History Lesson, Part I: America v. El Salvador
Posted on July 27, 2007
by: Big Jar
Ten, twenty, thirty years from now–whenever this war has reached its miserable conclusion–what will American History textbooks have to say about it?
Will they condemn the Bush administration for its ineptitude and innumerable blunders? Or will they attribute the war’s mishandling to some other factor? What will our children learn about this malicious chapter in our history? Will it be swept under the rug of our collective conscience, to collect dust with the Spanish-American War, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Seminole Wars, Fat Man and Little Boy? All of those things would be terrible embarrassments to America’s legacy, if we actually remembered them the way that they happened.
This terrifies me. After the torrents of garbage we’ve been forced to digest over the last seven years, it frenzies my brain to think that this could all just vanish into the future, that we could walk away from this experience without having learned anything.
The only way to prevent future Vietnams and future Iraqs and future Panamas is to start telling the truth about what has already happened. Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, so now it’s time to know, bitches.
Let’s start with America’s involvement in El Salvador during that country’s civil war. The El Salvadoran Civil War, which ran from 1980-1992, began when leftist guerilla forces ousted the conservative party’s Carlos Humberto Romero from power.
Romero was a member of El Salvador’s Conservative party, and had for many years ignored the country’s enormous class divide. In response, a collective of insurgents named the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) began attacking military targets in an effort to bring decent housing, food, and other basic civil rights to El Salvador’s lower classes.
The United States government, fearing that the Soviet Union was financing the FMLN, began financing Romero’s military to prevent a Communist takeover of the country. Specifically, the United States sent El Salvadorans to The School of the Americas, where they received instruction on how to defeat their enemy. The SOA taught them that the only way to defeat guerilla forces is to demoralize their civilian sympathizers. Kill their children, their elderly, and their infirm; torture their wives; burn their villages, and they will lose the will to fight. Again, the United States of America financed and operated this institution. Our government also sent Romero’s military huge amounts of aid in the form of weapons, ammunition, and explosives.
These American-backed military forces later became known as “death squads.” They began behaving exactly as we had instructed them: torturing and murdering people suspected of harboring FMLN sympathizers. It was quite common for them to slaughter entire villages and communities, terrorizing peasant farmers and children who had no involvement in the unrest.
The Catholic Church, in an extraordinary break from tradition, began criticizing the El Salvadoran government’s behavior. The famous Oscar A. Romero implored the government to disband the death squads, and even went so far as to criticize the United States for their complicity in this meaningless violence. A high ranking death squad general named Roberto D’Aubuisson ordered the assassination of every priest who criticized their actions, including Romero. He also executed the rape and murder of three American nuns (Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, and Dorothy Kazel) who were providing medical support to death squad survivors.
The United States government immediately tried to suppress and conceal the story about the nuns, but it eventually reached the general public. At first, Ronald Reagan tried to suggest that the nuns were trafficking weapons to Communist insurgents and probably died while engaged in a roadside altercation with Salvadoran government military forces. Then, he realized that only someone suffering from Alzheimer’s disease would believe that a group of nuns got in a shootout with Salvadoran death squads. The overwhelmingly negative public reaction to this event forced the United States government to pull its financial backing from the death squads. Of course, our Congress did nothing to help resolve the civil war it had essentially created, and the violence raged for a decade longer before El Salvador was finally able to bring about peace on its own.
Next week: The Spanish-American War. You’ll gain a newfound sense of irony when you see overweight rednecks sitting on lawnchairs with shotguns, “defending” the Texas border.
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