by the Reagan administration, in the person of Ambassador Diane Hinton, for his allegedly biased dispatches from behind guerrilla lines. What he saw and reported then--the guerrilla schools and hospitals, the tales of repression and massacre by government forces--is repeated here, together with the caveat that there is no guarantee of what a guerrilla victory would bring: of whether power would pass to the nationalistic and democratic elements among the insurgents, or to the hardline faction. The merit of Bonner's account is his first-hand experience with the former, never mentioned by administration spokesmen. (According to Bonner, a Carter official's observation that "we didn't know shit about the left" is still true.) These are peasants, Catholics, and students organized into a confusing panoply of opposition groups that Bonner says have grown proportionately stronger with increases in American military and economic aid to the San Salvador government. (From 1946 to 1979, American military assistance totaled $16.7 million; in the first full year of the Reagan administration, El Salvador received $82 million.) This has occurred despite the US Ambassador's statement, in 1977, that "the United States really has no vital interest in the country"--a view echoed at the time by the head of the State Department's Latin American desk. What then happened, says Bonner, was the flowering of a Vietnam-style approach to El Salvador's domestic political strife. The Carter administration was caught off guard by the Sandinista victory in nearby Nicaragua in July 1979, and when oppositional forces in the Salvadoran military staged a coup the following October, the US government moved to support the military faction of the new junta in order to prevent the army's dissolution. That move, in Bonner's view, closed off a political transition to democracy and escalated the civil war. Using documents obtained through formal and informal channels (government impediments are cited), Bonner shows that Washington has known 1) that the Salvadoran government is involved in repression; 2) that there is no real difference between the regular army and the National Guard, Treasury Police, and other repressive forces; 3) that no effort has been made to punish the people behind assassinations, disappearances, and massacres. When he went to El Salvador, Bonner says, he generally believed Washington's version of the situation; but no longer. Though this indictment will be written off by hardliners as an apologia for the guerrillas too, that will not alter its standing as the most thorough and up-to-date assessment of America's El Salvador involvement.

by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 2:55 am

Review of Raymond Bonner’s “Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador’s Dirty War”
by Murray Polner, Senior Book Review Editor, History News Network
February 29, 2016

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

“This book,” Raymond Bonner begins, “is about turmoil and revolution and the United States response. Though the focus is on the caldron in a country called El Salvador, the issues are broad, with parallels from the past and lessons—it is hoped—for the future”

For most of the nineteen eighties a savage civil war was fought in El Salvador, one of the poorest and most repressive nations in the hemisphere. Its government was supported diplomatically, economically, and militarily by the United States, which believed the rebels were communists. It was also a war that was bitterly contested in the US, where bruising battles between left and right were raged in politically sectarian magazines and by an assortment of pundits.

And so it went for twelve bloodthirsty years, when the Reagan administration, bolstered by neoconservatives in Washington and New York, often dismissed or covered up crimes such as the rape and murder of four Catholic churchwomen, the killing of five Jesuit priests, their maid and her daughter, as well as the massacre of hundreds of peasants in the village of El Mozote by the American-trained and armed Atlacatl Battalion.

At war’s end, about 75,000 Salvadorans were dead, tens of thousands had fled north for safety, and as the Truth for El Salvador Commission reported in 1993, “The government forces were responsible for eighty-five percent of the atrocities and human rights abuses.”

Bonner, a longtime New York Times and New Yorker correspondent, was one of two intrepid reporters (Alma Guillermoprieto, then of the Washington Post and now of the New Yorker was the other) who were the first to tell the story of the El Mozote mass murders, when some 900 residents of the small village of El Mozote, were butchered by the Salvadoran army in December 1981. When their reports appeared the two reporters’ were disparaged as leftwing propagandists by backers of US policy.

Having learned little or nothing from the Vietnam debacle, the US read the earlier coming of the leftwing Sandinistas in Nicaragua as the start of yet another version of the “domino theory” and thus a threat to America’s absolute control of the Western Hemisphere. It involved as well the Catholic Church’s many practitioners of “liberation theology” with its emphasis on the impoverished and tyrannized, which was seen as a threat by the Salvadoran government’s moneyed and controlling elite.

Bonner’s necessary if one-sided book is replete with barely-concealed rage. About Mozote, “the men were blindfolded, taken away in small groups of four and five, and shot. Women were raped. … 280 were children under fourteen years old.” Meanwhile, Washington assured Congress that the Salvadoran government was making progress in improving its human rights practices, a statement flatly denied by Amnesty International, Americas Watch and the admirable US Ambassador Robert E. White, who was fired after Reagan took office.

While Carter was a lame duck, the bodies of the four Catholic churchwomen – one of them a lay missionary engaged to be married—were found on December 4, 1980. The murders drew much greater attention to the “Dirty War” as critics dubbed it, its military death squads, and the role of Roberto D’Aubuisson of the ultra-right Arena Party, whom Ambassador White labeled “a pathological killer.” D’Aubuisson was probably responsible for planning the assassination of Archbishop Romero and the Jesuit priests. He died in 1992 of cancer at age 48 before he could be charged. Last year, Pope Francis said the Archbishop had died for a righteous cause and would be beatified, the last stage before sainthood.

“Top administration officials, even the President [Reagan] himself, gave tacit approval to the ineffective actions by the [Salvadoran] military high command against the fascist commanders, the death squad leaders,” writes Bonner, adding that Reagan, on C-Span, once blamed some of the death squad executions on leftwing rebels.

One of the President’s most important supporters was Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose article “Dictatorships [Dictators] and Double Standards” in Commentary, the leading neoconservative magazine, was widely praised by supporters of the American position. She argued that Carter’s emphasis on human rights rather than national interests had helped oust friendly regimes in Nicaragua and in Iran. Moreover, while “authoritarian” regimes could change, “totalitarian” regimes could not.

It was Kirkpatrick who said of the dead churchwomen, “They weren’t just nuns. They were political activists on behalf of the Frente” – the country’s leftwing coalition of rebel groups.

In this updated version of his earlier book on the subject, Bonner includes an illuminating epilogue about an American Foreign Service officer, H. Carl Gettinger, who outed the murderers and rapists of the churchwomen. The courageous Gettinger, a young, low-ranking, embassy official who would go on to receive the State Department’s highest award in 1982 for “creative dissent,” broke the story after he was approached by a knowledgeable Salvadoran officer and taped his information which named names. Larry Rohter of the New York Times then interviewed four of the men mentioned on the tape and wrote a page one story headed: “Four Salvadorans Say They Killed U.S. Nuns on Orders of the Military.”

Years after, a high Salvadoran official living comfortably in Florida was found by a US Immigration judge to have “assisted or otherwise participated” in the murders of Archbishop Romero, the four American churchwomen and the mass killings at El Mozote. The same judge ruled that a second former Salvadoran official, also a Florida resident, had “assisted or otherwise participated” in the deaths of the churchwomen and in the practice of torture. In 2015, the two men were sent back to El Salvador, all the while protesting they had been American allies in the war against communism.

“It was all true,” writes Bonner.” The two men had been carrying out American policy, had been praised and feted by American officials, had been welcomed at the White House” and then makes his crucial point: “No American official has been held to account for the crimes committed by the American- backed governments in El Salvador or for the deceit emanating from Washington.”

But that’s the way it’s been since Vietnam. Our many misadventures have caused irreparable harm to ourselves and others, yet we remain paralyzed, unable to change course.

by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 3:00 am

Time for a US Apology to El Salvador: Obama recently expressed regret for US support of Argentina’s “dirty war.” It’s time Washington did the same regarding our active backing of right-wing butchery in El Salvador.
by Raymond Bonner
April 15, 2016

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Over the ages, the United States has routinely intervened in Latin America, overthrowing left-wing governments and propping up right-wing dictators. President Obama pressed a reset button of sorts last month when he traveled to Cuba and Argentina. Now it’s time for him to visit a Latin America country that is geographically smallest but where Washington’s footprint is large and the stain of intervention perhaps greatest—El Salvador.

In Argentina, on the 40th anniversary of a military coup that ushered in that country’s “dirty war,” President Obama said it was time for the United States to reflect on its policies during those “dark days.” In the name of fighting communism, the Argentine government hunted down, tortured, and killed suspected leftists—sometimes throwing their bodies out of helicopters into the sea. “We’ve been slow to speak out for human rights and that was the case here,” Obama said.

That failure to speak out looks benign in contrast to the active role Washington played in the “dirty war” in El Salvador in the 1980s, which pitted a right-wing government against Marxist guerrillas. The United States sent military advisers to help the Salvadoran military fight its dirty war, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid.

In Argentina, the security forces killed some 30,000 civilians. In El Salvador, more than 75,000 lost their lives during the civil war, which lasted from 1980 until the 1992 peace agreement. The guerrillas committed atrocities, but the United Nations Truth Commission, established as part of the accord, found that more than 85 percent of the killings, kidnappings, and torture had been the work of government forces, which included paramilitaries, death squads, and army units trained by the United States.

The United States went well beyond remaining largely silent in the face of human-rights abuses in El Salvador. The State Department and White House often sought to cover up the brutality, to protect the perpetrators of even the most heinous crimes.

In March of 1980, the much beloved and respected Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was murdered. A voice for the poor and repressed, Romero, in his final Sunday sermon, had issued a plea to the country’s military junta that rings through the ages: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.” The next day, he was cut down by a single bullet while he was saying a private mass. (In 2015, Pope Francis declared that Romero died a martyr, the final step before sainthood.)

Eight months after the assassination, a military informant gave the US embassy in El Salvador evidence that it had been plotted by Roberto D’Aubuisson, a charismatic and notorious right-wing leader. D’Aubuisson had presided over a meeting in which soldiers drew lots for the right to kill the archbishop, the informant said. While any number of right-wing death squads might have wanted to kill Romero, only a few, like D’Aubuisson’s, were “fanatical and daring” enough to actually do it, the CIA concluded in a report for the White House.

Yet, D’Aubuisson continued to be welcomed at the US embassy in El Salvador, and when Elliott Abrams, the State Department’s point man on Central America during the Reagan administration, testified before Congress, he said he would not consider D’Aubuisson an extremist. “You would have to be engaged in murder,” Abrams said, before he would call him an extremist. But D’Aubuisson was engaged in murder, and Washington knew it. (He died of throat cancer in 1992, at the age of 48. Abrams was convicted in 1991 of misleading Congress about the shipment of arms to the anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua, the so-called “Iran/Contra” affair. He was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush, later served as special adviser to President George W. Bush on democracy and human rights, and is now a foreign-policy adviser to GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz.)

* * *

No act of barbarism is more emblematic of the deceit that marked Washington’s policy in El Salvador in the 1980s than the sexual assault and murder of four US churchwomen—three Roman Catholic nuns and a lay missionary—in December 1980, a month after Ronald Reagan was elected president.

The American ambassador, Robert White, who had been appointed by President Jimmy Carter, knew immediately that the Salvadoran military was responsible—even if he didn’t have the names of the perpetrators—but that was not what the incoming administration wanted to hear.

One of Reagan’s top foreign-policy advisers, Jeane Kirkpatrick, when asked if she thought the government had been involved, said, “The answer is unequivocal. No, I don’t think the government was responsible.” She then sought to besmirch the women. “The nuns were not just nuns,” she told The Tampa Tribune. “The nuns were also political activists,” with a leftist political coalition (Kirkpatrick died in 2006).

In Argentina, President Obama praised two American diplomats, Tex Harris and Patt Derian, for their commitment to documenting the human-rights abuses in Argentina.

Two American diplomats in El Salvador deserve similar presidential recognition. Ambassador White, a career diplomat, lost his job and was forced out of the foreign service by Secretary of State Alexander Haig when he refused to participate in a cover-up of the Salvadoran military’s involvement in the murder of the American churchwomen. Haig told a congressional committee that the women may have been trying to run a roadblock when they were killed (Haig died in 2010; White died in 2015).

At considerable risk to his career and his life, a junior diplomat in the US embassy, H. Carl Gettinger, wasn’t deterred by the chicanery in Washington and carried out his own investigation. It was Gettinger who had learned from the Salvadoran military informant about D’Aubuisson’s role in the assassination of Archbishop Romero, and he turned to the man, an army lieutenant, to help him solve the churchwomen’s case. The lieutenant, who had so much blood on his own hands during the dirty war that Gettinger dubbed him “Killer,” gave Gettinger, and the United States, the name of the sergeant who led the operation and that of four other soldiers who had participated, a crime that senior Salvadoran military commanders had successfully covered up until then (the men were convicted in 1984).

“Carl is an unsung hero,” Carol Doerflein, who was the assistant public affairs officer in the US embassy in El Salvador at the time, told me recently.

One year after the churchwomen were murdered, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history occurred when soldiers from the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion carried out an operation in the mountainous region of northeastern El Salvador. Altogether more than 700 men, women, and children were killed in El Mozote and surrounding villages.

The Reagan administration steadfastly denied there had been a massacre by government troops. Reports of the massacre, by myself in The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto in The Washington Post, were dismissed by administration officials and their right-wing supporters as “guerrilla propaganda.”

But cables and documents declassified by the Clinton administration in the early 1990s—as well as the findings of the UN Truth Commission—have confirmed the massacre in grisly detail. “As many as several hundred men, women and children were allegedly massacred by the Atlacatl Battalion during the December 10-13, 1981, El Salvadoran Armed Forces (ESAF) offensive,” the State Department wrote in a secret eight-page report to the Truth Commission. The commission removed the “allegedly.” On the morning after arriving in the area, according to the commission, the soldiers had “proceeded to interrogate, torture and execute the men.… Around noon, they began taking out the women in groups, separating them from their children and machine-gunning them. Finally, they killed the children.”

In 2012, on the 20th anniversary of the civil war’s end, El Salvador’s president, Mauricio Funes, went to El Mozote to apologize. “For this massacre, for the abhorrent violations of human rights and the abuses perpetrated in the name of the Salvadoran state, I ask forgiveness of the families of the victims,” he said, wiping away tears. He laid flowers on the monument that had been erected.

In Argentina, Obama tossed white roses into the water at a memorial to the victims of that country’s dirty war. No US official, not even a mid-level one, has ever visited the monument at El Mozote or apologized or expressed regrets about that massacre or, more broadly, for Washington’s active role in funding and encouraging El Salvador’s dirty war.

RAYMOND BONNER Raymond Bonner, a former New York Times correspondent who covered Central America from 1980 to 1982, is the author of Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War, which is being reissued by OR Books this month.

by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 3:07 am

US policy in El Salvador in the 1980s: The US to El Salvador junta: we’ll do your fighting for you
by Political Crumbs

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

The US has long demonstrated its deep and unwavering commitment to human rights and democracy. El Salvador offers a useful case study for examining this unique US obsession with individual freedom, civil liberties, and popular democracies.

Throughout the 1980s, and actually beginning much earlier, the US was obsessed with controlling the political situation in El Salvador. In order to control El Salvador’s political policies, the US armed, funded, and supported a military dictatorship.

It didn’t matter what the Salvadorian people themselves desired, or what form of government they preferred. What mattered was what kind of government the United States wanted to impose on the country, in the interests of US businesses.

Making the facts fit the policy

The US State Department, under both Carter and Reagan, had the habit of rearranging reality to make it fit policy. In this light, it is useful to compare presidential speeches and State Department memos, on one hand, with accounts by journalists and historians, on the other.

In his 1981 book Weakness and Deceit, New York Times reporter Raymond Bonner, who spent substantial time reporting on the ground in El Salvador, details some of these facts:

A November 1983 State Department cable recorded that, according to the International Red Cross investigations, “Perhaps as many as 90 percent of detainees are being tortured during interrogation;” and the Red Cross “has seen a continuing deterioration in the treatment of detainees since April” (Bonner 353).

Bonner supplies a long list of examples, culled from a collection of “horrendous stories about rape, torture, murder, and mayhem that could fill pages,” perhaps even volumes (Bonner 352).

All of this was during the same four-year period that the Reagan administration was vigorously defending the regime, supporting it to the hilt, and to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, military supplies, and US boots on the ground.

“We didn’t know shit about the [ES] left.”

The administration, and the security intelligence institutions in general, tended to make up the vision of the world that best suited their assumptions.

Part of the reason the Reagan administration’s analysis of ES was so informed, penetrating, and balanced was because Reagan had been careful to surround himself with capable, seasoned analysts with a strong sense of Central American history and society:

What the US state actually wanted

The administrations under Carter and Reagan funded, equipped, and supported the ES junta for a decade. They wanted what the US state has always wanted in Latin America: a reliable client prepared to offer profitable arrangements for US businesses.

***

Photo-documentation of the conflict can be viewed in this PDF file.

***

The Oliver Stone film Salvador does a good job portraying some of the events and issues of the early 1980s US backing of the junta:

by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 3:11 am

El Mozote Case Study
by Stanley Meisler

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Synopsis:

This case examines foreign coverage of a wartime episode when reporters have to test their powers of observation and verification. It raises the issues of one-sided information, the role of an editor and a news organization’s relationship with government.

Narrative:

In 1981, at the height of the Cold War, the new Reagan Administration rushed arms and funds to the army of El Salvador in a determined campaign to prevent the country from falling to leftist rebels the way Nicaragua had during the Carter Administration. Sensing the whiff of a possible new Vietnam, editors assigned correspondents and stringers there to find out what was going on. Watching the rebels in action was an obvious story, and American reporters repeatedly asked leftist contacts in the capital of San Salvador and elsewhere to arrange for them to travel with the revolutionary guerrillas. "As I remember it," says Ray Bonner of the New York Times, "I wanted to go in with the guerrillas. I think every reporter down there wanted to go in with the guerrillas. How could you not want to go in with the guerrillas?"

Both Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto, a stringer for the Washington Post, had received separate invitations from the guerrillas in December 1981 to enter Morazán, a province in northeastern El Salvador largely under rebel control. But the rebels called off the visits before the two reporters arrived. The Salvadoran Army was mounting a massive offensive against the guerrillas in Morazán. This was not the time for the guerrillas to entertain foreign correspondents.

Soon after New Year’s Day 1982, Bonner, back in New York, received word from the rebels that they were extending the invitation once more. He and freelance photographer Susan Meiselas, who had won international acclaim for her photographs of the Nicaraguan Civil War, prepared to fly to Honduras to enter Morazán together.

New York Times and Washington Post reporters regard themselves as competitors. But dangerous assignments like coverage of the wars in Central American foster camaraderie among foreign correspondents. Just before departing New York, Bonner phoned Guillermoprieto in Mexico City. "Ray said he would hate himself for telling me," she recalls, "but he finally said he was going in." G uillermoprieto was shocked. No one had reached her to reinstate her invitation. " I got berserk," she says. She sought help from Mexican journalists who had contacts with the guerrillas in Morazán. Those contacts had helped her set up the aborted trip in December. "I picked up all the threads," she says. Three days after Bonner telephoned, she received word from the guerrillas that they would allow her, too, into their territory. Guillermoprieto flew to Honduras, relieved yet fretful about Bonner’s head start.

Neither correspondent had much news experience in those days. Bonner, then 39, was a former Marine officer, San Francisco lawyer, assistant district attorney, Nader’s Raider and law instructor who had decided a few years earlier to seek a career in journalism. He had set out for Latin America and, as he puts it, "started bumming around." As a free lance, he attracted attention at the New York Times with some dispatches from Bolivia. The Times soon found itself short-handed in Central America because its veteran Mexico City correspondent Alan Riding had received death threats from right-wing extremists in both El Salvador and Guatemala. Bonner, asked to string in those two countries, arrived in San Salvador just before Salvadoran National Guardsmen executed four American nuns near the airport in early December 1981. "I got there on Sunday, the nuns were killed on Tuesday," he says, "and the rest is history." Within a month, the Times hired him as a reporter. He was assigned to the metro staff in New York but spent most of the year on loan to the foreign desk, heading in and out of Central America.

Guillermoprieto, then 32, was not yet a staff reporter for any publication. During the past two and a half years, she had worked as a stringer for a London newsletter, the Guardian and, since mid-1981, The Washington Post. Operating out of Mexico City, where she was born and raised, Guillermoprieto was bilingual, able to speak and write both English and Spanish fluently.

The editors had no hesitation about approving the trips into rebel territory. Bonner says he received "the usual caution — We don’t want you to do this if you don’t think it’s safe. Be careful, et cetera, et cetera." But Bonner had no intention of canceling his trip out of fear. Bonner, in fact, had long ago shrugged off the fears of working in the city of San Salvador. Despite the obvious hatred of him by right wing extremists, he would jog by himself every morning. "I used to say they would never kill a New York Times reporter," he recalls. "Then, I’d think, wait a minute. They killed four nuns. Why do I say that?"

Like Alan Riding of the Times, Guillermoprieto no longer traveled to San Salvador because of right-wing death threats. But she does not even recall discussing safety when she talked about the impending trip to guerrilla territory with Jim Hoagland, the assistant managing editor for foreign news, and Karen De Young, the foreign editor. In Guillermoprieto’s mind, there was simply no question that the story was worth the risks involved. Though she might find herself in extreme dangers, she understood that these were "the rules of the game." She does recall asking whether the Post would pay for her gear as well as her airfare. "I was a stringer," she said. "Stringers get treated like dirt." The Post agreed to pay for her gear.

On the Scene

Reports of a massacre by the Salvadoran Army were spreading before Bonner and Guillermoprieto entered Morazán. The Rev. William L. Wipfler, the director of the human rights office of the National Council of Churches in New York, telegraphed U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton for "confirmation or otherwise" of the reports of a massacre. He also left a message for Bonner in the Mexico City office of the New York Times. The message never reached Bonner. Radio Venceremos, the voice of the rebels, which had shut down during the government offensive, resumed broadcasting in late December and issued its first massacre account — a highly emotional one — on Christmas eve. Salvadoran President José Napoléon Duarte, in a national broadcast a week later, denounced the massacre story as "a guerrilla trick."

Despite these public accusations and counteraccusations, Bonner and Guillermoprieto, outside El Salvador at the time, were so preoccupied with arrangements to enter Morazán that neither recalls knowing anything about the massacre before meeting the guerrillas. Bonner and Meiselas checked into the Maya Hotel in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Their instructions were to go to a designated coffee shop and look for a contact carrying a Time Magazine. They did not find him in the coffee shop but wandering on the road nearby. The contact led them by car on January 3rd to a mountainous area near the border of El Salvador. "We removed our trousers, then held our shoes above our heads while crossing a wide river," Bonner would write a few years later. "…I was scared. I flashed back so many years earlier, to when I had been in Vietnam and how patrols were ambushed at night. Our Salvadoran escorts were so poorly armed…that I knew they would be no match for an army patrol." There would be three night marches before they reached rebel-controlled territory.

Guillermoprieto checked in at the Maya Hotel a few days later. While waiting two days for an escort, she walked up and down the hills of Tegucigalpa in what she now calls "a desperate attempt to get into shape." She later followed the same arduous and dangerous route as Bonner and Meiselas with escorts resentful that they had to endanger themselves by guiding a third journalist. Fording the wide river in her bikini underwear bottom, she slipped, ruining her camera and damaging her pack. After three nights of walking, she came to a rebel camp where Bonner and Meiselas were waiting to take the route back to Honduras.

"They were going out as I was coming in," she says. "I was jealous and envious and enraged about being scooped. But I didn’t realize they had the story." After talking with Bonner, in fact, she felt better, for he seemed excited about seeing the guerrillas in combat. "I was interested in seeing how their society was organized," she says. "I wasn’t that interested in combat."

On her first day in rebel territory, the guerrillas led her to El Mozote and nearby villages. Guillermoprieto came upon awful sights that had shocked Bonner and Meiselas a few days earlier. The "sickly sweet smell of decomposing bodies" pressed the air.

The two American journalists and the American photographer saw dozens of bodies beneath the rubble of the village and lying in nearby fields. They found little children’s bodies rotting in the charred ruins of adobe houses. The village church was in ruins. An array of bones lay in the burned sacristy. Skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column and countless other pieces of bone poked out of ruble. They found charred bones in two of the burned houses of the village. These scenes, photographed by Meiselas, would appear in the Washington Post and the Sunday magazine of the New York Times. "By the end of the day," says Guillermoprieto, "I realized that something untoward and unspeakable had taken place."

In a nearby refugee camp, Guillermoprieto, like Bonner, interviewed Rufina Amaya, the sole survivor of the El Mozote massacre. Guillermoprieto also interviewed two survivors from attacks on other villages. Aside from these eyewitnesses she interviewed a dozen other civilians who told her that their relatives had been killed by the Salvadoran soldiers. In all, Bonner said he interviewed thirteen peasants who told him that Salvadoran soldiers had killed their relatives. Both Bonner and Guillermoprieto were allowed to interview the civilians without the presence of guerrillas. The rebel soldiers also gave the reporters their version of events, and Guillermoprieto said that an American working in the area also described what he believed had taken place. Bonner said that he, too, had met an American, whom he identified as Joe David Sanderson. According to Bonner, Sanderson was killed in combat a few months later. Bonner also received a list from some villagers with the names of 733 peasants killed by the Salvadoran army. Bonner was told that the survivors had compiled the list.

From their separate interviews and observations, Bonner and Guillermoprieto, who did not consult each other afterwards, put together more or less the same basic account of what had happened:

In mid-December, a few weeks before the American reporters entered Morazán, the Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Army had destroyed the village, killing almost everyone there. The Atlacatl was an elite, 1000-man battalion trained in counterinsurgency and rapid deployment by U.S. Special Forces military advisors. The Atlacatl, commanded by Lt. Col. Domingo Monterrosa, was taking part in a Salvadoran Army search-and-destroy offensive in northern Morazán, an area largely in the hands of the rebels.

The Atlacatl soldiers marched into the village of El Mozote in the late afternoon of December 11. The village had fifteen to twenty mud brick homes around a square with a church and a small building that served as a kind of sacristy. The villagers did not regard themselves as rebel supporters, and some government soldiers had assured a local businessman that no villager would be harmed if all remained in their homes.

The Atlacatl soldiers, however, pounded on the homes and forced everyone to come out and lie down on the square in the darkness. After an hour and a half, the villagers were allowed to go back into their homes. "We were happy then," Rufina Amaya told Guillermoprieto. "`The repression is over,’ we said."

But before dawn the next day, the soldiers forced everyone back into the square. After a few hours of standing, the soldiers separated the men from the women and children and herded the men into the church. The women and children were put into a single home.

The soldiers beat and interrogated the men and then led them blindfolded from the church in small groups. At noon, the soldiers pulled young girls and women out of the house and took them to the hills outside the village, raping and killing them. The soldiers returned for the older women, marching them in small groups to another house where soldiers waited to shoot them. Some soldiers hesitated about killing children. But their officers berated them. Mrs. Amaya told Bonner she heard her nine-year-old son scream, "Mama, they’re killing me. They’ve killed my sister. They’re going to kill me."

After the carnage, the Atlacatl Battalion burned down the buildings of El Mozote and moved on. Rufina Amaya, who had heard the screams of her husband and other children as they were murdered, managed to slip away. Both before and after the massacre, the soldiers killed civilians in other villages. But no other village suffered a slaughter as massive and as near complete as El Mozote. Hundreds of civilians had died.

Guillermonprieto’s Report

Guillermoprieto felt that she had to get her story out right away. It was not so much the fear of being scooped. But she was sure that, if Bonner’s story appeared on the front page of the New York Times and hers reached the Post more than a day later, the editors would cut it and place it inside. "I was desperate," she says. "I was going to lose this story. It was going to be on page 17 in four paragraphs." What had happened, she believed, was a monstrosity, and she wanted everyone in Washington to take notice.

After gathering more detail from villagers and guerrillas on the second day, she sat down and wrote the story in closely packed script on seven pages of her notebook. She rolled the pages into a plastic film canister and persuaded a young rebel courier to take it to Tegucigalpa. Her plan to get the copy to the Post involved several simple but crucial steps. "Miraculously, it worked," she says. Following her instructions, the courier phoned an American radio journalist in Tegucigalpa. He picked up the canister and, heeding the plea on the handwritten copy, dictated the story to the Post.

The Editing Process

Guillermoprieto’s visit was cut short a few days later when the guerrilla commander informed her that he could no longer guarantee her safety. It was probably time to go anyway. She had banged a leg on a rock, and it was swelling. "When I got back to the Maya Hotel in Tegucigalpa," she says, "I was a nightmare. I had this enormous purple leg. I called the Post and asked, ‘When did the story run?’ And Karen (Foreign Editor De Young) said we were waiting to talk with you."

This upset Guillermoprieto . She felt that "they didn’t believe the story. Both Jim (Assistant Managing Editor Hoagland) and Karen thought I was overwrought and got too emotional and was too sympathetic to the guerrillas. What happened was so unbelievable that they didn’t believe it." There was only one consolation. She had not been scooped by Bonner. No story of his on the massacre had yet run in the Times.

The delay in publishing Guillermoprieto’s story was less an issue of belief than of cautious editorial practice. Since De Young had covered the Nicaraguan Civil War and other Central American stories as a highly regarded correspondent, she and other Post editors were sensitive to the need in Washington to produce full evidence in any story exposing the brutality of the armies of anti-communist dictatorships in the region. Without such evidence, the stories would be dismissed as left-wing propaganda.

Hoagland took the phone to talk with Guillermoprieto. "Jim spent an hour grilling me," she says. "God bless him, he was convinced." As Hoagland recalls the hour-long conversation, "We wanted to go over the details that had to be explained…It was not an unbelievable story to me. But we had to ask the basic question that all editors ask — How do we know that?" After the talk, he says, "I was satisfied that we had shown the scope of what we knew." Even though there was a possibility the Post would be scooped by Bonner, Hoagland says he had no intention of running the story until he had talked with Guillermoprieto and satisfied himself about the evidence.

The story was heavily edited by De Young. Guillermoprieto, who now writes for the New Yorker, says she tends to write at length and take time before getting to the heart of a story. She believes that the first half of her story was incoherent and that De Young mostly used the second half. After conferring with her, De Young and Hoagland inserted a key paragraph. It stated that the rebels had invited her to the province two weeks after their radio station had broadcast reports of the massacre. "It was clear that the guerrillas’ purpose was not only to demonstrate their control of the region," the paragraph said, "but also to provide what they said was evidence of the alleged massacre in December." Hoagland says readers need to know "when you are in a situation where you are dependent on your hosts for food and lodging and, in fact, your life."

After her talks with Hoagland and De Young, Guillermoprieto slept for a day. She felt feverish but wrote quickly, finishing a series of articles on life behind guerrilla lines. The story already in the hands of her editors was published in the Post on Wednesday, January 27, with the headline: "Salvadoran Peasants Describe Mass Killing: Woman Tells of Children’s Death."

Datelined Mozote, the Post story began:

"Several hundred civilians, including women and children, were taken from their homes in and around this village and killed by Salvadoran Army troops during a December offensive against leftist guerrillas, according to three survivors who say they witnessed the alleged massacres.

"Reporters taken to tour the region and speak to survivors by guerrilla soldiers, who control large areas of Morazán Province, were shown the rubble of scores of adobe houses they and the survivors said were destroyed by the troops in the now deserted village community. Dozens of decomposing bodies still were seen beneath the rubble and lying in nearby fields, despite the month that has passed since the incident.

"In Washington, Salvadoran Ambassador Ernesto Rivas Gallont said, ‘I reject emphatically that the Army of El Salvador’ was engaged in ‘killing women and children. It is not within the armed institution’s philosophy to act like that.’ He acknowledged that the ‘armed forces have been active in that part of the country,’ particularly during a December offensive against the guerrillas, but said that their actions had ‘definitely not been against the civilian populations.’

"The survivors, including a woman who said her husband and four of her six children were killed, maintained that no battle was under way during the second week in December when the alleged massacre took place…"
Bonner’s Report

Although the Times had already published the start of the Bonner series, his first article did not discuss the massacre. There was nothing by Bonner to match the Guillermoprieto story in the first edition of the Times for that day.

Bonner flew to Mexico City to write a series on life behind guerrilla lines. He did not rush out a story on the massacre but included it as the second piece in his series. He sent it to the New York Times as one in a batch of three articles. His fourth would follow. "I was so green and naïve in journalism that I didn’t know what I had," he says. "I didn’t know what impact it would have."

Craig Whitney, then deputy foreign editor of the Times, edited the series. After the first piece was published, he worked on the massacre story and then, much like Hoagland and De Young at the Post, set it aside, assuming he could talk with Bonner about it the next day. "The reporting was there," he recalls. "The next step was making sure by asking the obvious questions. How do you know it happened? What is the evidence? How do we know how many people were killed?" But Whitney received a call at home that evening informing him that Guillermoprieto’s story had appeared on the front page of the first edition of the Post. "I said run the story," says Whitney. "I edited it and talked with Ray on the phone, and it ran. It ran on Page 1. There was never any doubt that he had the basic facts." Bonner says "the story probably had a fair amount of editing because it probably needed it. I wasn’t an experienced writer at that time."

The story appeared on the front page of the final edition of the New York Times on Wednesday, January 27, the same day that the Guillermoprieto story appeared on the Post’s front page. The headline read: "Massacre of Hundreds Reported in Salvador Village."

Also datelined Mozote, the Times story began:

"From interviews with people who live in this small mountain village and surrounding hamlets, it is clear that a massacre of major proportions occurred here last month.

"In some 20 mud brick huts here, this reporter saw the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams and shattered tiles. There were more along the trail leading through the hills into the village, and at the edge of a nearby cornfield were the remains of 14 young men, women and children.

"In separate interviews during a two-week period in the rebel-controlled northern part of Morazán Province, 13 peasants said that all these, their relatives and friends, had been killed by Government soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion in a sweep in December.

"The villagers have compiled a list of the names, ages and villages of 733 peasants, mostly children, women and old people, who they say were killed by the Government soldiers. The Human Rights Commission of El Salvador, which works with the Roman Catholic Church, puts the number at 926…"

Bonner’s story did not have a paragraph like the one in the Post story stating that the guerrillas had invited him in so that he could look at the massacre site. But, though almost all of the evidence in his story implicated the Salvadoran Army as the perpetrators of the massacres, the Bonner story did say, "It is not possible for an observer who was not present at the time of the massacre to determine independently how many people died or who killed them."

Although Bonner was too inexperienced to realize the impact that his story would have in Washington, he now feels that his inexperience was probably an advantage. "I was not journalistically trained," he says. "I wasn’t trained in the culture of the New York Times and I wasn’t trained even in the culture of journalism. I f I did a good job… I sometimes wonder how much of that was because I did not have journalistic training. I think I’d be much more cautious in what I wrote today, and I’m not sure it would be better…I had no idea what the impact of the New York Times was…Maybe that was good because I just wrote what I saw."

Guillermoprieto expected the stories to have more of an impact than they did. "I was surprised at the lack of world outrage," she says. "By my standards, what I had hoped for, there was no impact. I felt as if I were in a nightmare when you try to scream and have no voice."

Reactions Back Home

The stories on the front page of the two most influential newspapers in the country upset and embarrassed the Reagan Administration. They appeared a day before President Reagan sent Congress his certification that El Salvador was "making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights." he certification — required by law as a condition for continued military aid — was ludicrous if the stories were true.

In San Salvador, Ambassador Deane Hinton, who had already assured the National Council of Churches that he had no reason to believe that reports of a massacre were true, sent Todd Greentree, a political officer, and Maj. John McKay, a military attaché, to investigate. Greentree and McKay flew over El Mozote but, since it was in rebel territory, never set foot in it. On the ground, where they were joined by Deputy Chief of Mission Kenneth Bleakley, they interviewed refugees but mainly in the presence of Salvadoran soldiers. The conclusions of the embassy officers, sent to the State Department in a cable over Hinton’s signature, were cautiously put together.

"Although it is not possible to prove or disprove excesses of violence against the civilian population of El Mozote," the cable said, "it is certain that the guerrilla forces…did nothing to remove them from the path of battle…nor is there any evidence that those who remained attempted to leave. Civilians did die during Operation Rescate, but no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone." There was a good deal of ambiguity in the cable, but it clearly blamed the rebels for leaving civilians "in the path of battle." This implied, of course, that they were killed by chance in battle and not by the deliberate act of bloodthirsty, abusive soldiers.

Citing the investigation by the two embassy officers and repeating the words of the cable, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas O. Enders told both a Senate Foreign Affairs Subcommittee and a House Appropriations Subcommittee a week after publication of the stories that "there is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operations zone." Enders also said that the number of dead civilians could not possibly have reached Guillermoprieto’s estimate of several hundred or Bonner’s of 500 to 700 since government records list the population of El Mozote as only 300. This ignored the fact that both correspondents had reported that the massacres occurred in more villages than just El Mozote.

The administration’s belittling of the news accounts soon led to a right-wing campaign against the reporters, especially Bonner. In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal, citing as evidence the paragraph that the Post editors had inserted in Guillermoprieto’s story, said that Bonner had clearly taken part in "a propaganda exercise" and "there is such a thing as being overly credulous." The presence of the "propaganda" paragraph in the Post story deflected the attack from Guillermoprieto, and the Journal did not criticize her directly. But that did not mean it believed her account. Much of the American press in El Salvador, according to the Journal, was following a Vietnam War-style of reporting "in which Communist sources were given greater credence than either the U.S. government or the government it was supporting." But Bonner seemed the main culprit. The editorial accused Times editors and reporters who had defended Bonner of closing "ranks behind a reporter out on a limb."

The attacks intensified. George Melloan, who had contributed to the editorial, went on the televised McNeil-Lehrer Report to say that "obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation." The conservative newsletter Accuracy in Media castigated Bonner for carrying on "a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador." Ambassador Hinton, in a breakfast with Washington reporters in June, dismissed Bonner as an "advocate journalist."

The attacks were too furious to be ignored in the Times newsroom. "There were all kinds of aspersions on Ray as a person and as a reporter," recalls Whitney, soon promoted to foreign editor. "…They (the administration) and their friends were really vicious about Ray and quite unfair. We probably applied more rigorous standards to his stories after then. But criticism makes me contrary and more determined than ever to get the story into the paper."

In August, seven months after the El Mozote stories were published, Managing Editor A. M. Rosenthal withdrew Bonner from Central America and assigned him to the business section in New York. Rosenthal insisted at the time and continues to maintain today that the relatively inexperienced Bonner needed more training as a journalist and more understanding of the way the New York Times works. The reassignment, however, was interpreted in some journalistic circles as a repudiation of Bonner and a surrender to pressures from the Reagan Administration.

This interpretation infuriates Rosenthal. Citing the Times’s history of defying Washington — especially its publication of the Pentagon Papers during the Nixon Administration, Rosenthal says, "The Times has a pretty good record. Why in God’s name should we become whores for Ray Bonner?" He says any suggestion that he punished Bonner for writing the El Mozote story "is a lie."

But Rosenthal, who covered communist Poland as a young foreign correspondent and had the reputation of a tough Cold Warrior, acknowledges that he may have been worried about Bonner’s attitudes toward the Salvadoran government and toward the Salvadoran rebels. "As a matter of fact," he says, "I had doubts about a large part of the press corps." It was no accident that he hired Shirley Christian of the Miami Herald as a Times correspondent after she wrote an article in the Columbia Journalism Review denouncing American reporters for favoring the leftist Sandinista rebels during the Nicaraguan Civil War. While the need for training was the primary motive for reassigning Bonner, Rosenthal continues, "I’m not saying we were not worried about his articles. He’s a good reporter, but he’s not Jesus Christ Almighty."

Bonner agrees that he was not reassigned because of State Department pressure over the El Mozote story. A colleague informed him that Rosenthal told several Times editors and reporters at a private meeting, "If I have to choose between Bonner and the State Department, I’ll take Bonner." But Bonner believes that Rosenthal regarded communism as a far greater threat to Central America than brutal, repressive regimes and was troubled by correspondents who spent what Rosenthal regarded as too much time exposing the tactics of these regimes. Rosenthal, according to Bonner, was probably more upset by Bonner’s favorable view of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua than by the El Mozote story. Bonner says that three of his Nicaragua stories were never published.

The reassignment may have chilled El Salvador coverage. Reporters, according to Michael Massing of the Columbia Journalism Review, became "wary of provoking the embassy." "If they can kick out the Times correspondent," said one foreign correspondent in San Salvador, "you’ve got to be careful." A New York Times correspondent heading off to Latin America told Bonner, "I’m not going to get caught in the same trap that you did." The whole episode, said another Times foreign correspondent, "had an intimidating effect on the foreign desk."

Bonner took a leave of absence to write a book on El Salvador and then resigned from the Times in 1984. He became a free lance writer working mainly for The New Yorker. In the 1990s, after Rosenthal retired as executive editor and began writing a column, Bonner returned to the Times as a contract writer and then as a staff correspondent assigned to Washington in 1999.

The Post rewarded Guillermoprieto by promoting her to a full-time job in Washington as a reporter. But the promotion did not work out well. "The whole thing was hexed from the beginning," she says. Her mother took ill and soon died. After the excitement of covering Central America, she had to cover suburban Maryland for the metro desk. Instead of reporting wars, she had to report on fires breaking out in middle class American homes. She felt a kind of culture shock. "It was a complete mismatch," she says.

She also felt "there was a ring of mistrust around me" because of her Salvador stories and the attacks on her by the Reagan Administration. The Post in those days was subject to a continual barrage of criticism from the White House. "There was tremendous pressure on us during the Reagan Administration," says De Young, the foreign editor. "People in the White House would complain to high executives at the Post about the correspondents covering Central America. That led to an air of mistrust. You know, if you call someone a leftist often enough, some of it sticks. But, having said that, I can not think of a single time that a story was changed or dropped because of pressure from the White House."

In a similar description of the atmosphere, Hoagland, the assistant managing editor, says it was not unusual for some editors to feel suspicious about the reporting of a correspondent in the field. "It was sort of like what happened in newsrooms during the Vietnam War," he says. "There is a difference between the Washington view, based on what editors hear from officials, and the view of reporters in the field who see the problems and failures of U.S. policy." But Hoagland believes that he defended Guillermoprieto against the doubts of some editors and that he had a duty to defend her. "I defended someone who had risked her life for us and given us a scoop," he says.

After two years, Guillermoprieto won an Alicia Patterson fellowship for travel in Europe and then accepted a job with Newsweek as its Latin American correspondent. She left Newsweek in 1987 to write a book and then became a staff writer for the New Yorker.

Epilogue

Guillermoprieto and Bonner were vindicated 11 years after the publication of their dispatches on the massacres.

As part of the accords that ended the Salvadoran Civil War on December 31, 1991, the U.N. Secretary-General appointed a Truth Commission to record the violations of human rights during the war and identify the culprits who perpetrated them. The commission comprised former Colombian President Belisario Betancur as chairman, former Venezuelan Foreign Minister Reinaldo Figueredo Planchart, and Thomas Buergenthal, an American law professor who once headed the Inter-American Court for Human Rights.

The Commission issued its report in March 1993. In the section on El Mozote, the commissioners concluded that "more than 500 identified victims perished at El Mozote and in the other villages." They added that "many other victims have not been identified" but gave no estimate of their number.

There was "full proof," the commissioners said, that units of the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion "deliberately and systematically killed…the entire civilian population that they had found there." The commission added that there was "sufficient evidence" that the soldiers "massacred the non-combatant civilian population" in several nearby villages both before and after the El Mozote slaughter.

The commission’s conclusions were based heavily on the findings of forensic experts. A team of four Argentine forensic anthropologists dug up and examined the bones in El Mozote and then passed the material on to a team of four American doctors in San Salvador for a forensic examination.

The most damning evidence was exhumed in the sacristy. The Argentines found the skeletal remains of 143 bodies there. Of these, 131 were of children under the age of 12. The evidence showed that many of the victims were lying on the ground when shot from above by the killers standing in the door and by the windows. The bullets uncovered were U.S. government ammunition for U.S. government M16 rifles. The forensic experts concluded that the evidence "confirms the allegations of a mass murder." "There is no evidence to support the contention," the experts went on, "that these victims, almost all young children, were involved in combat or were caught in the crossfire of combat forces." The Truth Commission condemned the El Mozote massacre as "a serious violation of international humanitarian law and international human rights law."

In all, the Truth Commission received 22,000 complaints of human rights abuses during the war. In contrast to what the Reagan Administration had insisted about rebel exaggerations and rebel killings, the commissioners said that the victims attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the army and other agents of the state, paramilitary groups allied to the government, and right-wing death squads.

After the Truth Commission published its report, Secretary of State Warren Christopher appointed a panel to examine "the activities and conduct" of the State Department during the war. The panel was made up of I. M. Destler, a professor at the University of Maryland, and two distinguished former foreign service officers, George S. Vest and Richard W. Murphy.

The panel was generally kind to the State Department. It concluded that "within the parameters of overall U.S. policy, the Department and Foreign Service personnel performed creditably — and on occasion with personal bravery — in advancing human rights in El Salvador." But the panel found a few exceptions, and El Mozote was the main one.

The panel criticized Assistant Secretary of State Enders for failing to make clear to Congress that the two U.S. embassy officers had not set foot in El Mozote during their investigation. The department was chastised for going even further than Enders in trying to discredit the Bonner and Guillermoprieto stories in its correspondence with members of Congress. Although Ambassador Hinton had cabled Washington in February his suspicion that "something happened that should not have happened and that it is quite possible Salvadoran military did commit excesses," the State Department still insisted in July that it had "no evidence to support allegations of large-scale massacres." That went even further than the testimony of Enders that they had no evidence "to confirm" the massacres.

The panel said that the reports of the massacre had clearly called for "an extraordinary effort" by the State Department to investigate what had happened. But none was mounted. "The Embassy does not seem to have been inclined to press," the panel said, "and Washington preferred to avoid the issue and protect its policy then under siege." The panel concluded that U.S. statements on the case were wrong and "undermined the Department’s credibility with its critics — and probably with the Salvadorans — in a serious way that has not healed."

by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 3:14 am

Did Bill O’Reilly Cover Up a War Crime in El Salvador?: Brian Williams isn’t the only one telling fibs.
by Greg Grandin
February 9, 2015

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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 of The 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, and Elliott 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 Journal called Bonner “overly credulous” and “out on a limb” and placed the word massacre in “scare quotes.” The Times sided 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:

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 Journal ran 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.

Video courtesy of Vanderbilt TV News Archive

First off, Meanguera isn’t “leveled.” There are some knocked-down buildings, and a bit of rubble in front of which O’Reilly gives his “impressive” stand-up. But most of the town seems intact. No “smoldering” fires are to be seen. “We saw no one, alive or dead,” he writes. But I counted at least eight people who looked like residents of the town in the broadcast, going about their business. Also, the clip makes clear that O’Reilly actually got a fly-over helicopter tour of the region by the Salvadoran army, to survey infrastructure damage caused by the rebels—so at least part of his harrowing journey into “Indian Country” was at an altitude.

But, more importantly, as Bonner and Guillermoprieto (and then, later, Danner and Binford) show, it was not “impossible” to say who was “doing the scorching.” The question is: Did O’Reilly intentionally deflect away from a war crime that implicated Reagan’s Central American policy, or was the deflection a result of his ignorance and laziness?

O’Reilly’s report captures the degeneration of post-Vietnam journalism. Bonner, Guillermoprieto, and Meiselas were operating under the old model, pioneered in Southeast Asia by correspondents like Neil Sheehan and Peter Arnett who questioned Washington’s version of events and did all that was necessary to get to the scene and get at the truth. In contrast, O’Reilly, whether he was whisked into Meanguera on a US-supplied helicopter or arrived overland, did, as he writes, a ninety-second “package”—a “stand-up” routine that largely confirmed the official story, as dictated by Enders and Abrams. Bonner was punished for his intrepidness. O’Reilly went on to transform cable TV.

In his memoir, O’Reilly said, of his reporting in El Salvador, that he “banished the fear from my mind.” “I learned a tremendous amount about the conflict and about myself. I could face a high-risk situation. It was a huge confidence builder.”

H/T John Dolan.

by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 4:24 am

The Diplomat Who Wouldn’t Lie: Robert White was the rare official who chose to lose his job to keep his integrity.
by Raymond Bonner
April 19, 2015

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

“An ambassador is a gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” It was an English poet, as well as diplomat, Sir Henry Wooten, who coined this aphorism, over four hundred years ago. Through the ages, many a diplomat—too many—has observed the maxim. Robert White was not one. White, who worked for seven presidents, served America by refusing to lie—holding firm even when pressured to sweep murder under the rug by the Reagan Administration—an act of principle and integrity that cost him his career.

White, who died in January at the age of 88, was sent by President Carter to El Salvador in 1980. As hard as it is to fathom today, at that time the tiny nation—White was fond of observing that it was possible to see the entire country from a helicopter at 9000 feet—was on the front burner of American foreign policy, as Syria, Iraq, ISIS, are today. The fear then was Communism. In neighboring Nicaragua, the Sandinistas had overthrown the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled and looted the country for decades, with American acquiescence.

Washington was now worried that El Salvador would be the next domino to fall into the Moscow-Havana-Managua orbit. The country had long been ruled by an alliance of the military and the oligarchy. With support from the country’s peasants, a leftist-revolution led by students was growing.

Carter tasked White with preventing a civil war by assembling a political center, something between the extremist right and revolutionary left. During White’s confirmation hearings, Senator Jacob Javits, the moderate Republican from New York, urged him to be more than a traditional ambassador. “You really have to be an activist and take a chance with your career,” Javits told White. He was and he did.

White was a rarity among diplomats. He not only spoke his mind, he spoke it on the record. During one briefing at the American embassy, after White, dressed in his diplomatic pin stripes, took his seat behind the microphones, the press officer explained the ground rules. “This is for background,” he began. White interrupted, “Hell, no—what I have to say is on the record! You can attribute to me.”

I arrived in El Salvador to report for the New York Times several months after White had taken up his post. He sought to wean me from calling him “Mr. Ambassador,” by responding, “Mr. Journalist.”

The son of Irish immigrants, White enlisted in the Navy when he was 17 and served in the Pacific during World War II; when the war was over, he worked for two years to raise the money to attend college, at St. Michael’s in Vermont. He then got a degree from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, before entering the foreign service—Eisenhower was president, John Foster Dulles secretary of state.

Twenty-five years later, President Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance turned to White. “Secretary Vance had chosen me specifically to go to El Salvador because I liked the human rights policy of the Carter Administration,” White told me last year. “I thought it gave us an opportunity to distance ourselves from dictators, which by definition, are unstable; and to shelter democracy, and allow the democratic elements in these dictatorships of that era to change.”

I interviewed White for a mini-documentary I was working on with RetroReport, the innovative online news organization that revisits and re-reports on old stories as a counterweight to sound-bit journalism. We talked for nearly two hours, and I came away thinking what a tragedy that no one had done an oral history with him. He still looked every inch the distinguished diplomat, dressed in a sport coat and tie; his gravelly baritone voice still had a trace of his New England roots, and his mind was as sharp as three decades earlier. He had not yet been diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him.

White often clashed with Latin American dictators, from Paraguay’s Stroessner to Nicaragua’s Somoza—and with Washington. When he criticized the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet for his human rights abuses, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger issued a letter of reprimand; White threatened to resign; Kissinger withdrew it.

When he arrived in El Salvador, White faced a constant stream of atrocities. “Ten bullet-ridden bodies of people who have ‘disappeared’ are found daily on city streets or provincial highways, while the armed forces are increasingly attacking protest groups they describe as ‘subversive,’” the New York Times’ Alan Riding wrote in March 1980. A 27-year-old leftist politician and his 23-year-old Danish wife were picked up the National Police; their tortured bodies were later found by the roadside 40 miles from the capital. When workers went on strike at an American-owned electronics plant, security forces stormed the building, took three workers to a separate room, and shot them in the head. Soldiers killed at least 300 civilians, many women and children, as they were trying to cross the Rio Sumpul into the safety of Honduras. “There were so many vultures picking at the bodies in the water that it looked like a black carpet,” a priest said.

Not long after arriving in El Salvador, White sent Vance a “Preliminary Assessment of the Situation. The 27-page cable is reminiscent of George Kennan’s “long telegram”—which analyzed the political landscape in the Soviet Union in 1946 and set the containment policy that was to guide the United States during the Cold War—and it deserves to be accorded the same place and importance in history.

It was a highly classified “NoDis,” meaning that it was not to be sent to anyone who was not on the short recipient list. It was not declassified and released until 1994. Even then, it has been largely overlooked; I wasn’t aware of it until I interviewed White last year. I was struck at how accurate and prescient his analysis was—and, sadly, how it had been ignored in Washington.

“There is no stopping this revolution; no going back,”

White began. In a sentence, he explained why. “In El Salvador the rich and powerful have systematically defrauded the poor and denied 80 percent of the people any voice in the affairs of their country.”

The government’s security forces must “stop torturing and killing any youth between 14 and 25 because he may be involved with labor unions, church organizations, etc.,” White wrote. He added, “The daily total of dead, many among them teenagers bearing marks of brutal torture, result from right-wing terrorism.”

At the same time, he was fully aware of the threat from the left. “An extremist Communist take-over here, and by that I mean something just this side of the Pol Pot episode, is unfortunately a real possibility due to the intense hatred that has been created in his country among the masses by the insensitivity, blindness and brutality of the ruling elite.”

There was one thing White particularly wanted to be “well understood in Washington.” Yes, Cuba was providing training for some of the guerilla fighters and Russia was supplying some arms. But neither of these has “created this threat of violent revolution but rather decades of oppression and a studied refusal on the part of the elite to make any concessions to the masses.”

White outlined the “main players in this revolution.” They ranged from the “ultra-right,” to the “far left guerrilla groups,” as well as the army and included the Roman Catholic Church, which was led at the time by Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

Romero was the voice of the poor; his Sunday sermons were broadcast over radio, and peasants throughout Latin American tuned in. . White warned Washington in his cable that the archbishop might be the target of an “incident of terrorism.” Attending his first mass after presenting his credentials as ambassador, White heard the archbishop read from a letter he had sent President Carter calling for the cessation of military aid. The archbishop then turned to the Salvadoran military, and concluded the mass with a plea that rings through the ages. “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.”

The next day, Romero was celebrating a small mass for the mother of the owner of an independent newspaper, which had been bombed two weeks earlier, when a shot rang out. The bullet entered the left side of the archbishop’s chest, hit his heart and lodged in his lung.

White attended the funeral. His presence was a political statement, as much as a religious expression, applauded by the poor and peasants, condemned by the rich and military.

The Salvadoran military and some in Washington sought to blame the assassination on the left, but it was the work of a thirty-five year old former military officer, Roberto D’Aubuisson. Muscular, fit and charismatic, D’Aubuisson was the founder of a political party, the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance—and ran death squads, which targeted students, union leaders and peasants. White, again not mincing his words, described him as a “psychopathic killer,” barred him from the embassy and instructed his staff not to meet with him.

White worked tirelessly to achieve a political settlement. But he only had nine months—until Ronald Regan was elected in November 1980. In sharp contrast to White, Reagan’s first ambassador to El Salvador, Deane Hinton, whose mission was to repair U.S. relations with the Salvadoran right, welcomed D’Aubuisson. Hinton developed an “almost father-son relationship” with him, one of Hinton’s aides told me at the time. “He thought he could channel him, push him along the democratic path, and theoretically curb his more violent tendencies. In the process, he created a monster.” (In February, Pope Francis declared Archbishop Romero a martyr, a step toward sainthood. D’Aubuisson died in 1992.)

Raymond Bonner, a former foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for the New York Times, is author of Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong.

by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 4:28 am

Official Cover-up Of El Salvador Massacre Hurts Credibility Of Government
by Anthony Lewis, The New York Times
November 24, 1992

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

The civil war in El Salvador is over now, a political settlement taking hold. But the American role in El Salvador did damage to our institutions and our honor that remains unrepaired. So we are reminded by a recent turn in an appalling piece of history.

On Jan. 27, 1982, correspondents of The New York Times and The Washington Post reported from the remote Salvadoran village of El Mozote that hundreds of civilians had been massacred there. Most were women, children and old men.

Raymond Bonner of The Times wrote that he had seen the skulls and bones of dozens of people buried under burned-out peasant houses. Alma Guillermopietro wrote a similar account for The Post.

Villagers nearby said an elite battalion of government forces had carried out the massacre the previous month. The villagers had a list of 733 victims. The Salvadoran Human Rights Commission put the number of dead at 926.

Those newspaper reports evoked angry denials and denunciations. A Salvadoran military spokesman said the account of a massacre had been fabricated by ``subversives.``

The Reagan administration, already embarrassed by Salvadoran death squads, was just as bristling. A week later Thomas Enders, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, told Congress: ``There is no evidence to confirm that (Salvadoran) government forces systematically massacred civilians ... or that the number of civilians killed even remotely approached the 733 or 926 victims cited in the press.``

Enders supposedly based his statement on an investigation by two U.S. Embassy officials in El Salvador. But he did not make their report public, and he misrepresented what they said.

The Reagan administration did not rest with disingenuous denials. It did its best to smear the reporters.

Sad to say, this effort at smearing found a voice in the press itself. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, ideologically committed to the Reagan administration and its view of what to do in El Salvador, ran an editorial 36 inches long headed ``The Media`s War.`` The correspondents who reported the El Mozote massacre had been ``overly credulous,`` the editorial suggested, and were taken in by a rebel ``propaganda exercise.``

``Much of the American media (in El Salvador), it would seem,`` The Journal said, ``was dominated by a style of reporting that grew out of Vietnam -- in which communist sources were given greater credence than either the U.S. government or the government it was supporting.``

The Journal editorial had a significant effect. Other newspapers worried about looking soft on communism and toned down their reporting from El Salvador.

The new turn in this story came last month, when a team of forensic archeologists digging in the ruins of El Mozote found dozens of skeletons. Most of them were of children. The archeologists said shell casings and other evidence supported the charge of a massacre by government troops.

The archeologists had to overcome strenuous resistance from the Salvadoran government to do their investigation. It was only insistence by a three-member Truth Commission set up under the peace agreement that opened the way. The Truth Commission has also had an extremely hard time getting cooperation from the U.S. government. Many U.S. documents on the El Mozote massacre are still being withheld from the commission -- and from us.

Surely the time has come for Americans, like Salvadorans, to know the truth of what was done in our name. Perhaps even Tom Enders and the other officials who covered up horrors could face the truth. And the press could learn again how essential it is to be skeptical of convenient official denials.

by **admin** » Tue May 30, 2017 4:33 am

A Massacre in the Rear View Mirror: El Mozote at 35
by Christy Rodgers
December 13, 2016

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

In three days, from December 11-13, 1981, U.S.-trained troops in Central America’s smallest, most densely populated republic, El Salvador, rounded up and killed over a thousand unarmed civilians in the hamlet of El Mozote, in Morazán province, near the Honduran border. This massacre, I believe, still has the dubious distinction of being the largest mass killing of civilians by state forces in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th century.

Most people who know anything about the Central American civil wars in the last decades of the Cold War know that they were U.S. proxy wars, the Reagan Administration’s “line in the palms” against Soviet expansion. In Weakness and Deceit, then New York Times foreign correspondent Raymond Bonner carefully exposed the bloody fingerprints of the administration on that massacre and the years-long cover-up that followed, and was exiled from the paper for his pains.

El Salvador’s twelve-year civil war ended in a negotiated settlement, after displacing a fifth of the country’s population of five million and killing over 75,000. And after billions of U.S. tax dollars were poured in to prop up its army and political class by Carter, Reagan and Bush – El Salvador was at one time the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt. The war was followed by fifteen years of right-wing dominated plutocratic governments that institutionalized denial, and pushed through a craven amnesty for all military and political figures implicated in war crimes, while they continued (a little more discreetly than before) looting the country. A few triggermen were prosecuted for death squad activities but by and large, the major perps walked free, some of them settling comfortably in the U.S. A lot of other Salvadorans ended up in the U.S. as well, but the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service worked diligently to ensure that none of those who had fled government repression were given political asylum.

El Salvador’s guerrilla army, the FMLN, had taken swifter, if limited, justice: in 1984, they lured the massacre’s engineer and top commander Colonel Domingo Monterrosa into a booby-trapped helicopter by letting him think he had captured the transmitter for the guerrilla radio station, Radio Venceremos. They blew him up in mid-air. A pretty good film, Trap for a Cat, made by a Venezuelan filmmaker sympathetic to the struggle tells this as a story of poetic justice, with some dramatic license.

In 1991, on the tenth anniversary of the massacre, I stood with a tiny group of people in the tall dry grass of the empty place that had once been the busy market town of El Mozote. A majority of its residents had been conservative evangelical Christians who had refused to support the FMLN – and so the initial story manufactured for the cover-up was that the massacre was a reprisal by the guerrillas. That story eventually sank under the weight of the facts – in no small part because there had been at least one surviving witness to the attack.

That was Rufina Amaya, widow of a smallholder who was killed in the massacre, and she was standing with our group in the susurrus grass of that depression in the barren hills where there was absolutely no structure, whole or partial, remaining to indicate the former town. She began to speak about what she had seen and heard on that day in 1981, when she hid in the bushes as the army marched in and began rounding up the townspeople.

Because what she saw and heard – including the cries of her own children as they were locked inside the town church, which would later be burned to the ground with them in it – was too much for any human to bear and remain unbroken, she spoke rapidly, almost at the edge of panic at first and then in tears, her voice shaky but never choking, never stopping for breath or reflection, just saying what had to be said, which she had already had to do a hundred times by then. She had crouched in her hiding place through the long day of screams, shouts, weeping, gunfire and blood and escaped in the dark.

I was responsible for interpreting for her to those in the group who did not speak Spanish and I remember that the only way to do it was to relinquish any intermediation between her words and mine and simply open my mind to hers as the words flowed out. I had never had to do that before, have never had to do it since and I don’t know if I could do it again.

Yet it is in such moments that phrases like “a shared humanity” lose their abstract or clichéd status. The facts can always be argued, twisted, or simply suppressed. Narratives and counter-narratives can be created in which the facts disappear in a welter of relentless polemic that is far more captivating than the facts can ever be. The only truth we will ever know is the truth we recognize in one another in situations where pretense and pretexts are stripped away – and in the living world that sustains us, whenever we can experience it without intervention. Rufina was truth that day in the dust of that whispering place where a thousand bodies were moldering invisibly under the soil.

History is mostly what’s told us by the victors. But El Salvador’s best poet – murdered, in despicable political irony, at the order of a brilliant FMLN commander who made northern Morazán, throughout the later 1980s, a guerrilla stronghold into which the Salvadoran army could no longer enter and kill at will, allowing some remarkable if inevitably limited experiments in collective autonomy to flourish at the same time (just in case you ever thought revolution was a case of stark, unmistakable distinctions between good and evil) – the revolutionary Roque Dalton, wrote a poem called “The Victim’s Turn” in which the possibility of a different history is raised:

Last year, an Argentine forensic team was finally authorized to complete exhumations at the El Mozote massacre site. The team had begun digging more than twenty years before and when it actually unearthed over a hundred bodies (more than half of whom were children) its work was rapidly suspended. But the families of the murdered persisted, and at last the wheels of some kind of justice began to turn – first with a decision by the Inter-American Human Rights Court in 2012 that El Salvador’s amnesty law had limits, and a case of grave violations like El Mozote had to be investigated and produce reparations. A decision that the Salvadoran Supreme Court has now ratified: the amnesty law was annulled last year, and 22 high-ranking military officials will face trial for crimes against humanity.

But the words “never again” still ring hollow, 35 years on, as none of the institutions that permit massacres and cover-ups here, there or elsewhere have been abolished or even weakened much, despite the tireless efforts of millions to stop the past from repeating itself. One hegemonic enemy collapsed but the great game has continued, creating new enemies to order and churning out fancy new tools to do the old work of killing and distracting and covering tracks afterward. The transformative hopes of the thousands who died fighting in El Salvador – or died only because they were poor and in the way of power – were not realized. Neoliberal economics, corruption and gang wars continue to pillage it today. Still there isn’t a choice but keep driving forward while never ceasing to look backward, as if we were all a motorized version of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, watching the disasters pile up in the rear view mirror.

And yet it is the utmost disrespect to the survivors to relax into a distanced despair. The last time I saw Rufina Amaya was on the back roads of Morazán in the first years of peace. She was on her way to a dance. She died of cancer in 2007; she did not live to see the first government in El Salvador’s history that was even slightly to the left of outright oligarchy take power in 2009, or its president admit the state’s responsibility for the El Mozote massacre and apologize to the victims’ families in 2012. But the victory that she had already won for herself, the triumph over annihilating despair – and for her people, the survival of the truth – was an even greater one.

For further reading:

Christy Rodgers lives in San Francisco, where all that is solid melts into air. Her essays and reviews have appeared in CounterPunch Alternet, Upside Down World, Truthout, Dark Mountain Project, and Left Curve Magazine. Her blog is What If? Tales, Transformations, Possibilities.

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