El Salvador: the next Vietnam?
Forche, Carolyn
El Salvador: the next Vietnam? An oppressive regime expects help from Reagan Carolyn Forche Last March, when a Congressional subcommittee was considering a proposal to send three twelve-member...
...The Carter Administration had ample evidence of electoral fraud, illegal arms and narcotics trading by high-ranking Salvadoran officers, and the imprisonment, torture, and murder of peasants and priests, but it never condemned the dictatorship...
...Every labor union meeting place has been blown up, as have opposition newspaper offices, the church radio station YSAX, and the Metropolitan Cathedral, where the bodies of six murdered Democratic Revolutionary Front leaders were dynamited as they lay in state...
...The Central American rightists called Carter "Jimmy Castro," but they are perhaps more on target in referring to Reagan as "the savior...
...That was shameful as we could not even cover her private parts with a petate (rush mat).' " 11 July 9, 1980: Thirty-one members of the peasant family Mojica Santos were shot to death by members of the paramilitary organization ORDEN...
...This is not a purely political problem," he said...
...Soon after taking office he picked up the resignation of Ambassador Ignacio Lozano, a Ford appointee, while Lozano was conducting a sensitive investigation of the murder of an American citizen by officers close to dictator General Carlos Romero...
...Meanwhile, the U.S...
...My own view is that the Salvadoran forces need to improve their proficiency in a technical, professional sense, and if we can do that I think we should...
...The rest of the political assassinations were committed by the Death Squad, the Secret Anti-Communist Army, and ORDEN [a paramilitary organization], which all function illegally under the protection of the Military Corps of National Security and the Army...
...These U.S.-approved elements sabotaged the fledgling government, which then moved steadily to the right throughout 1980, a period in which the composition of the junta changed three times...
...Government agencies will be severely reduced...
...Hang in 'til we get there,' Reagan said...
...A Salvadoran member of the opposition cautioned a U.S...
...journalists have been banned from the country by threats on their lives," the "Dissent Paper" noted, "Salvadoran government restrictions on visiting reporters have kept a tight lid on many critical events in the past six months...
...Whole villages have been destroyed...
...the reform did not touch the smaller but far more lucrative holdings which generate most of the coffee wealth...
...Lozano's successor, career diplomat Frank Devine, indulged in some verbal wrist-slapping of the Romero regime but fed it with lucrative loans...
...The State Department dissidents expressed the belief that the American people support "current policy," but that "this support would not survive the introduction of U.S...
...Although White was viewed in Salvador as a seasoned diplomat who had proved himself in politically sensitive areas of Latin America, to the disappointment of the Salvadoran majority, he upheld the U.S...
...interests...
...Two incidents typify the killings: 11 May 14, 1980: Several hundred peasants (one estimate is 600), mostly children and the elderly, were machine-gunned to death as they attempted to cross the Rio Sumpul, which divides El Salvador and Honduras...
...Land redistribution was a priority of the first junta, but power has remained effectively in the hands of the Right, which opposes it implacably...
...An oppressive regime expects help from Reagan Carolyn Forche Last March, when a Congressional subcommittee was considering a proposal to send three twelve-member teams of U.S...
...The American military involvement Carolyn Forche is a journalist specializing in coverage of Central America and the Caribbean Basin...
...Reagan strongly supports Pentagon training of the region's army and police forces...
...El Salvador is also receiving $25 million in unstructured economic aid and $40.4 million in a recently approved Inter-American Development Bank loan to rescue the failing economy...
...The influence of human rights and social reform advocates in U.S...
...We'll get in and then we'll give you help...
...Under Reagan, the conflict is expected to become thoroughly regionalized...
...Stay there and fight...
...military attache in that country what would happen when the first of these trainers returned home in a flag-draped coffin...
...military "trainers" to El Salvador, I asked a U.S...
...Southern Command...
...That," he said, smiling at the hint of comparison to Vietnam, "would be up to the American press, wouldn't it...
...The report acknowledged that "there is a growing realization that a total military victory is no longer a realistic objective for the government and the armed forces...
...Don't give up...
...By the close of 1980, the United States had indeed done what it could to improve the proficiency of Salvadoran forces: The U.S...
...A refugee saw "National Guard troops raping a woman and then cutting her throat, leaving a great pool of blood, 'And they were not satisfied with that but they also hung her body on a barbed wire fence, and warned that no one go near her...
...policy" toward the region...
...But, caught in its own post-election turmoil, the United States failed to "prevent" a December purge of remaining moderates, including Colonel Adolfo Ma-jano, who led the initial coup...
...Stay there and fight.9 Will the incoming Administration take up where Carter's left off...
...The whole process was rigidly controlled from above...
...The "Dissent Paper" favored the "Zimbabwe option"—that is, mediation followed by elections— but that was before the Democratic Revolutionary Front leaders were murdered...
...The Archdiocese's reports and those of the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission document a pattern of urban and rural military operations directed against the Salvadoran populace...
...A later phase of this reform, conceived and directed by Americans— including Roy Prosterman, who had supervised the identically named "Land to the Tiller" pacification in Vietnam—attempted to create a class of small landholders...
...At the heart of the "Dissent Paper" is a warning: "The Reagan Administration's first international crisis may well be in El Salvador...
...troops...
...policy was to seek a compromise between intransigence and actual reform...
...According to the "Dissent Paper," the Carter Administration was interested in training military officers, developing military infrastructures for more effective urban and rural combat and troop deployment, "setting up adequate supply lines and stockpiling material in cooperation with regional and hemispheric allies," and nurturing even stronger ties between armed forces and paramilitary organizations throughout the region...
...Presumably written by State Department dissidents but claiming that "the views articulated...
...The Salvadoran government now consists of a figurehead Christian Democrat president, Jose Napoleon Duarte, known as a "rightist" in his own party, and a military vice-president, Colonel Abdul Gutierrez, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, who wields a power both titular and real and who has had American backing all along...
...the Right is waging a war of psychological terror as well as material attrition...
...But according to the "Dissent Paper," the agrarian reform has "failed to neutralize the peasant population and has not succeeded in isolating the guerrilla forces...
...Others were thrown into the air and shot...
...That is the position of a "Dissent Paper on El Salvador and Central America," an analysis which surfaced in Washington two days after Reagan's election...
...During that period, the American news media told Americans very little about what was going on in El Salvador: "Influential U.S...
...Reagan advisers have defended "death squad" activities, and there have been insinuations of possible illegal contributions from Guatemalan citizens fun-neled to the Reagan campaign through a California entity...
...The bloodbath has claimed the lives of ten priests, ten doctors, two American land reform advisers, four American missionaries, 181 teachers, one foreign journalist, two radio commentators, two human rights activists, hundreds of students, and thousands of farmers, peasants, and industrial workers...
...are shared in private by current and former analysts and officials at NSC, DOS, DOD and CIA," the paper was addressed to the "Dissent Channel," an official but little-known method by which State Department officials can bypass their immediate superiors...
...What information Americans have received about El Salvador has often been misleading: The news media have repeatedly indicated that the United States is supporting a moderate, reformist government besieged by left-and right-wing extremists...
...State Department has twice intervened to avert coups by the ultra-right...
...Unfortunately, a lot of people are unwilling to consider a more active involvement as a result of Vietnam," declared Lieutenant General Wallace H. Nutting, chief of the Panama-based U.S...
...Right-wing killings in El Salvador are marked by elaborate mutilation of the victim even after death...
...by Lieutenant General Daniel Graham (former Defense Intelligence Agency head, now on the defense advisory committee), who wrote in a Guatemalan newspaper that "the Hemisphere's leftist totalitarians" had been "stimulated by the United States' obsession with human rights," and by Reagan's choice as ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who provoked State Department human-rights advocate Patricia Derian to retort on national television: "What the hell is a moderately oppressive regime—just a little torture...
...The dead included a fifteen-day-old baby girl labeled 'subversive' How did the United States come to back such a murderous regime...
...in Salvadoran affairs—so reminiscent of the way the United States slid into Vietnam—lends credence to the view that if President Ronald Reagan uses force there, former President Carter will have prepared the way for it...
...The land reform program which actually bsgan in March 1980 was designed to allow no fundamental changes in political power...
...On the other hand, neither did it fight to save Romero when, in October 1979, a group of progressive lieutenants purged the military of its corrupt senior officers and set up a civilian-military junta...
...foreign aid official...
...I'll help you as soon as I get in...
...However, according to The New York Times, the Salvadoran business community says it has received assurances from Reagan advisers that "the new Administration will increase military aid, including combat equipment, to security forces fighting leftist guerrillas...
...Don't give up...
...The Reagan Administration appears to prefer the latter...
...A pre-election report from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs described Reagan's personal meetings "with two leading spokesmen of the Guatemalan Right," detailing "his promised 180-degree turn in U.S...
...It is an open secret that the Carter Administration influenced the composition of the new government, vetoing some progressive candidates in favor of those who would safeguard U.S...
...Fifteen children under ten years of age were killed in their mothers' arms...
...The whole of the agrarian reform program was a pretext for the military and the Right to eradicate any opposition in the countryside...
...Moreover, the report concludes (its observations have a familiar ring) that the junta has no popular support, the urban middle class is largely on the side of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (a coalition of opposition groups), capital flight has stripped the country's coffers, thousands of refugees have joined opposition forces, members of the ruling junta have been bitterly divided, and "neither government nor the armed forces have been able to demonstrate their will or ability to avoid indiscriminate repression . . . contributing to the rapid deterioration of their image among the population and internationally...
...and they shot at that too,' she said...
...audience last spring to be willing to accept El Salvador as another Nicaragua, or it will become another Vietnam...
...If Carter's signals were mixed, Reagan's are clear...
...The U.S...
...That view is supported by transition team member Pedro A. San Juan, whose premature public suggestion that Robert White "be fired" has endangered the ambassador's life...
...of the Escuadron de la Muerte (Death Squad) or the words Navidad Negra (Black Christmas), the latter, apparently, referring to the planned massacre of all government opposition prior to the Reagan inauguration so that landowner and military Rightists could present the new American administration with a fait accompli...
...Carter policy supported these shifts, provided they maintained the appearance of a civilian (Christian Democrat) presence...
...However," the report added, "should President Reagan choose to use military force in El Salvador, historians will be able to show that the setting for such actions had been prepared in the last year of the Carter Administration...
...Reagan's foreign policy advisers have made deeply disturbing statements about their plans for Central America and the Caribbean Basin...
...Current human-rights legislation will be respected "in principle" but will not interfere with American economic or military aid...
...Three options were presented: defeat, reliance on a U.S...
...There is overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
...The dead included an eighty-five-year-old woman and a fifteen-day-old baby girl labeled "subversive...
...myth of the moderate junta...
...There is nothing more conservative than a small farmer," said one U.S...
...The largest haciendas were occupied by the army, which thereby obtained bases of operations throughout the countryside...
...We are going to be breeding capitalists like rabbits...
...I saw them cut off the palomita ("dove," slang for penis) of a little boy...
...According to the legal aid department of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, 80 per cent of the political assassinations were committed by the National Army and the Military Corps of National Security (National Guard, National Police, and Rural Police...
...has provided the junta with trucks, flak jackets, tear gas grenades and gas masks, night vision sights and image intensifiers...
...Early in 1980, Ambassador Frank Devine was replaced by Robert White, the bete noire of conservative Republican Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms and of Salvadoran rightists, who have threatened his life and attacked his residence...
...The slaughter was accomplished through the cooperative efforts of Salvadoran and Honduran military forces, both of which have been aided and equipped by the United States...
...This myth hinged on the hard-sell of one program, agrarian reform...
...military rescue, or negotiation...
...According to an article in La Tri-buna, a Honduran newspaper, "The most dramatic part of the tragedy, said Salvadoran Paula Guardado, another of the survivors, is that 'the Guardsmen threw the children into the water, and boasting of their marksmanship, shot them with their machine guns...
...The streets of El Salvador's towns are choked with burnt-out vehicles, the debris of incendiary bombs, spent ammunition, and corpses...
...Bodies in the countryside are found naked and decapitated, carved with the initials "E.M...
...During 1980, more than 9,000 persons were killed in El Salvador...
...Carter Administration ambassadors to El Salvador and Nicaragua are expected to be,replaced...
...Army School of the Americas in Panama, in its largest single training effort ever, had graduated some 250 Salvadoran officers and noncoms...
...Months later, as the American press began to lift its virtual blackout on news from El Salvador, American military officials were speaking more plainly about the American agenda in that tiny coffee republic...
...Despite his official hu-' man rights advocacy, Jimmy Carter always sent mixed signals to the Salvadoran right wing...
...Hang in 'til we get there," Reagan reportedly told Guatemalan hotel magnate Eduardo Carrette (soon to be ambassador to the United States...
...Reagan recognizes," according to one high Guatemalan official, "that a good deal of dirty work has to be done...
Vol. 45 • February 1981 • No. 2
