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$  American flag - swastika and stripes - symbol of American state terrorism. American terrorism is international terrorism.  $

The Crucifixion of El Salvador


From What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky

For many years, repression, torture and murder were carried on in El Salvador by dictators installed and supported by our government, a matter of no interest here. The story was virtually never covered. By the late 1970s, however, the US government began to be concerned about a couple of things.

One was that Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, was losing control. The US was losing a major base for its exercise of force in the region. A second danger was even more threatening. In El Salvador in the 1970s, there was a growth of what were called “popular organizations” — peasant associations, cooperatives, unions, Church-based Bible study groups that evolved into self-help groups, etc. That raised the threat of democracy.

In February 1980, the Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, sent a letter to President Carter in which he begged him not to send military aid to the junta that ran the country. He said such aid would be used to “sharpen injustice and repression against the people’s organizations” which were struggling “for respect for their most basic human rights” (hardly news to Washington, needless to say).

A few weeks later, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying a mass. The neo-Nazi Roberto d’Aubuisson is generally assumed to be responsible for this assassination (among countless other atrocities). D’Aubuisson was “leader-for-life” of the ARENA party, which now governs El Salvador; members of the party, like current Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani, had to take a blood oath of loyalty to him.

Thousands of peasants and urban poor took part in a commemorative mass a decade later, along with many foreign bishops, but the US was notable by its absence. The Salvadoran Church formally proposed Romero for sainthood.

All of this passed with scarcely a mention in the country that funded and trained Romero’s assassins. The New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” published no editorial on the assassination when it occurred or in the years that followed, and no editorial or news report on the commemoration.

On March 7, 1980, two weeks before the assassination, a state of siege had been instituted in El Salvador, and the war against the population began in force (with continued US support and involvement). The first major attack was a big massacre at the Rio Sumpul, a coordinated military operation of the Honduran and Salvadoran armies in which at least 600 people were butchered. Infants were cut to pieces with machetes, and women were tortured and drowned. Pieces of bodies were found in the river for days afterwards. There were church observers, so the information came out immediately, but the mainstream US media didn’t think it was worth reporting.

Peasants were the main victims of this war, along with labor organizers, students, priests or anyone suspected of working for the interests of the people. In Carter’s last year, 1980, the death toll reached about 10,000, rising to about 13,000 for 1981 as the Reaganites took command.

In October 1980, the new archbishop condemned the “war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population” waged by the security forces. Two months later they were hailed for their “valiant service alongside the people against subversion” by the favorite US “moderate,” José Napoleón Duarte, as he was appointed civilian president of the junta.

The role of the “moderate” Duarte was to provide a fig leaf for the military rulers and ensure them a continuing flow of US funding after the armed forces had raped and murdered four churchwomen from the US. That had aroused some protest here; slaughtering Salvadorans is one thing, but raping and killing American nuns is a definite PR mistake. The media evaded and downplayed the story, following the lead of the Carter Administration and its investigative commission.

The incoming Reaganites went much further, seeking to justify the atrocity, notably Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. But it was still deemed worthwhile to have a show trial a few years later, while exculpating the murderous junta — and, of course, the paymaster.

The independent newspapers in El Salvador, which might have reported these atrocities, had been destroyed. Although they were mainstream and pro-business, they were still too undisciplined for the military’s taste. The problem was taken care of in 1980-81, when the editor of one was murdered by the security forces; the other fled into exile. As usual, these events were considered too insignificant to merit more than a few words in US newspapers.

In November 1989, six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, were murdered by the army. That same week, at least 28 other Salvadoran civilians were murdered, including the head of a major union, the leader of the organization of university women, nine members of an Indian farming cooperative and ten university students.

The news wires carried a story by AP correspondent Douglas Grant Mine, reporting how soldiers had entered a working-class neighborhood in the capital city of San Salvador, captured six men, added a 14-year-old boy for good measure, then lined them all up against a wall and shot them. They “were not priests or human rights campaigners,” Mine wrote, “so their deaths have gone largely unnoticed” — as did his story.

The Jesuits were murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit created, trained and equipped by the United States. It was formed in March 1981, when fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army School of Special Forces. From the start, the Battalion was engaged in mass murder. A US trainer described its soldiers as “particularly ferocious.... We’ve always had a hard time getting [them] to take prisoners instead of ears.”

In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which over a thousand civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and burning. Later it was involved in the bombing of villages and murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other methods. The vast majority of victims were women, children and the elderly.

The Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by US Special Forces shortly before murdering the Jesuits. This has been a pattern throughout the Battalion’s existence — some of its worst massacres have occurred when it was fresh from US training.

In the “fledgling democracy” that was El Salvador, teenagers as young as 13 were scooped up in sweeps of slums and refugee camps and forced to become soldiers. They were indoctrinated with rituals adopted from the Nazi SS, including brutalization and rape, to prepare them for killings that often have sexual and satanic overtones.

The nature of Salvadoran army training was described by a deserter who received political asylum in Texas in 1990, despite the State Department’s request that he be sent back to El Salvador. (His name was withheld by the court to protect him from Salvadoran death squads.)

According to this deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents — tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun.

In another case, an admitted member of a Salvadoran death squad associated with the Atlacatl Battalion, César Vielman Joya Martínez, detailed the involvement of US advisers and the Salvadoran government in death-squad activity. The Bush administration has made every effort to silence him and ship him back to probable death in El Salvador, despite the pleas of human rights organizations and requests from Congress that his testimony be heard. (The treatment of the main witness to the assassination of the Jesuits was similar.)

The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top “as if each body was stroking its own head.”

The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.

According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren’t uncommon.

“People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador — they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.”

Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self-help groups in an attempt to organize the poor.

By and large, our approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organizations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history — and it’s got a lot of competition.




Related pages


Making Guatemala a Killing Field
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Teaching Nicaragua a lesson
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The Invasion of Panama
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America: the Ultimate Terrorist


Chronology of U.S. Terrorism and Genocide of the Central American, South American & Caribbean peoples


Free online book from Common Courage Press:
Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy
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Inside American State Terrorism: A Soldier Speaks
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Bibliography:
Cuban Liberation: Castro, Che Guevara and Jose Marti




About the Author


Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a major figure in twentieth-century linguistics. He has taught since 1955 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a full professor at the age of 32. His 1957 work Syntactic Structures revolutionized the field of linguistics, fundamentally changing the current understanding of language and mind. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. Currently he is also the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics.

Chomsky has received honorary degrees from the University of London, University of Chicago, Georgetown University and Cambridge University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. His work in linguistics, which has been internationally acclaimed, has earned Chomsky the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences and the Helmholtz Medal.

Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, Chomsky became politically conscious at a very young age, writing his first political article, on the fight against fascism in Spain, when he was only ten years old.

Chomsky has written many books on contemporary issues and is an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy and corporate power. His political talks have been heard, typically by standing-room only audiences, all over the country and the globe.

In a saner world, his tireless efforts to promote justice would have long since won him the Nobel Peace Prize. But no, the committee prefers to give it to sleazy war-criminals like Henry Kissinger.



Books by Noam Chomsky




Audio books:



Other works:




Related sites


What Uncle Sam Really Wants
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-contents.html

Zmag.org provides the complete text of the book.


The Noam Chomsky Archive
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm



School of the Americas Watch
http://www.soaw.org/index.html

The United States Army “School of the Americas,” in Fort Benning, Georgia, teaches its students how to torture human beings.

Graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas have been responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America.

Among the SOA’s nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia.

Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the torture of countless people throughout Central and South America and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 human beings.



The US Army School of Assassins
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lormand/soa/

Exposes the dirty deeds of the U.S. Army School of “the Americas” (Assassins) throughout Latin America. Special sections on Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Grenada, Colombia, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

El Salvador: SOA graduates on parade
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lormand/soa/elsalvador.htm



Writings by Peace Activist S. Brian Willson
http://www.brianwillson.com/

Brian Willson is a courageous Vietnam vet who was wounded in combat — but not during the Vietnam Genocide. He was fighting a war of conscience. In 1987 a military train at a U.S. Navy munitions base intentionally ran over him and severed his legs as he and two other veterans sat on the tracks to block it. The train was carrying weapons to be used in America’s ongoing holocaust of innocent civilian people in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

His autobiography is heartfelt, utterly unself-pitying and very instructive, particularly his experiences from Vietnam onward. Brian Willson’s writing is extremely valuable, being from a deeply intelligent and genuinely moral man who has witnessed firsthand the horrors of American state terrorism around the world.

From the site:

“THIS SITE CONTAINS essays describing the incredible historic pattern of U.S. arrogance, ethnocentrism, violence and lawlessness in domestic and global affairs, and the severe danger this pattern poses for the future health of Homo sapiens and Mother Earth. Other essays discuss revolutionary, nonviolent alternative approaches based on the principle of radical relational mutuality. This is a term increasingly used by physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists to describe the nature of the omnicentric*, ever-unfolding universe. Every being, every aspect of life energy in the cosmos, is intrinsically interconnected with and affects every other being and aspect of life energy at every moment.”

*everything is at the center of the cosmos at every moment



WSWS : News & Analysis : South & Central America
http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/news/americas.shtml




Bibliography


What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky


I Was Never Alone:
A Prison Diary from El Salvador
by Nidia Diaz


The Culture of Terrorism
by Noam Chomsky


Body of Secrets:
Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
by James Bamford

In 1962, U.S. military leaders had a top-secret plan for committing terrorist attacks on Americans in Miami and Washington D.C., while blaming Cuba. Codenamed “Operation Northwoods”, the plan was intended to provide the propaganda necessary to create popular support for an invasion of Cuba.


The Real Terror Network:
Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
by Edward S. Herman


Colombia:
The Genocidal Democracy
by Javier Giraldo


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:
International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky


Western State Terrorism
Alexander George, editor; essays by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Gerry O’Sullivan and others


Terrorizing the Neighborhood:
American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era
by Noam Chomsky
Pressure Drop Press, 1991


The Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark


Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League


Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum


Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
by William Blum


The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee


Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
by Michael Parenti


A People’s History of the United States:
1492 — Present
by Howard Zinn


Cuban Liberation:
Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Jose Marti
(bibliography)


Living Like the Saints:
A Novel of Nicaragua
by Liston Pope Jr.


Dying For Growth:
Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor
Edited by Jim Yong Kim, Joyce V. Millen, Alec Irwin and John Gershman


Eyes of the Heart:
Seeking a path for the poor in the age of globalization
by Jean-Bertrand Aristide


Against Empire
by Michael Parenti


War At Home:
Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It
by Brian Glick


The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti


Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky


Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti


War, Lies & Videotape:
How media monopoly stifles truth
edited by Lenora Foerstel; multiple authors




HOME • Chronology of Terror • Bibliographies • Valuable Websites

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