Salvador Option of Death Squads

by Oui Mon Apr 14th, 2025 at 09:45:18 AM EST

The Pentagon May Put Special-Forces-Led Assassination Or Kidnapping Teams In Iraq | Newsweek |
Published Jan 07, 2005 at 7:00 PM EST -- Updated Mar 13, 2010 at 7:21 PM EST

Nuns pray over the bodies of four American sisters killed by the military in El Salvador in 1980
What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon's latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"--and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can't just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November's operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency--as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time--than in spreading it out.
Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success--despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")
Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitarie

Dems Ignore Negroponte's Death Squad Past, Look to Confirm Iraq Appointment | Democracy Now! - 28 April 2004 |
At a Senate hearing on the appointment of John Negroponte to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Negroponte was never questioned about supporting widespread campaigns of terror and human rights abuses as ambassador to Honduras. We speak to a priest and a nun who lived in Latin America in the early 1980s as well as a human rights activist who disrupted Negroponte at the Senate hearing. [includes rush transcript]

Seeking justice for 1982 murder of four Dutch journalists | El Salvador Perspective - 14 March 2018 |
Yesterday the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on President Bush's nominee for US ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte and reports from Capitol Hill indicate that he is now on a fast-track for Senate confirmation. The vote could come as early as Friday.
If confirmed Negroponte will head up the largest US embassy in the world, with more than 3,000 employees and over 500 CIA officers. Despite what some would call Negroponte's infamous history in Central America as US ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s, he has come up against almost no Congressional opposition, even from Senate democrats who once criticized him for supporting widespread human rights abuses.
As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.
A former official who served under Negroponte says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

CIA coverage putting blame squarely on the opposition rebel forces ...

EL SALVADOR: DEATHS OF THE DUTCH JOURNALISTS - 9 April 1982 | CIA Publication FOIA |

El Salvador killers of Dutch journalists in court after 42 years | Dutch News |

Murders of Dutch journalists in El Salvador closer to trial after 42 years of impunity | 29 Oct. 2024 |

Negroponte to State ... WTF? | by Oui @BooMan on 4 Jan 2007 |
What maneuver is this to escape accountability by new Congress? To fill the gap left by Bolton at the U.N. or perhaps he needs this position to clean personal history files [cached]: death squads in Central America [cached original] and as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq ..
Negroponte To Become Condi's No. 2 | CBS News |

Iraqi Prime Minister Announces Arrests of "Death Squad" Linked to Activist Assassinations | PBS - 17 Feb. 2021 |

US ambassador Robert E. White Central America ... the good ambassador.

Robert White was our Ambassador in El Salvador during the Carter administration and was dismissed by President Ronald Reagan.
Quote: "The policy in South America under Jimmy Carter was first-class."
White believed the United States was on the wrong side of history and justice . We were backing the repressive governments throughout Central and South America and ignoring the legitimate desires of its citizens to have a real democracy and not be governed by murderous dictators.

My diaries @BooMan key word | Honduras |

The Murdered Churchwomen in El Salvador
On December 2, 1980, four churchwomen--Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan--became victims of escalating violence toward church members who sided with the poor in El Salvador.

The slogan, Haz patria, mata un cura ("Be a patriot, kill a priest") became a battle cry for Salvadoran right-wing extremists who believed that anyone who opposed the military regime was a communist, including religious figures.

The murder of a leading Catholic bishop Óscar Romero by U.S. trained assassin
This slogan, however, targeted more than priests. The murder of the four American churchwomen illustrates the possible fate of those who belonged to the "subversive church."
The subversive church, according to the Salvadoran military, were those who sided with the poor. A month before her death, Ita Ford told an interviewer, "The colonel of the local regiment [Ricardo Augusto Peña Arbaiza] said to me the other day that the church is indirectly subversive because it is on the side of the weak... The governments find this difficult to handle. It's very contradictory to their National Security ideology."
This change in the church became known as Liberation Theology [not to be confused with Trump's Liberation dogma of 2025] and it would shake the foundation that maintained unequal power relations in countries like El Salvador.
In 1968, Latin American Bishops gathered in Medellín, Colombia to establish a doctrine that would serve poor and oppressed communities: liberation theology. While historically the Catholic Church allied with elites and helped maintain its power over the region, this gathering served as a catalyst for change in peasant communities throughout Latin America. The bishops labeled poverty, injustice, and oppression of marginalized communities in the region as social sins [evil].

Rules based order subverted by the United States and allies for many decades ...

Practice relating to Rule 158. Prosecution of War Crimes | ICRC |

Geez ... forgot all about this diary @BooMan ... good-bye to an EVIL EMPIRE 😳

WORLD'S NR. 1 DESPOT RUNNING AMOK AND UNCHECKED
| Posted by Oui on 27 Aug. 2013 103 comments |
The travesty of decency, the speech by US highest diplomat John Kerry closes the door of hope for the United States of America. How dare he speak of moral conscience and a matter of sound judgement on Syria and the Assad regime. When you have the likes of Susan Rice and Samantha Power impersonating humanity, my jaw drops to the ground.
A short and personal history of my cries for moral conscience and sound judgement.
Living in the states and studying in St. Louis, I lost many friends in 1965 because I opposed the Vietnam War. The Vietnam opposition rallied in 1968 after the Tet offensive showed the lies of the Johnson administration and US military. Nixon and Kissinger would take over and tried the Christmas bombings on Hanoi killing tens of thousands.
Every war on this scale is obscene and immoral as John Kerry told the US Senate. Vietnam brought the US My Lai, civilian deaths and Agent Orange.
The US empire showed its teeth with Chili of Allende and the social uprising of the left against dictators in South America. This policy continued in Central America in the 1980s and the well documented death squads of terror and extrajudicial killings. Thousands of activist citizens and leaders were killed in a most gruesome manner. Personification of all those lives lost stand out with Bishop Romero in El Salvador, six Dutch journalists making a documentary for an evangelical church group and the US nuns and six Jesuits killed.
Should I even mention the years of Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinski and the impeachment trials? Let's jump to the next administration and the 8 years of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Let's just skip those years as too many words and too few deeds aren't worth covering again. It has become clear the Neocons laid out US policy for the coming years and never mind who resided in the White House or enjoy the plush seats in the US Senate and House of Representatives.
A new administration of hope and change, Barack Hussein Obama. The legacy of the Bush administration of a failing ecomomy tied the hands of Obama during his first term. On foreign policy he was undoubtedly willing to push ahead his agenda of openness and diplomacy. I'm afraid the State apparatus was too conservative and Ms Clinton had her own agenda, so nothing worth mentioning happened.
Yesterday, US top diplomat John Kerry expressed his conviction: "It's not peace that's our goal, that's a cause for America's youth. We are wise men working with our conscience, natural decency and sound judgement. We have made up our minds and decided to go to war. I don't want to be a fool like my predecessor Colin Powell in front of the world community of the United Nations to defend these lies. I just can't, so this speech will do." [paraphrasing by Oui]
[...]

German Espionage Ship Off the Syrian Coast Is a War Act
Posted by Oui on 19 Aug 2012 |
Germany helping Syria rebels with spy ship intelligence
BERLIN (JPost) - Germany is helping Syrian rebels by providing them with information gathered by a German navy vessel Alster off the coast of Syria, a newspaper said on Sunday, without citing sources.
Germany's Bild am Sonntag said the boat had spying equipment from the German intelligence service on board, enabling it to observe Syrian troop movements up to 600 km inland.
Information on the military operations of Syrian President Bashar Assad's troops that is collected by the ship is passed on to US and British secret services, who then give it to the Free Syrian Army, Bild said.

Today's headline ...

The Federal Foreign Office has presented an eight-point plan to offer Syria stability and a way out of the crisis | Bundesregierung Deutschland |

Syrian Civil War - End Game in Idlib? [Update] | 18 Sept. 2018 |
Will the West accept defeat in their attempt to overthrow Bashar Al-Assad?
Will the Atlantic Alliance and NATO concede the intrusion of Russia/China/Iran in their backyard?
Will Netanyahu's rightwing government keep quiet in the coming weeks or intervene in Syrian politics?

Today's headline ...

Ukrainian and Al Qaeda Terror Joined HTS in Idlib district, Syria

Best to offer from the US-UK-IL empire of mercenaries, jihadists and terror groups ... proxy warfare.

Syrian War Propaganda and Human Rights NGOs | 10 Dec. 2015 |
Each and every bomb dropped from a plane or grenade shell launched, maims or kills people. Many are killed as a result of "collateral damage" in the War on Terror after the 9/11 attacks ... name all the countries where US and coalition forces have operated - war "theater."
Later the Arab Spring led to western powers and the GCC nations to supply arms and mercenaries to overthrow sitting government for self-interest and a power grab for their state. All pictures and videos are horrific, victims of war provides an opportunity for propaganda. In Syria it's use is not for peace, but to attract more young men and women to the battle field. Syria Direct and the Nabaa Media Foundation appears to be such an outfit. See also Facebook account Syria Direct.

Media Bias in Covering Conflict - A Syrian Example | Tasmanian Times - 3 Dec. 2023 |

'Humanitarianism' played a major role in policy and
news media discussions about potential or actual
intervention in Somalia (1992), Rwanda (1994),
Bosnia (1995), Kosovo (1999), Darfur (2003-2017),
Libya (2011), and Syria (2012-2018).
'Humanitarianism' was also evoked, in conjunction
with other ideological devices, to legitimise the
2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq War.

Salvador Option of Death Squads | 5 comments (5 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Salvador Option of Death Squads (none / 0)

Friends 🇺🇸🤝🏼🇸🇻 pic.twitter.com/tMJHMf7pT4
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 14, 2025

Hasbara is a dead language

by Oui (Oui) on Mon Apr 14th, 2025 at 09:20:47 PM EST

Re: Salvador Option of Death Squads (none / 0)

WTF ??

Martin White-washing Human Rights Abuse

A very dumb essay on the Liberation Theology and the exploitation of South American people by US Corporations, military power and abuse of the UN established Global World Order under leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt ... how simple or very lazy can one get?

Thoughts on U.S.-El Salvador Relations | BooMan23 |
I want to make a relatively simple point without resorting to any kind of ideological argument about the Cold War or U.S. foreign policy toward Central America in the latter-half of the 20th-Century. Let me start with some simple facts. The Salvadoran Civil War began in 1979 and ended in 1992. It pitted military governments backed by the United States against left-wing guerrillas supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union. The United States was concerned that El Salvador might fall to communism, as Cuba had before, and therefore was willing to give aid and training to undemocratic governments that engaged in gross violations of human rights, including torture, massacres, disappearances and suppression of all dissent.
The Salvadoran government pursued a war on the peasantry in an effort to deny the guerrillas any safe harbor, and this led many to flee the country. Yet, the United States generally refused to grant asylum during the war, so people seeking refuge in America had no choice but to enter illegally. Large populations of these folks formed in American cities, especially in Los Angeles. Before long, criminal gangs began to form, initially to protect themselves from other gangs, both on the streets and in the prisons. Among these was the MS-13 gang.
When the war ended in 1992, the United States began deporting people back to El Salvador, with an understandable priority on violent gang members. As MS-13 became established in El Salvador, it quickly created a major crime problem that is just grown bigger and bigger over time. This resulted in a second wave of Salvadorans seeking refuge in the United States, but this time they were less worried about their government's power than its weakness.

Hasbara is a dead language

by Oui (Oui) on Mon Apr 14th, 2025 at 09:22:04 PM EST

Re: Salvador Option of Death Squads (none / 0)

El Salvador's legacy of violence is most evident in its gang culture, most notably perpetrated by Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and the 18th Street Gang, or Calle 18. Both groups emerged from a migratory channel opened between the United States and El Salvador.

Hasbara is a dead language

by Oui (Oui) on Mon Apr 14th, 2025 at 09:22:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Salvador Option of Death Squads (none / 0)

America's Role in El Salvador's Deterioration | The Atlantic |

Many Salvadorans stayed in the U.S. after a devastating earthquake. But other disasters in the country were man-made.

Anti-war marches to Pentagon for a rally to protest U.S. military involvement in El Salvador, on May 3, 1981. (IRA SCHWARZ / AP)
When Donald Trump said this month he would end temporary protected status for almost 200,000 Salvadorans, the number of immigrants standing to lose protections under this president approached the 1 million mark. This includes people, like those from El Salvador, that now stand to be deported to countries where their lives could be in danger. El Salvador has one of the world's highest homicide rates--due in no small part to the policies of the country now trying to expel them.
Trump promised to end the protected status granted to Salvadorans in 2001 following a devastating earthquake. Then, a few days later, during a White House meeting on immigration policy, the president characterized places like El Salvador, along with Haiti, as "shithole" (or perhaps "shithouse") countries. Unwilling to explicitly criticize the president for his intemperate remarks, Senator Marco Rubio expressed pity for the poor nation: "[T]he people of El Salvador and Haiti have suffered as the result of bad leaders, rampant crime and natural disasters." Rubio omitted to note that one of the biggest disasters to befall El Salvador--one that created hundreds of thousands of refugees even before the post-earthquake wave--was man-made, with the United States, not nature, being a major force.
It was a civil war of the 1980s, one that pitted leftist revolutionaries against the alliance of countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades--with U.S. support--keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished. It was a bloody, brutal, and dirty war. More than 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in the fighting, most of them victims of the military and its death squads. Peasants were shot en masse, often while trying to flee. Student and union leaders had their thumbs tied behind their backs before being shot in the head, their bodies left on roadsides as a warning to others.
President Trump might wonder what Ronald Reagan--one of his favorite presidents--was doing pouring billions of dollars of economic and military aid into the tiny country. In the early `80s, El Salvador was receiving more such aid than any country except for Egypt and Israel, and the embassy staff was nearly as large as that in New Delhi. For Reagan, El Salvador was the place to draw the line in the sand against communism.
Many Americans would prefer to forget that chapter in American history; those under the age of 40 may not even be aware of it. Salvadorans haven't forgotten, however. In El Mozote and the surrounding villages of subsistence peasants, forensic experts are still digging up bodies--of women, children, and old men who were murdered by the Salvadoran army during an operation in December 1981. It was one of the worst massacres in Latin American history. But while Trump might smear the country's image with crude language, today El Salvador has a functioning legal system--more than three decades after the event, 18 former military commanders, including a former minister of defense, are finally on trial for the El Mozote massacre.
Some 1,200 men, women and children were killed during the operation. Old men were tortured. Then executed. Mothers were separated from their children. Raped. Executed. Crying, frightened children were forced into the convent. Soldiers fired through the windows. More than a hundred children died; their average age was six.
"The United States was complicit," Todd Greentree, who was a young political officer at the American embassy at the time, told me recently in an interview for a documentary about the massacre. Greentree noted that the massacre was carried out by the Atlacatl Battalion, which had just completed a three-month counterinsurgency training course in the United States. That training was also supposed to instill respect for human rights. The El Mozote operation was the battalion's very first after completing the course.

School of the Americas

Hasbara is a dead language

by Oui (Oui) on Mon Apr 14th, 2025 at 09:25:44 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Salvador Option of Death Squads (none / 0)

Memorial of massacre site at El Mozote, Morazan, El Salvador. (Source: Efrojas, Wikimedia)

El Salvador: Groundbreaking Insights into U.S. Cover-Up of El Mozote Massacre | CADTM - 29 April 2021 |

This groundbreaking revelation was the big takeaway from the expert testimony of Stanford University political scientist Terry Karl during pretrial hearings in El Salvador on Monday, April 26. The news of Hazelwood's presence -- along with Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, commander of the Atlacatl Battalion -- at the scene of the massacre offers new insight into the extent of the U.S. role, as well as what Karl calls a "sophisticated cover-up" on the part of the Reagan administration and Salvadoran civil-military junta.

A United States military advisor, Sergeant Major Allen Bruce Hazelwood, was in Morazán with Coronel Domingo Monterrosa, commander of the Atlacatl Battalion, during the El Mozote massacre in December of 1981.
It also rekindles the debate about the United States responsibility in the Salvadoran armed conflict, as well as the need for both governments to fully declassify internal documents on the massacre and other war crimes, which they have withheld for four decades.
"Had [Hazelwood's presence at El Mozote] come to light at the time, it would have meant cutting off United States aid," said Karl. She added: "The participation of an advisor in wartime activities is against our laws, and it was illegal at the time."
The El Mozote massacre was the deadliest war crime of the Salvadoran civil war. Between December 11 and 13 of 1981, the Salvadoran Army deployed almost an entire elite battalion to El Mozote and six nearby villages in the Morazán department, killing 978 unarmed civilians. Most of them, 533, were children. 477 of these were under 12 years old, and 248 under six.
For years the governments of El Salvador and the United States denied that the massacre had occurred. Later, they questioned the identities of the victims in suggesting they were guerrillas. The two journalists who simultaneously revealed the massacre, in the New York Times and Washington Post, were Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto, who then faced swift backlash for their work. By 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights pronounced the Salvadoran state guilty of the crime.

Hasbara is a dead language

by Oui (Oui) on Mon Apr 14th, 2025 at 09:27:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Salvador Option of Death Squads | 5 comments (5 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)