fbaezer wrote:OK Amigo, let's accept -for the argument's sake, at least- that the CIA is evil and was even more evil during the Cold War.
Does this make Chavez a saint or something?
Could we move a bit beyond the Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader level?
The Atlacatl Battalion
was the first Salvadoran
unit trained by U.S. Army
Special Forces advisors.
"The Yankees' Battalion"
During the early 1980s, the entire Salvadoran security apparatus, including the National Guard, the Treasury Police, the Army and the Air Force, received financial backing and expert instruction from the United States. But the support bestowed on the Atlacatl Battalion was in many ways unique.
Early in 1981, advisers from the U.S. Army Special Forces were sent to hone the counterinsurgency skills of the Salvadorans. The training program was a key element of the Reagan administration's drive to "professionalize" the anti-guerrilla operations of El Salvador's military, to ensure it's ability to stave off insurrection. The first unit trained was Atlacatl, which was to become what the U.S. instructors called an "immediate reaction infantry battalion" -- a search-and-destroy force deployed to "clean up" contested areas.
The commander of Atlacatl, Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, was an avid student of counterinsurgency methods and a rabid warrior. As a young soldier, Monterrosa had trained at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, then located in Panama. If he acquired any understanding of the rights of noncombatants from his U.S. advisers, Monterrosa did not show it. Six months after his battalion's total war on El Mozote, Monterrosa told Washington Post reporter Christopher Dickey that in areas where the FMLN was popular, civilian casualties were to be expected:
"It is natural that in these subversive redoubts the armed men are not there alone. That is to say, they have their 'masses' -- people, women, old people, or children, including the children who are [guerrilla] messengers, or the wives, and they are all mixed up with the subversives themselves, with the armed ones. So in the clashes ... it's natural that there were a series of people killed, some without weapons, including some women, and I understand some children."
Mark Danner quotes one of Atlacatl's Special Forces trainers who voiced similar sentiments in regard to the indiscriminate killings that occurred during Operation Rescue:
"El Mozote was in a place, in a zone, that was one hundred percent controlled by the guerrillas. You try to dry those areas up. You know you're not going to be able to work with the civilian population up there, you're never going to get a permanent base there. So you just decide to kill everybody. That'll scare everybody else out of the zone. It's done out of frustration more than anything else."
The fact that El Salvador's security forces practiced total war against civilians, be they political opponents or suspect peasants, was also understood by at least some U.S. officials. According to Todd Greentree, a junior official at the U.S. embassy in San Salvador, "the hard-core guys" in the Army believed they were fighting "a virus" of Marxism. "They'd always say 'a cancer' -- you know, 'Communism is a cancer.' And so if you're a guerrilla they don't just kill you, they kill your cousin, you know, everybody in the family, to make sure the cancer is cut out."
The dirty war waged by the American-backed battalion would soon come under scrutiny in the United States, where reports of atrocities in El Salvador posed a threat to continued congressional support of the war effort. Three weeks after the massacre, New York Times reporter Ray Bonner visited El Mozote to confirm reports by refugees and Radio Veneceremos that something catastrophic had happened there. He described what he saw in his 1984 book, Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador:
"The carnage was everywhere. I saw skulls, rib cages, femurs, tibias protruding from the rubble of cracked roofing tiles, charred beams, children's toys, crushed sewing machines, and kitchen utensils. Fourteen bodies lay in a heap at the edge of a cornfield, under the swooping green leaves of banana trees."
Bonner reported his observations in a Times story on January 27, 1982. "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," the front-page article began. Bonner described the traces of butchery that he had witnessed in the ruins of El Mozote, and noted peasant statements that the Atlacatl Battalion was responsible for the killing. Residents of the region had supplied him with a list of 733 peasants killed by the Army in and around El Mozote.
On the same day the Washington Post published a similar report by Alma Guillermoprieto, also on page one. Her article added detail to the story and contained survivor Rufina Amaya's somber account of the systematic extermination of the people of El Mozote: "The soldiers had no fury. They just observed the lieutenant's orders. They were cold. It wasn't a battle."
In Washington, the Reagan administration scrambled to discredit press accounts of the massacre and preserve the U.S. military aid package. In Morazan, the Salvadorans who survived the latest bloodbath understood who was funding the troops that terrorized them. In Weakness and Deceit, Bonner quotes a peasant song memorializing the massacre:
http://www.parascope.com/articles/0197/el_mozin.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre
