[...]
Each morning, as the skies lightened over El Salvador's cities, people would rise to find corpses littering their streets: sometimes the bodies were headless, or faceless, their features obliterated with battery acid or a shotgun blast; sometimes limbs were missing, or hands or feet chopped off, or eyes gouged out; women's genitals were torn and bloody, bespeaking repeated rape; men's were often cut off and stuffed into their mouths.
[...]
Beyond the gaudy wounds, however, there were the "signatures." More often than not you would find, cut into the flesh of the back or the forehead or the chest of the victim, the telltale sign of the "death squad" that claimed the work: the Union of White Warriors, perhaps, or, more frequently, the Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez Brigade.
[...]
And so we come to the Mothers of the Disappeared and their terrible picture books. One notices first of all that they are many, these books, and that their pages are bound loosely, with spiral binders, to allow for the insertion of ever more photographs. For during those terrible years of 1979 and 1980 and 1981, as the cars without license plates cruised the streets of the capital each night and the bodies appeared on the streets each dawn, the numbers of dead went on mounting, until the photographers of the Human Rights Commission became unbearably busy -- for on the streets of San Salvador alone each month no fewer than eight hundred mutilated corpses could be found.
Against the urban infrastructure of the Left -- the network of political organizers, labor leaders, and activists who had put together the great demonstrations of the late seventies -- the death squad onslaught proved devastating. The Christian Democrats, in particular, saw their party decapitated, with the murder of several hundred activists. By the end, however, the killing had become less discriminating -- any "profile" that seemed to identity leftists would do; and so one morning a pile of corpses was found that proved to consist entirely of young women wearing tennis shoes and blue jeans: apparently, some intelligence officer had concluded that such a profile -- women dressing in this casual way-reliably separated out subversives, and thus the young women had been seized and tortured and liquidated with all the others.
One [...] officer, who eventually fled El Salvador, described to the American journalist Allan Nairn what went on between the time Salvadorans were seized and carried off by the hooded men, and their mutilated bodies discovered on San Salvador's streets: [...]
[...]
Such things do indeed "happen in war," but in El Salvador in the early 1980s they lay at the heart of a systematic and bloody response to a political rebellion, and in very rapid course this dirty war sent the country into a tailspin of lurid and very public violence. In March 1980, a death squad member shot down Archbishop Oscar Romero while he said Mass. Nine months later, four American churchwomen were sexually assaulted and murdered by Salvadoran soldiers, and buried in a shallow grave. The following month, the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency and two of his American advisers were assassinated as they sat together in the cafe of the Sheraton hotel.
These very public atrocities, two of them involving the murder of American citizens, increased the squeamishness in Washington. President Carter, disgusted by the murder of the churchwomen, cut off funds; in January 198 1, however, faced with the unleashing of the guerrillas' highly touted "final offensive," the "human rights president" restored aid. [...] Carter's step made one thing clear: when it came down to a decision between supporting a bloody-minded, murderous regime, and risking a rebel victory by reducing aid, America's leaders -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- would always choose to support the devil they knew. Time and again throughout the Reagan years, as each new massacre was uncovered and each new aid budget approved, they would reaffirm that principle.
Really, you must read how the Americans funded a totally disastrous operation that resembles our involvement in Iraq so closely, such as attempting to train the foreign government's army to attempting to direct its politics in national elections, that one could almost refer to our current operations there as a Salvadoran option.
Pictures of "the disappeared"
