The American Connection, Volume One: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador [1] 0862322413, 9780862322410

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4

Michael McClintock

The American Connection

Volume One

State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador

□ EXAM I NAT-CN COPY O' REVIEW COPY With Compliments

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The American Connection Volume I: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador

Michael McClintock 2?7 CniJ FG: ST. TORONTO,. ONT. M5T 1 R4 C.ANADA

{4!g) 59/-0328

Zed Books Ltd.

The American Connection. Vol /; State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador was first published by Zed Books Ltd., 57 Caledonian Road, London N1 9BU, in 1985. Copyright © Michael McClintock Copyedited by Anna Gourlay Typeset by Folio Photosetting, Bristol Proofread by Tony Berrett Cover design by Magenta Designs Printed by The Pitman Press, Bath All rights reserved

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

McClintock, Michael The Amcriean Connection. Vol. 1. State terror and popular resistance in El Salvador. 1. Central America— Politics and government 2. United States — Politics and government 1945- 3. LInited States — Foreign relations — Central America I. Title 972.8’()52 FI436 ISBN 0-86232-240-5 ISBN 0-86232-241-3 Pbk

US Distributor

Biblio Distribution Center, 81 Adams Drive, Totowa, New Jersey 07512. A Companion Volume on Guatemala

Michael McClintock has written a companion volume to this book called The American Connection. Vol. IT. State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala (Zed Books, 1985)

Contents

INTRODUCTION

vii

PART 1: THE US AND THE DOCTRINE OE

COUNTER-INSURGENCY 1. Prelude to Counter-Insurgency American Freedom and the Communist Threat US Military Assistance

1 3 6 9

2. Launching “Special Warfare”: the Kennedy Era Counter-Insurgency’s New Face US Army Special Forces Role of the Mobile Training Teams US Military Doctrine in the 1960s: Vietnam

12 15 18 22 24

3. The New Battlefields The Enemy is Within Alliance for Progress Counter-Guerrillas: The Local Paramilitary

28 29 32 33

4. “Meeting Terror with Terror”: a Policy of Failure Institutionalized Brutality Vietnam: Rural Pacification and the “Phoenix” Programme Counter-Terror and the Winning of Hearts and Minds

39 41 44 49

5. The Role of Intelligence and the CIA’s Public Safety Programme Police Assistance: The Agencies Involved Substance of Intelligence Assistance Public Safety Program’s Demise: Proposed Alternatives

54 57 63 70

Notes to Part 1 PART 2: LAND, LABOUR AND SECURITY: 1820s-1960s 6. The Politics ofLand and Labour The Police: Role and Function “A Revolution in Our Agriculture”: Coffee Cultivation Creation ofthe National Guard

72 87 89 92 94 97

7. Buying Time Against Revolution Massacre: 1932 Coupd’Etat and Agrarian Revolt TheMatanza

99 99 193 112

8. Controlling the Population: An Agrarian Police State The Civic Guard The Security Network’s Strong Arm The National Police

117 117 120 121

9. Coup and Counter-Coup: Reform and Reaction The Military V. The Paramilitary Military Revolt: President Martinez Resigns Half a Step Forward, Two Steps Back The “Major’s Coup”: 1948 and After The New Military Role President Lemus: A “harsh and dictatorial man” Coup: 1960 — Counter-Coup: 1961

127 127 129 130 132 133 135 136

Notes to Part 2

137

PART 3: COUNTER-INSURGENCY EMERGES

147

10. From Reform to Repression: 1961-71 War With Honduras: Land Crisis in El Salvador Political Reform — With Reservations Foreclosed Political Process: Escalation of Terror

149 154 157 165

11. State Terror: 1972-77 Agrarian Reform and Persecution of the Church Electoral Fraud and Repression: 1974-77 US Human Rights Policy: Spotlight on El Salvador General Romero: State Terror and Social Mobilization

171 176 181 187 192

12. The New Security System: US Model Counter-Organization for Counter-Insurgency: ORDEN The Military’s New Role A Security System for the 1980s

196 204 209 214

Notes to Part 3

223

PART 4: COUNTER-INSURGENCY AND CIVIL WAR

243

13. Military Coup: October 1979 — And After Strikes, Demonstrations and Machine-guns The Counter-coup Agrarian Reform Neutralizing Majano and the Reformists US Aid and Six Dead Americans

245 254 257 266 272 275

14. Elections and Civil War Counter-Terror Escalates Reform Abandoned “Operation Wellbeing”

213 32q

15. US Military Assistance: Indirect to Direct Intervention After the Coup: Partners in Counter-Insurgency Human Rights, Internal Defence and Development Paramilitary Expansion The Mercenary Element US Military Advisers and Political Signals US Assistance and Intelligence

326 329 337 34q 342 346 349

Notes to Part 4 Select Bibliography

Index

286

298

333

373

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Introduction

At 23,000 ieet the view through the scratched plexiglass of Central America s whistle-stop airlines is a geographical extravaganza, a process ot smoking volcanoes and crater lakes, misty mountains shrouded in tropical vegetation, silver arcs of lowland rivers and the long, thin line ot Pacific beaches. The evidence of human activity below is no less dramatic. Villages perched on mountain tops, linked by ridge¬ line trails; the striped squares of agro-industry on the coast and, in the coffee lands, geometrical rows and rectangles of gleaming coffee bushes stand out a dark, richer green. At dusk, after the harvest season, long lines of fire flicker across the landscape as stubble fields are burnt In this volcanic dream landscape an explosion of state terror erupted in the 1960s. “Death-Squad” assassinations, routine “disappearance” and murder of political prisoners, and mass executions in the countryside were justified as means to deter subversion and crush insurgency. The killing took new forms and reached unprecedented levels; formed part of counter-insurgency programmes launched successively by Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and claimed tens of thousands of lives by the mid-1970s. Since spring 1979, when this study was begun, over 100,000 Salvadoreans and Guatemalans have been assassinated or put to death by the forces of their governments. Thousands of others have died in combat, as passive resistance to the flood of state terror graduated to armed resistance and open civil war. A new human dimension has now been added to Central America's exotic geography; an association in the popular imagination of the mountains, the volcanoes, the lakes and the rivers with the recent history of repression and resistance. Since 1981 El Salvador’s Sumpul and Lempa rivers along the Honduran border are remembered for the days they ran red with the blood of machine-gunned would-be refugees, when clergymen reported the bodies of murdered infants caught in fishermen's nets. Guatemala's Lake Atitlan. its most beautiful and once most visited crater lake, is now remembered for the army occupation of the Indian communities on its shores, and the execution or “dis¬ appearance” of many of their people (including the parish priest). Lake Atitlan, like El Salvador’s Lake Ilopango, is now also better known for

vii

The American Connection

the bloated corpses that regularly bob to the surface than for its native handicrafts. And no one swims any more at a beach near El Salvador s port of La Libertad. now known as the beach of the headless corpses. There are also the volcanoes, like Nicaragua's Volcdn deMasaya, where the Somozas disposed of their enemies, or the slopes of the crater of Guatemala’s Volcan de Agua near the capital, where deposits of the bodies of victims of army “death-squads” are periodically found. In El Salvador, the great volcanoes with their densely forested slopes, gouged by deep ravines, are a symbol of resistance, not terror. The Volcdn de Santa Ana, the Volcdn San Vincente, the Volcdn de San Miguel serve as bastions of the guerrilla opposition forces. At a more intimate level of human geography. Central America's towns and villages are replete with landmarks of repression and resistance. In Nicaragua’s small cities, still marked by the destruction wrought by aerial bombardment in the last days of the National Guard, and themselves monuments to resistance, walls, park benches, and even trees in every neighbourhood are painted with the names of the local heroes who died there. In San Salvador, neighbourhoods like Ea Fortaleza, a precarious huddle of shanties below the edge of a ravine, slashing through a rather fashionable neighbourhood, became known in the 1970s for having provided more than their share of victims of “disappearance” or execution, and more than their share of those resisting repression. In Guatemala, the landmarks include the “clan¬ destine cemeteries” in the ravines and sand pits in the outskirts of the capital. The personification of political conflict in the features of the land itself, from the volcano redoubts of the guerrillas to the walls where firing squads made neighbourhood martyrs is a function both of the dramatic nature of the repression and the small scale of Central America itself Flying from north to south from Guatemala City, San Salvador is half an hour away; Managua, Nicaragua 20 minutes more down the coast and out over the Gulf of Fonseca; and then on to San Jose de Costa Rica, some 30 minutes more. Tegucigalpa, in the interior of Honduras, is off the Pacific coast flight path, but can be reached by air within about 30 minutes from all but the Costa Rican capital. The volcanoes and volcanic lakes serve as the topographic milestones of the region. A cluster of 10,000 to 12,000 foot peaks loom over Guatemala City; to the south-east the crossing into El Salvador is marked by the Volcdn de Santa Ana and the crater lake of Coatepeque. The scale of El Salvador is particularly intimate. From the air above the coast, one can see at a glance most of the country from the Volcdn de Santa Ana to Nicaragua’s Volcdn Cosagiiina on its promontory in the Gulf ot Fonseca, and right across into Honduras, as nowhere is El Salvador much more than 45 miles wide. Central America’s five states range from tiny El Salvador, whose 4.5 viii

Introduction

million people crowd into a mere 21,000 square kilometres (precisely the size of the state of Israel, without the occupied territories) to the largest, Nicaragua, with 130,000 square kilometres and just 3 million people. Guatemala is of medium rank, with 7 million people and an area of 109,000 square kilometres. While small, the region is not quite as small as the outsider might think. Together the five parts of what was once the state of Central America extends over 423,000 square kilometres, more than twice the territory of an earlier conflict state, the short-lived Republic of Vietnam, and larger than Vietnam reunited. This study deals in depth only with El Salvador (Vol. 1) and Guatemala (Vol. 2). Both have experienced new forms of state terror and counter-insurgency since the late 1960s and face insurgency, civil war, and the intervention of the United States in the 1980s. Those countries and most of Central America, have a long history of repression and resistance, insurgency and civil conflict: state terror was part of this experience. The pattern of state terror which emerged in the 1960s, however, appeared from the beginning to be a departure from the past. It began abruptly; it was defended strictly on ideological and strategic, not legal grounds; it was administered both by conventional military and police services and by new paramilitary forces; it claimed victims in the tens of thousands; and it was closely associated with the United States’ first concerted military and police assistance programmes in the region. The pattern was first seen in Guatemala, where the killings began in large numbers in the third quarter of 1966. It later emerged in El Salvador and Nicaragua, to be eliminated in the latter only after a civil war. the overthrow of the government, and the disbanding of the military/police/paramilitary apparatus of the old regime. A more limited pattern of state terror but including the “disappearance” and murder of some political prisoners, has taken shape in Honduras only in the mid-1980s. In one Central American state only, Costa Rica, has state terror on the new model yet to make an appearance. With the advance of the terror of the state the mid-1960s saw a parallel mobilization of popular resistance to authoritarian governments throughout the region. As governments adopted new measures for counter-insurgency insurgency grew apace. As the scale of state terror grew, non-violent challengers of authoritarian regimes — the political parties, trade unions, peasant leagues, and even the grass-roots organizations of the Roman Catholic Church — were transformed progressively into proponents of armed insurrection, and their members into active insurgents. With prolonged state terror, responsible govern¬ ments lost whatever legitimacy they might originally have had; they came to stand neither for the popular will, nor for law. nor for order. This study was originally conceived as a means to explain how, and why, state terror burst on the Central American scene in its present IX

The American Connection

form. Did it in fact represent a significant departure from the past; were the “death-squads” or paramilitary groups innovations? Was the terror the reaction of desperate regimes to active insurgency? Was the explosion of terror in fact a matter of calculated military strategy or doctrine? And finally, how did the terror reflect traditional conflicts in the societies concerned, and traditional means of resolving these conflicts? The problem, then, was first to document how the governments concerned traditionally dealt with problems of internal security. Conventional histories rarely deal with the intimate details of how governments uphold the status quo, and maintain themselves in power. Political scientists tend to concentrate on a higher threshold of political phenomena, analysing military coups and changes of government, but largely disregarding the paramilitary and political police institutions in the background, unless marked by colourful personalities such as El Salvador’s Major Roberto D’Aubuisson. And even then the focus is on the personality, not the institutions, or their written or unwritten doctrine. There is a blind spot centred on the institutional structures and strategies by which governments control their own populations: the military in its internal security function, the civil police, the intelligence or political police agencies, and the other assorted paramilitary organizations at the service of the state. The present study is built around an outline of the development of the security systems of El Salvador and Guatemala, highlighting the influence of the United States and other foreign powers in different periods. These systems were taken to include military, police, and paramilitary institutions from their beginnings, and their relation to changing social, economic, and political trends in each country taken into account. The major emphasis is on developments in the 1960s and afterwards, and the role of United States security assistance programmes and military doctrine to the present. United States civil and military security assistance, and above all the United States doctrine of counter¬ insurgency provide the common denominator in the way counter¬ insurgency warfare has been waged in the two countries. After 1960, counter-insurgency doctrine and US security assistance induced changes both in the strategies and structures of the regions’ security systems which influenced events to the present. At the core of the doctrine were concepts of “counter-terror” — a legitimation of state terror to combat insurgent terror— and of “counter-organization” — the creation by allied armies of civilian, paramilitary irregular forces to mimic guerrilla organization and tactics. Perhaps most importantly, in the Central American context, US counter-insurgency doctrine was seen as a green light from the leader of the “Free World” to state terror, to legitimize, and lift the stigma of barbarism from practices which seemed throwbacks to earlier times. X

Iniwduction

While the present regional dilemma must be largely attributed to the United States doctrine of counter-insurgency and its programmes of security assistance since 1960. recent US inOuence is not the whole stoi7. Central America's current plight cannot be disassociated from those historical factors unique to each country. In both Guatemala and El Salvador the new counter-insurgency doctrine was to be applied in a bitter centuries-old contlict between a small elite and a peasant majority. The background of repression and resistance, of Indian revolt, and of massacre, accounts in no small way for the particularly deadly manner of implementation of the new counter-insurgency programmes introduced in the 196()s.

XI

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Part 1: The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

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1. Prelude to Counter-Insurgency

When not characterized by overt military intervention or long-term occupation. United States intervention in the security affairs of its neighbours before World War II was relatively insignificant In 1933, after more than two decades of intervention when the Marines left Nicaragua, the entire security system had been remade in their image. But significantly, no elaborate measures were taken to prop up the Somoza regime (once installed) or the contemporary regimes of General Jorge Ubico (President of Guatemala. 1931-44) or of General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez (President of El Salvador for the same period) in the years leading up to World War II.' No major counter-insurgency assistance programme then existed, or was necessary - until the revolts that deposed both Ubico and Martinez; even then the United States took no particular measures to keep them in power. World War II brought a serious concern overall for internal security in Latin America. Policy makers in the US encouraged the Latin American allies to follow the US lead in suppressing Nazi sympathizers and agents, and Communists who might “take advantage” of the troubled times. One approach, largely legalistic, entailed the adoption of uniform regional standards of counter-subversive, anti-totalitarian legislation, and the negotiation of individual military assistance pacts with most of the region's governments. Before entering the war, the United States orchestrated PanAmerican Union efforts to suppress subversion in the Americas with “maintenance of neutrality” as the express objective.^ The first meeting of foreign Ministers of the American Republics (Panama, October 1939) resolved that to this end “police and judicial measures” should be considered in “preventing or repressing unlawful activities ... in favor of a foreign belligerent State .. The second foreign Ministers' meet¬ ing (Havana, 1940) elaborated the need to co-ordinate internal defence: Experience... demonstrated the need to organize in the most effective manner possible the defense of society and of the institutions of each State... Such defense must be undertaken by the authorities of each 3

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

State, but its efficacy depends to a large extent upon a common orienta¬ tion, as uniform as possible.'' By 1941 legislation in all Central American States was consistent with the desires of the Foreign Ministers’ meeting (and those of the United States) banning “totalitarian doctrines” and their promoters and propagandists. They established sanctions in law, newly defining crimes in ideological terms, but punished along traditional lines, with large fines and lengthy imprisonment for offenders. Representative of the trend was the Nicaraguan Law of 25 June 1941, “Against the Pro¬ paganda of Communist Doctrines”, banning “Propaganda of doctrines of political and social systems contrary to the constitutional principles of the State... the Communist doctrine, the Nazi and Fascist sys¬ tems .. Ironically, three Central American dictators. Ubico, Martinez and Somoza were themselves suspected of Fascist sympathies. In June 1941 military intelligence warned Washington that there “are some pro-Nazi's in Ubi'co’s government”, but tempered this by noting that “There is no trace of Socialism or Communism”, and that Ubico, himself “is very friendly toward the United States”.^ Martinez, the President of El Salvador, was however, considerably more than just “Pro-Nazi at heart”; until late 1941 solid military and commercial relations linked El Salvador with both Italy and Germany, the main purchasers of its coffee. By 1936 the major destinations for overseas training of Salvadorean army officers were Germany and Italy, and pro-Axis officers held most key posts in government. Wehrmacht officer Colonel Eberhardt Bohnsted was appointed Director of the Salvadorean Military Academy in 1938. The Italians tended to be the main arms suppliers; in March 1938 a contract was signed with Italy to exchange $200,000 worth of coffee for four Caproni fighter planes and spares, and in October 1938 six Caproni bombers, three Fiat light tanks, and a group of technicians arrived in San Salvador.^ The links were also ideological. The New York Times reported in June 1940 that Martinez had declared it a “national crime” to express sym¬ pathy for the allied cause, and that as police held back angry spectators 300 Salvadorean “Black Shirts” had marched in San Salvador when Italy declared war. The official reversal of the pro-Axis position in October 1940 was motivated less by Martinez’s disillusionment with totalitarianism than by the sudden isolation of El Salvador from its Axis trade partners and arms suppliers and, perhaps, by direct pressures from the United States.® American military intelligence did not take his conversion wholly at face value, however, and nearly a year later repor¬ ted that Martinez “has retained in office Colonel Juan F. Merino, chief of the National Police, presidential aspirant, and leader of the Pro-Nazi officer group”, “tending to substantiate the accusation that the Presi¬ dent is secretly pro-Nazi”.’ Despite concern about Nazis in submarines and minor sales of 4

Prelude to Counter-Insurgency

strategic materials. Central America’s more immediate concern was “reds under the beds” that could conceivably cause trouble when the United States could least afford diversion from its larger war effort.As for the military aspect during the war years, in addition to the assign¬ ment ot officers to the Directorship of the military academies in Guatemala and El Salvador, the United States armed forces installed permanent military missions, initiated a regular supply of military equipment through the Lend-Lease programme and pre-empted any links to the region’s military^ by foreign powers." The Inter-American Defense Board, with representatives of Latin American, and the US armies, was first established as a war-time inter¬ army co-ordinating body, and made permanent in 1945. The 1947 Interamerican Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance strengthened the regional armies’ co-operation agreements by ensuring “mutual assis¬ tance’ in case of attack. United States military policy toward the region, however, was not especially innovative in so f^ar as it affected internal security. The Joint Chiefs of Staff statement in 1945 on “Military Objec¬ tives in Latin America” identifies these as essentially traditional interests, including co-operation in the defence of the hemisphere (against external attack); maintenance of regional peace; assurance of “an uninterrupted flow of strategic materials”; access to military bases in Latin America for US forces; and standardization of equipment, training and doctrine with United States models.'^ By 1953, as the Cold War hotted up. the policy changed to include “internal stability” and the “reduction and elimination of Communist and anti-US subversion” as American concerns in the region, but the United States’ armed forces took no major military initiatives toward these ends, apart from covert assistance lent to the CIA for such efforts as the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954. The relative reluctance of the US military to enter the internal security field in Latin America may in part be explained by a lack of urgency. In the 1940s and 1950s arms sales to both Nicaragua and El Salvador were sometimes even blocked where they appeared to be intended largely for police-type military operations. One example, in 1943, was the Salvadorean militaity attache to Washington’s attempt to purchase 1,000 US military surplus Reising sub-machine guns for the Salvadorean National Guard. The State Department noted that it was “a rather considerable order of an article which has played a sinister role in Central America”; the Ambassador to El Salvador noted the sub¬ machine guns “may be desired for the repression of civil disorders”; Lieutenant-General George H. Brett, Commanding General in the Pan¬ ama Canal Zone, declared himself “emphatically” against compliance with the request, and it was refused on the grounds that the arms would be used for a purpose not “consonant with our basic political policies or agreeable to the American taxpayer”;'^ tantamount to the “on human rights grounds” argument of the 1970s. 5

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

Similarly, even war-time military assistance to the Ubico regime in Guatemala through the Lend-Lease programme was a sore point with the United States military, not merely because it might be used to slaughter Guatemalans - much of the material consisted of obsolete heavy weapons, from mortars to howitzers - but because Ubi'co had demanded an enormous quantity of material without payment (this was a secret at the time) in return for the loan of facilities for United States air bases. From the tone of the military intelligence reports for the period it seems that the United States military despised Ubico and his army, and were thus especially irritated by being forced to comply with the Lend-Lease deal; With an octogenarian, illiterate Secretary of War and a preponderance of hopeless incompetents on its active list of 67 general officers, the Guatemalan Army, whose highest tactical unit is the company, is glibly planning the allocation of three million dollars worth of military equipment.. Clearly, in 1943 there was no plan to turn the Guatemalan army into effective soldiers, much less effective counter-insurgents.

American Freedom and the Communist Threat At the Ninth International Conference of American States in Bogota in 1948, almost total diversion of attention from the Nazi to the Com¬ munist threat was ratified by Resolution XXXII of the “Final Act” of the Conference; That by its anti-democratic nature and its interventionist tendency, the political activity of international communism or any totalitarian doctrine is incompatible with the concept of American freedom. The “Final Act” also declared that the States represented at the con¬ ference would take the necessary measures to eradicate and prevent activities ... tending to overthrow their institu¬ tions by violence, to foment disorder in their domestic political life, or to disturb... the free and sovereign right of their peoples to govern themselves.. Measures introduced in the wake of this “Final Act”, which, until the 1960s, served to some degree as the hemisphere’s anti-Communist char¬ ter, still tended to be legalistic, and to offer traditional sanctions for internal security offenders; the principal innovation was the co¬ ordinated effort to build a homogeneous, international legal framework 6

Prelude to Counter-Insurgency

to oppose subversion throughout the hemisphere. A compendium of existing and proposed measures to this effect was published in 1953 by the Pan American Union, its stated objective being to provide member states with the means to oppose “the acts of persons who are animated by the desire to destroy the democratic institutions of the American states so as to open the way to the aggression of communist imperialism.”'^ It outlines security measures “for the protection of human rights and American democratic institutions”, with special emphasis on recent legislation in the United States as a model. Measures were recommen¬ ded to control the international movements of potential subversives; to outlaw potentially subversive organizations; to restrict the rights of citizenship of members of suspect organizations (including the right to hold government employment); to prevent the infiltration of “legitimate” organizations by subversives; and to halt subversive propaganda.'^ The citizens' freedom of movement was to be restricted in order to prevent “subversives" from carrying on consultations, receiving train¬ ing, or imparting state secrets abroad. International co-operation was required to halt foreign propagandists, and governments were recom¬ mended to: ... use the necessary means to prevent the inhabitants of their territories ... from taking part in meeetings, crossing the frontiers or embarking in their territories on travel for the purpose of spreading propaganda ..

The control of propaganda required the control of the news media, both printed and broadcast, and of “public displays... teaching activities, or any other means of communication ...” It must be bom in mind that subversive propaganda being an intellectual element par excellence in the perpetration of‘acts of political aggression'... when its agents are nationals, such conduct acquires the essential charac¬ teristics of an act of treason.”

The report also equates with treason the participation in labour organizations of persons linked to “subversive” organizations, as “the economy of a country is one of the supports of its internal security” and so there is a “need to arrest the infiltration of communism in these organizations, through the adoption of adequate and efficacious measures. “ On the basis of these few illustrations, it is justifiable to conclude that the multilateral initiatives of the United States in the late 1940s and the 1950s contributed considerably to the creation or reinforcement of an attitude towards internal security which identified all manifestations of opposition to the status quo as “Communisf’ and, therefore, treasonable. Nonetheless, the legislation of the 1940s and 1950s did little to change

7

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

the nature of the actions taken against “subversives in Guatemala and El Salvador where harsh measures - arbitran- imprisonment, torture and exile - had been the norm for many years; it did. however, put the crushing of dissent in an ideological trame. detined in a self-consciously uniform legal structure for the Western hemisphere. To some extent the self-righteous and legalistic character ot these Cold War security developments persisted into the 1960s. when a new trend towards extralegal measures was introduced. Multilateral resolutions and treaties set the tone lor future counter¬ insurgency doctrine by promoting the strengthening ot political police operations to enforce the new restrictions. Equally important was the gradual development of close institutional links betw'een the United States’ military forces and those of the region. The Inter-American Defense Board provided a multilateral war-time framework through which the United States could deal with its regional counterparts. Bilateral relations were compacted in 1944 and 1945 in a series of “Staff Conferences” at which top level United States militaiy’ officials met with the general staffs of most of the Latin .American armies. The US Department of State played a minor role at these conferences, although they would provide the basis for the post-war escalation of US military involvement and assistance in the region."’ This escalation became policy during 1947. after acrimonious exchanges between Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Secretaiy of War Robert P. Pat¬ terson, and Secretary of the Na\y Forrestal. Acheson vigorously opposed legislation to dramatically increase provision of US equipment and weaponry on the grounds that it would promote militarism, drain economic resources, and promote instabiliy in the Americas, with potentially disastrous consequences for US interests." Secretary of War Patterson's response to earlier expressions of States' resistance in a memorandum to Acheson on 27 March 1947 was a classic exposition of early Cold War thinking: ... I feel very strongly that this legislation is a preventive measure of the highest importance. It is designed to prevent the very type of crisis which has arisen in Turkey and Greece where we are now' desperately attempt¬ ing to lock the stable door while the horse is almost in process of being stolen. In Latin America, we must lock the stable door before the danger ever arises. Prevention is relatively cheap; crises are exorbitantly expen¬ sive in money, in time, and often in blood.’’

Patterson’s vision of the means to lock the stable w as to pull the Latin American military fully into the American orbit, and imbue them with the same ideals held by the US militaiy. ... the provision of United States equipment is the keystone since United States methods of training and organization must inevitably follow its

8

Prelude to Counter-Insurgency adoption along with the far-reaching concomitant benefits of permanent United States military missions and the continued flow of Latin American officers through our service schools. Thus will our ideals and ways of life be nurtured in Latin America, to the eventual exclusion of totalitarianism and other foreign ideologies. Thus only can we maintain the security of our southern flank ...

Department of State's resistance persisted for a time, but faced pro¬ gressively more potent arguments from Patterson: a memorandum to Acheson dated 17 April 1947 noted pointedly XYiai Communists opposed military assistance; One of the chief objectives of communistic propaganda in the Latin American states is to prevent the extension of military assistance by the United States to those states. It would seem that we are playing into the hands of the Communists if by our own decision we disable ourselves from the tender of military assistance.'^

Secretary of State George Marshall ultimately supported the War Department, ushering in a period in which United States military mis¬ sions expanded throughout the Americas, transfers of conventional warfare equipment proliferated (much of it World War II surplus), and which saw an infrastructure set up for major training programmes for Latin American military personnel by the United States.^^ The growing presence and influence of the United States military in the region after 1947 welded the close institutional contact between armies that was the prerequisite for the new kind of intervention of the 1960s.

US Military Assistance By the mid-1950s “Mutual Defense Assistance Agreements” linked the US army with the armies of every Latin American country except Argen¬ tina and Mexico, and the United States held a near monopoly on the provision of military equipment and supplies to the region.^’ By 1953 the terms of reference of the military assistance programme to Latin America had changed to include, along with “Hemisphere Defense” (anti-submarine warfare, etc.) a new role in the “Reduction and Elimination of Communist or anti-United States Subversion”, and a strategic goal of “internal stability” in the countries aided. Until the 1960s, however, the US Congress specifically prohibited United States military assistance in the region for internal security purposes; these were, of course, ill-defined. The bilateral and multilateral links that developed between the armies of the United States and Latin America after the outbreak of World War II became the structural foundation for the US’s intensive

9

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

regional role in the 1960s, when the implementation of counter¬ insurgency doctrine in the Americas, including the use of United States advisers, proceeded on the basis of this previous institutional ground¬ work. From 1961 a “Conference of American Armies” was held almost every year on US initiative, bringing together the top officers of virtually every Latin American army.^^ From 1961 to 1967 the conferences were largely organized and run by the counter-insurgency oriented United States military. One American army officer, an expert specializing in Latin American affairs, described them as a “powerful element” in the creation of an integrated security orientation in the region, perhaps more important than the Inter-American Defense Board, since they “permitted direct person to person contact at the highest levels of each service”.^^ For Central America and Panama a special regional organization was formed to link national armies with each other and the United States. In 1962 the charter of the Organization of Central American States, ODECA, part of the Organization of American States, was revised to provide for a Central American Defense Council of the Ministers of Defense of Central America. A treaty establishing CONDECA {Consejo de Defensa Centroamericana) was signed in 1963, an organization that began to function in 1964 with the opening of a per¬ manent office for the co-ordination of CONDECA activities, the Com¬ mon Permanente of CONDECA, or COPECONDECA. The United States military developed “intelligence sharing arrange¬ ments; communications nets for control; periodic field exercizes to test the [Inter-American Security] System, and frequent meetings of the highest military authorities .. throughout the hemisphere. In Cen¬ tral America these were largely under the auspices of CONDECA and in close co-ordination with the United States Southern Command at the Panama Canal Zone. There were joint military maneouvres at least until shortly before the fall of the Somoza regime, with the US acting both as adviser and participant. CONDECA heads of state and military chiefs continue to maintain close, personal contact on regional security matters. One of CONDECA’s innovations, to be treated in more detail later in this study, concerns communications, particularly the “Central America and Panama Telecommunications Security Network”, which links together the principal intelligence agencies^' of each country, and the US Southern Command in Panama. By 1960 the military in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador shared a uniformly extreme position toward the threat of subversion, and a common willingness to follow the United States’ lead in Cold War activities. Guatemala was then accommodating the secret training camps for the Bay of Pigs invasion forces; Nicaragua would provide their jumping-off point. El Salvador’s military establishment was, perhaps, the most steeped in overt anti-Communism owing to its 10

Prelude to Counter-Insurgency

experience of aborted “revolution” in 1932. The military magazines of the three countries, particularly those of El Salvador,presented a pic¬ ture of Communist demons waiting to seize the throats of the unwary, and of the local military establishments' tireless dedication to rootingout Communists. The “Communist” threat, however, was met much before World War II, producing scores of political prisoners and exiles, much torture and intimidation, and traditional political police opera¬ tions. The military institutions were not yet involved in large-scale specialized counter-insurgency activities. Even in Nicaragua, where there were no civil police bodies, the National Guard carried out politi¬ cal police functions along the lines of the traditional secret police of the region. To radically alter the traditional response to “subversion” and lead to the mass murder by governments which characterized the later 1960s, 1970s and now, the 1980s, it required the Cuban Revolution and the innovations President John F. Kennedy catalysed in the United States’ armed forces and introduced to Latin America. The innovations can be attributed primarily to the development of a new military doctrine for counter-insurgency.

11

2. Launching “Special Warfare”: the Kennedy Era

From reliance on potential, massive, nuclear retaliation as the core of US military deterrence. President Kennedy turned towards an aggressive, small action, brush-fire war policy to supplement the nuclear threat Within this framework, military theoreticians developed organizational and operational techniques facilitating the materialization of political war¬ fare concepts into concrete actions extending well beyond the sporadic, secret adventures of American intelligence agencies early in the Cold War. Prior to the Kennedy administration, the military was apparently reluctant to become whole-heartedly engaged in the dirty-tricks-dirtywork operations that had characterized the secret, irregular warfare in South-east Asia, Latin America and Africa, and more than willing to leave them to the patriots and mercenaries of the glamorous, yet not quite legitimate “intelligence” community.^"* The major military heritage of the Kennedy administration (although overshadowed at the time by the nuclear showdown over Soviet missiles in Cuba) was the incorporation of “ special warfare” capabilities and doctrine into the mainstream of the United States forces, and the aggressive export of this doctrine. A military assistance programme for Latin America resulted, which, combined with the security assistance programmes of other US agencies, possibly played a greater part in the region than any other aspect of American foreign policy throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. Indisputably, it irrecoverably changed the security systems and the political destinies of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The change was based on a new assessment of threats to the United States and its allies, sparked-off by the Cuban revolution and Khruschev’s declaration in January 1961 that the Soviet Union would actively support “wars of liberation” throughout the world. President Kennedy felt a new approach was necessary in the rough-and-tumble of the Cold War world; that battles were being lost by default; and that only given the will and necessary technology could the “enemy” within the Free World be identified, pinned down and destroyed. The insidious and dirty tactics attributed to this enemy could be countered on equal terms simply by inverting them. Passive reliance on the bomb, the 12

Launching "Special Warfare": the Kennedy Era

multifarious projects of the CIA and the independent anti-subversive initiatives of threatened, friendly governments were not enough to pre¬ vent another Cuba. Pre-existing programmes for the assistance of foreign armies and security agencies were redirected and fortified, with internal security functions becoming the raison d'etre of military institu¬ tions receiving assistance. The United States military s part was to develop its capacity to res¬ pond to the new, threatening challenges with new doctrine, organizational resources, and techniques, all oriented toward the menace of insurgen¬ cy, and to prepare to impart these and provide pertinent hardware to friendly security services (both military and paramilitary) in threatened countries. Kennedy's intensive, personal campaign for a change of policy was publicly launched by his 1961 speech to Congress on foreign aid in which he summed up both the threat from the enemy and a proposed vast offensive against "subversion" in the free world. The free world's security can be endangered not only by nuclear attack but also by being slowly nibbled away at the periphery, by forces of subver¬ sion, infiltration, intimidation, indirect or non-overt aggression, internal revolution, lunatic blackmail, guerrilla warfare or a series of limited wars. The Presidenfs personal interest in counter-insurgency theory, his reading of texts on guerrilla warfare, and his demands for immediate action on the problem are described in all the histories of the Kennedy administration. In Washington the Presidenfs enthusiasm was infec¬ tious, and “counter-insurgency" became a factor in every aspect of foreign policy during his administration. It also strongly coloured the foreign policy of subsequent administrations to the present. As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General L.L. Lemnitzer, put it in 1962: What the president had in mind was nothing less than a dynamic national strategy: an action program designed to defeat the Communist without recourse to the hazard or the terror of nuclear war; one designed to defeat subversion where it had already erupted, and, even more important, to prevent its taking initial root.. The aspects of the bold new strategy which concern us here are those related to the improvement of governmental powers of coercion. The much vaunted Alliance for Progress, the little sister of the counter¬ insurgency programme, intended to stop revolution through economic development, had little impact on either economic or any other development in Nicaragua, Salvador and Guatemala, or, indeed, in the region as a whole. 13

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

In the words of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in mid-1961, the Alliance for Progress could function only if governments could count on effective forces “to cope with subversion, prevent terrorism, and deal with outbreaks of violence before they reach unmanageable proportions.”^'’ On the other hand, Mr Pat Holt, a chief staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, later described the foreign policy of the period not as dominated by the grand plan of the Alliance, but as “a policy of stop-gap measures to shore up existing governments, both democratic and dictatorial, provided they are reasonably friendly to the United States.”^' Counter-Insurgency was the stop-gap par excellence. Linking development to internal defence, making it dependent on enhanced security, placed it at a disadvantage from the start; it also added little to the argument of the days of the Great White Fleet when the American interventions in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic were justified as attempts to put their finances in order and to establish the means of creating social peace so that they could “develop”.^^ The new counter-insurgency orientation was still crystallizing when the March 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs ended in failure. A presidential committee to investigate the affair evolved into a perma¬ nent co-ordinating committee for matters related to Third World insurgencies. Created by National Security Action Memorandum 124, of January 1962, the “Special Group (Counterinsurgency)” was to serve as a co-ordinating committee linking the President, the CIA, the Departments of State and Defense and other agencies. Its purpose was described in the memorandum (termed its charter) that initiated it as “To assure the use of US resources with maximum effectiveness in pre¬ venting and resisting subversive insurgency in friendly countries ...”” The Special Group would co-ordinate the response of all govern¬ ment departments to “subversive insurgency” considered a “new and dangerous form of politico-military” conflict, and would order approp¬ riate changes in the : organization, training, equipment and doctrine of the US Armed Forces and in the political, economic, intelligence, and military aid programs conducted abroad by State, Defense, AID, USIA and CIA.'“

The Special Group was made “speciaf’ and distinguished from its predecessors both by the degree of presidential interest in its activities Attorney General Robert Kennedy was an active participant - and by its scope for initiating actions as established by its “charter”.'*' Appoint¬ ment of General Maxwell Taylor to chair the Special Group, as “Military Representative” of the President, ensured that the mainstream military establishment would not take a back seat to the intelligence establishment in the counter-insurgency field.*^ 14

Launching Special Warfare ": the Kennedy Era

Previous presidential committees dealing with the problems of insurgency had concentrated on the supervision (read, rubber-stamp approval) of covert operations by American intelligence agencies. Called at different times the “40” Committee, the “54-12” Group, or the 303 Committee, they traditionally included the President’s National Security Advisor, a Deputy Secretary of State, a representative of the military and, as Chairman, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who prepared their agendas.'’^ The “Special Group” may have continued to serve the same purpose as well as the new and more crea¬ tive objectives outlined in its charter. The appointment of General Taylor as Chairman was probably a comment on CIA inadequacies in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Rather than limiting the traditional covert operations of the intelligence agencies, the main result of Special Group recommenda¬ tions and of regearing the American military for counter-insurgency was that actions formerly the exclusive province of the covert operators of the “intelligence community” became part of the mainstream doc¬ trine and operational programme of the regular US military forces, the foreign policy establishment, and the foreign assistance agencies (notably the Agency for International Development AID).

Counter-Insurgency’s New Face A “for information” cable (classified as secret) to all American diplomatic posts, issued jointly by the Departments of State and Defen¬ se, AID, and the United States Information Agency described Special Group's establishment and outlined what the Group required of US missions in order to accomplish its security objectives.'” “Internal defense” was defined to include consideration of all aspects of the target society, as well as an assessment of all “available US resour¬ ces” within the country, including, for example, “US Corps of Engineers capabilities. Peace Corps, Ford Foundation-type operations. Special Forces augmentation teams, Ex-Im Bank” and others.'^^ As for the assis¬ ted government: An adequate internal defense requires the effective mobilization of a government’s political, military and psychological resources cast both strategically and tactically. The sine qua non of a successful and lasting solution is effective political action.'*^

While the Special Group recommended a holistic approach to the problem of insurgency, the US missions’ immediate objective in pro¬ blem countries was to develop “adequate internal defense forces”.'*^ The new doctrine outlined two lines of defense against insurgency: 1) development, “to eliminate causes of discontent or to immunize the 15

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

population from appeals to conspiracy and violence”, and 2) coercion, “the development of effective police and/or military capabilities to maintain internal security”.'** The classified documents with action instructions to US agencies to prepare for counter-insurgency were considerably more candid about priorities - security first, development later - than was the public face of policy. Economic and social change to eliminate the causes was des¬ cribed as an unrealistic goal in the short term without correcting “basic social, political and economic injustices”. Practical security measures could, however, be taken almost immediately to “reduce both the effec¬ tiveness of insurgent and subversive operations and communist appeals to the population for the instigation or support of violence.”'*^ If, to “eliminate causes of discontent”, major change was necessary, but such change, being “long-term in character”, was not for the moment a viable alternative for US policy, the secondary objective (or line of defence, could be pursued by short range, more expedient, means. The immediately possible would have to suffice and this could be accomplished through the boosting of police and military capabilities. While the need for reform and development is continually referred to throughout the United States’ published counter-insurgency doctrine it was a stillborn concept, compromised and restricted at its very inception“ by so-called realism and expediency in confidential policy state¬ ments, and had little practical application beyond the field of public relations. Although the Special Group, as a presidential body, held authority over all aspects of US policy vis-d-vis counter-insurgency, it was given special “cognizance” - somewhat more than a watching brief - over countries of particular concern. By mid-1962 this special category included Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, as well the South-east Asian countries.^* One year later an assessment of the Spe¬ cial Group’s role recommended that the Americas as a whole be placed under its supervision, with a mandate to monitor intelligence activities, labour and student programmes, “psychological warfare, economic development. Food for Peace, political action, etc.”:“ [The Americas] encompass 50% of those countries assigned to the Group by the President. It represents a very large proportion of the trouble spots in the underdeveloped areas ... To the extent that Cl (Counter-Insurgency) programs are effective, the Communists will concentrate on gaining power through other means. It is not necessary to describe these means. They are sufficiently well known ... the Group would serve as an antiCommunist strategy board to identify those countries threatened by Com¬ munism, to review departmental programs, and as necessary to stimulate new and expanded ones to ensure that the US presents a co-ordinated response of sufficient strength and diversity to assist friendly countries in overcoming the,Communist threat.^^

16

Launching "Special Warfare": the Kennedy Era

Although the Special Group did not, in tact, take on all of the Americas as its province, its standard-setting counter-insurgency doctrine set its mark on much of the region. An illustration of the impetus given by the Special Group to enhance security systems in the region within the context of a nominally holistic approach, was the development of a system oVlnternal defense plans". On the Group’s initiative. US diplomatic missions in trouble-spots (and incipient trouble-spots) were to draft assessments of particular security threats and potential remedies, using available domestic and US resour¬ ces; the documents were to include input from all the agencies represen¬ ted in the respective missions. Internal Defense Plans were requested for countries where subver¬ sion and insurgency were in progress or believed to be imminent, Guatemala and El Salvador were among the Latin American countries privileged with such plans, whereas it was not considered that Nicaragua, in the 1960s, faced any significant internal security threat that lay beyond the capacity of its National Guard to control.^'’ In pre¬ paring plans, heads of mission were instructed to: briefly summarize the military, police, intelligence, and psychological aspects of internal defense as well as socio-economic and political measures which comprise a well-rounded IDP and should be consistent with over-all US objectives and regional and country policy guidelines... Do not discuss with host or third country government representatives until instructed.^^

Plans were to include a statement of the countries vulnerabilities (where subversion could strike deep), an interpretation of US policy objectives in the country, and an outline of remedial and prophylactic measures to be taken in the “Political. Socio-economic, Security (including Intell¬ igence) and Psychological information categories’’.^^ A Guatemalan Internal Defence Plan (IDP) sent to Washington, by Ambassador John O. Bell in September 1962, included most of the ele¬ ments of the new security focus; ... the primary objective of the US in Guatemala is the prevention of the accession to power of Communists in Guatemala... In my view, the danger of insurgency in the sense of open armed action by guerrillas against the Government is not of great immediacy in this country ... On the other hand, the danger of other forms of subversion, forms which pro¬ vide a base from which insurgency can develop, is real and present. .

The plan skirted around several ideas for “socio-economic reform’’, including better education (but noting that this might make the educated “all the more aware of the hopelessness of their status ... and more susceptible to communist agitation’’) and land reform through an

17

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

increased land tax (“although it is perhaps unlikely to be passed by Congress”). It did, however, suggest immediate measure to enhance the security of the country, including improvement of the capacity of civil police to control riots, civil disturbances, and future guerrilla opera¬ tions; joint operational plans for the military and law enforcement bodies and continued military assistance “with counterguerrilla train¬ ing at all levels”. The latter was to be a high priority, and the report praised the contribution already made by “counter-guerrilla instruction given to Guatemalan officers by a United States mobile team”. A final security concern was that as “there is at present no intelligence system worthy of the name operated by the GOG [Government of Guatemala]”, the development of a professional intelligence organization was of the utmost importance and long term “in-country advisory assistance” on intelligence matters urgently advised.^* The guidelines for drafting internal defence plans reflected the Spe¬ cial Group’s overall approach to insurgency; the tasks requested of the missions on the ground reflected the global initiatives set in motion at the same time. Plans to develop local level military and security forces into efficient counter-insurgents were matched by accelerated training of military and other government personnel in counter-insurgency matters in the United States, and the accelerated preparation of new military and police assistance programmes. A global survey was made of “free-world” security problems, and of the existing police and military deterrence capacity in problem countries. National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 162, of June 1962, ordered “The Development of US and Indigenous Police, Paramilitary and Military Resources” - a large order for the United States. To this end major changes were required within the US's military and security establishment itself An aggressive civil police assistance role was assigned to the AID by the establishment of a Division of Public Safety in November 1962, which took over from the low level police assistance programme of the former International Co-operation Administration (AID’S predecessor).^^ The new military counter-insurgency doctrine - which was to become gospel for the armies and security forces of Central America - is of most concern here. That, and the reorganization of the United States military for the purpose of imparting this doctrine abroad, has most bearing on the changing patterns of security enforcement - and repression - in Guatemala and El Salvador and will be outlined at length.

US Army Special Forces In January 1961 President Kennedy called on the armed forces to add “still another military dimension” to the “national arsenal” of the United States; a counter-insurgency programme. Within 18 months

18

Launching "Special Warfare": the Kennedy Era

considerable activity within the United States military establishment boosted its capacity to carry out counter-insurgency operations both directly - through its own forces - and indirectly - through enhanced training capacity for foreign forces. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and each of the armed services appointed co-ordinators for counter-insurgency affairs; the Army appointed a spe¬ cial assistant to the Chief of Staff on Special Warfare Activities, respons¬ ible for advising on “special warfare and cold war activities”.^ The President also mandated the Army and the CIA to open special “Research and Development” programmes devoted to counter-insurgency. Regearing included first of all a rationalization of existing American doctrine on political warfare; an amalgam of the American experience of behind-the-lines commando actions, and earlier involvement in guerrilla warfare - from the war against guerrillas in the Philippines at the turn of the century, through the pursuit of Sandino in Nicaragua in the 1920s and 1930s, to the war against the Huks in the Philippines in the 1950s. The new counter-insurgency doctrine’s designers also took advantage of British Army tacticians’ knowledge and absorbed the experience of other colonial wars.^' The substance of the new doctrine, as it was applied, is the subject of later chapters. Organizational initiatives can be roughly divided into efforts to train US armed forces in counter-insurgency; the creation within them of spe¬ cial units with a particular expertise in special warfare (counter¬ insurgency); the training of foreign forces; and the development of multilateral relations with Latin American armies through regional organizations and conferences. In mid-1962 an 18 month progress report to the President informed of the creation of nine special counter-insurgency courses for officers, with 2,099 graduates. Over 510,000 enlisted men had completed counter¬ insurgency courses “beyond basic level... from training in guerrilla warfare, psychological warfare, underwater demolitions and air rescue operations to language training, military assistance training, and civil affairs”. “Field exercises addressed specifically to counter-insurgency” were now “obligatory throughout the armed forces”.“ While the crash programme of counter-insurgency training soon set¬ tled into a routine, it illustrated the level of the military’s institutional concern for preparedness in the area, and dominated the period of the 1960s which, as we shall see later, was to determine the course of events in Central America. Specialized counter-insurgency units in the US armed forces maintained the strong counter-insurgency momentum and were a principle vehicle for its export to Latin America - and the world. The training courses were especially directed toward training officers and enlisted men of counterpart (Latin American, etc.) armies, whose home territories were considered potential trouble spots. From 1 January 1961 to July 1962 the US Army reported it had trained 14,000

19

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

foreign students in counter-insurgency at US military schools and installations. In addition “Several hundred thousand others” had received training in their own countries from US mobile, counter¬ insurgency oriented, training teams”. The Mobile Training Teams (MTTs) provided in-the-field instruction, and in some cases par¬ ticipated in actual combat. They reached the largest number of local military personnel in problem countries and provided them with detailed operational training. A total of 79 such teams, numbering 1512 US military men, are presently [1962] deployed in 19 different countries, threatened by insurgency situa¬ tions. Of these teams 50 are in Southeast Asia and 20 in Latin America. The specialties represented by the mobile teams cover the total spectrum of counter-insurgency actions ..

By 1967 MTTs dispatched from Fort Gulick, the Canal Zone regional headquarters of the US Army Special Forces, had carried out more than 600 missions to Latin America.^ The MTT’s (composed primarily of US Army Special Forces) particular role in Latin America will be dealt with below. In 1961 the US Army special unit for unconventional warfare (the Special Forces, later the Green Berets) numbered less than 1,000: by July 1962 3,800; by 1963 5,600. In 1962 an Air Force Special Air War Center was established at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida as a counterpart to the special Army facilities for counter-insurgency. The Marine Corps also integrated counter-insurgency training at all levels. Creation of special units for “prosecuting the counter-insurgency war” was given urgent priority. Within 18 months special warfare units in the three armed forces comprised 7,500 men. They were: special forces units comprised of selected and highly skilled volunteers, trained and targeted on specific threatened areas; psychological warfare units; sea-air-land unconventional warfare teams ..

As the foremost counter-insurgent forces in the US military, the activities and operational doctrine of the Army Special Forces merit special attention, as they represent a distillation of the overall military doctrine of counter-insurgency in action. Responsibility for developing counter-insurgency doctrine and organization of training was assigned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1960. Since its foundation in 1956,^^ through its Special Warfare School, the Center had trained officers from all the services and a few Latin American army officers, in counter-insurgency operations. The Special Forces became the major vehicle for on-the-ground counter-insurgency assistance to Latin American armies through the 20

Launching Special Warfare

the Kennedy Era

device of the MTT, which enabled units of from 12 to 36 Special Forces personnel to move rapidly into and out of crisis areas and provide a lowprofile combat advisory force that would easily elude the scrutiny of the international press and of the American public. According to several former US military officers, an important factor facilitating concealment of the MTTs in the 1960s, was that the diplomatic rules binding US forces required an American warship entering port in, say, Guatemala, to communicate immediately with the US Ambassador to Guatemala, but such reports were not required from forces arriving by air. A Special Forces contingent flown in from the Panama Canal Zone, therefore, was not formally required to contact the Embassy, thus the local US diplomats could plead ignorance of American in-the-lield operations (either advisory or active combat).®* Since MTT operations were part of a co-ordinated US policy toward each country where they were active there is no reason to assume (in spite of such official disclaimers as above) that these operations went on entirely without the knowledge of US Ambassadors; probably there was prior agreement along general lines, though the details may have con¬ veniently been undisclosed. The distinction between the MTTs advisory and direct action role in Latin America, as in Vietnam, may have been largely academic, as will be seen with regard to El Salvador and Guatemala. While Special For¬ ces units detailed directly from the Special Forces Groups based at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg were rotated through Latin America on a regular basis, a Latin America “Special Action Force” was built around the 8th Special Forces Group based at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone. This 1,000 man unit was specifically earmarked for special warfare tasks in Latin America and provided the bulk ofthe numerous Mobile Training Teams (MTTs) which would travel to each of the Latin nations to provide training to supplement that of the resident Military Group or that pro¬ vided in military schools in the US or the canal zone. The most famous of these MTTs was the one sent to Bolivia in early 1967 to train the Bolivian Ranger unit that eliminated Che Guevara’s guerrilla movement. Other related Special Action Force units stationed in the Canal Zone included the Army’s 3rd Civil Affairs Detachment and the Air Force’s Air Commando Squadron. Both of these units ... sent numerous MTTs to Latin America in this period (1961-1967).®'^

The link-up with the Air Commando Squadron, equipped with the kind of “propeller and early subsonic-jet air craft that dominated the air-order-of-battle of most developing nations”,™ gave Special Forces units the mobility which, in earlier interventions in Guatemala (1954) and the Bay of Pigs (1961) had, at least nominally, depended on CIA air¬ craft resources. Whether unmarked aircraft on secret missions belong to

21

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

the US Air Force or the CIA is of interest only in so far as it illustrates the regular armed forces moves to take on an increasingly large part of the dirty warfare and covert action role formerly left to the CIA. Co-ordination of Special Forces-Air Commando forces was facilitated by a reorganization of the former US military’s “Caribbean Command” as “SOUTHCOM”, a unified command centre for the Army, Navy and Airforce, with considerable room for initiative as the “US regional head¬ quarters for Latin America”.^' The Special Forces’ role in Guatemala and El Salvador will be des¬ cribed in greater detail in the context of overall security assistance to those countries. In general terms, in Latin America as elsewhere, they concentrated on creating paramilitary bodies to support the regular security services with irregular operations, sometimes described as “guerrilla” actions in support of the state. In 1963 the Secretary of the Army (US) informed a congressional committee of the basic 12 man Special Forces personnel units’ potential to raise “guerrilla” forces to fight subversion: ... a detachment of such American forces consisting of ten enlisted per¬ sonnel and two officers can effectively organize, control, and assist in the operations of a foreign guerrilla force of more than one thousand 72 men.

A late 1960s official history of the US Marine Corps gave the follow¬ ing description of the Special Forces, stressing their primary role to be the organization of irregular “indigenous” counter-insurgent forces: The US Army Special Forces (the “Green Berets”) are military personnel with training in basic and specialized military skills, organized into small multipurpose detachments, whose mission is to train, organize, supply, direct, and control indigenous forces in guerrilla warfare and counter¬ insurgency operations and to conduct unconventional warfare opera¬ tions. Special Forces detachments by themselves have little combat capability.’^

Role of the Mobile Training Teams As we shall see, though not in themselves important as combat units, the MTTs in-and-out-again role in organizing paramilitary counter¬ guerrilla forces - in some cases “death squads” - was a primary factor in Central American developments. The theory of counter-guerrilla organization - including the use of irregular paramilitary forces to oppose guerrillas - and the techniques of “counter-terrorism” will be discussed in the chapters on the sub¬ stance of counter-insurgency doctrine. Sufficient here to cite some

22

Launching "Special Warfare": the Kennedy Era

examples of the Special Forces role in building counter-insurgency structures and systems in target countries. As early as 1962 at least one Special Forces MTT had carried out training in the field in Guatemala, where guerrilla activities led by for¬ mer Guatemalan army officers were launched in February 1962.^''Documents revealing the objectives, activities and recommendations of the first Special Forces MTT sent to Guatemala have not yet been uncovered, but we do know the details of a visit by a similar team to Colombia,^^ where there were comparable problems of guerrilla insurgency at about the same time. This high-level Special Forces team's recommendations to the Colombian Army and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff covered most aspects of counter-insurgency action later recommended, and implemented, in Guatemala and El Salvador. In early 1962, at the invitation of the Colombian government, US Special Forces MTT, headed by General William Yarborough, Com¬ mander of the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, visited Colombia. The Team met the Minister of Defense and had full access to civil and military bodies involved in counter-insurgency, including the civil political police {Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, (DAS)). Recommendations called for new organizational forms - “prototype anti-guerrilla organizations" - and a new range of techniques, including “terrorism" against “known Communist proponents”. The most radical proposal, and most representative of the new school of counter¬ insurgency, appeared in a separate, special “Secret Supplement" to the main body of the Classified report. There, General Yarborough’s pres¬ cription for Colombia was the organization of secret paramilitary groups to carry out violent covert actions against the domestic opposi¬ tion; his recommendation amounts to a formula for setting up the “death squads" that have been a major element of counter-insurgency in Latin America since the 1960s:’* It is the considered opinion of the survey team that a concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training... This should be done with a view toward development of a civil and military structure for exploitation in the event the Colombian internal security system deteriorates further. This Struc¬ ture should be used to... as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known Communist proponents.

Ideally, the General added, such covert actions should be launched immediately if feasible: “If we have such an apparatus in Colombia it should be employed now before communist proponents become too strong to combat.” United States-supported state terrorism could thus be launched “in the event the ... security system deteriorates further” or as a pre¬ emptive measure to make sure it did not, and destroy the opposition

23

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

before it became active. General Yarborough was not “out of line” with the rest of the US security establishment in recommending covert terrorist tactics against “Communist proponents”, and the 1962 report was not an aberration. United States’ counter-insurgency experts’ direct involvement in the development of paramilitary forces and in promoting the use of terror tactics in Guatemala and El Salvador is outlined elsewhere.

US Military Doctrine in the 1960s: Vietnam Declassified documents on Special Forces activities in ’Vietnam provide complementary evidence that both the organization of secret paramilitary groups and their deployment in assassination operations was in accord with mainstream military doctrine in the 1960s. A 1965 secret army report, describes the fundamental role of the Spe¬ cial Forces in Vietnam - the organization of paramilitary forces - in terms almost identical to those used in General Yarborough’s proposal for Colombia. Whereas in Colombia irregular forces were to be set up to “execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known Communist proponents”, the Special Forces in action in Viet¬ nam in 1965 worked to organize indigenous “guerrilla-style” forces, deployed in “ambushing, raiding, sabotaging and committing acts of terrorism against known VC (Viet Cong) personnel.”^^ Eater in the same report these operations are defined as “to include assassination”. According to this report the objectives of the Special Forces in Vietnam were, firstly, “To provide planning and operational advice and assistance, material support, and training for selected indigenous military and paramilitary forces”; and, secondly, to assist in “performing border control/surveillance and internal guerrilla roles”: In Vietnam, US Army Special Forces (USASF) personnel have been primarily committed to providing training, operational advice, and assis¬ tance to indigenous paramilitary forces ... Specifically, Special Forces have been involved with primitive tribes in distant and remote areas, peo¬ ple in rural areas, and minority ethnic and religious groups.^*

The sequence followed in “counter-guerrilla” operations began with the recruitment and training of a local “Strike Force” and the establish¬ ment of an intelligence network, and went on to “guerrilla type” opera¬ tions, in which the “counter-guerrilla Strike Force” would be turned loose to clear out “the enemy” and their sympathizers. Operations were to include assassinations: “[Irregular forces are to] conduct operations to dislodge VC-controlled officials to include assassination.”™ The first phase - “preparation” - could combine measures to prepare “counter-terror” units with attempts to win “hearts and minds”; 24

Launching "Special Warfare": the Kennedy Era Establish CIDG [Civilian Irregular Defense Group] Camp with a joint USASF/VNSF operations center; Recruit and train local personnel for Strike Force; Establish intelligence nets and train agents; Establish frien¬ dly rapport with local population . .

After “preparation", “clearing” operations came into play, utilizing pat¬ rols. ambushes, population control (monitoring and restricting the movement of the population and food and medical supplies, etc.), and the initiation of counter-terror operations. Deny the VC the capability to function in the assigned area of operations by staying on the offensive; Identify and destroy the VC infrastructure among the local population . .

The sequence culminates in a “holding” phase. A major problem for Special Forces in Vietnam was the language barrier. Special Forces units could not “directly organize paramilitary units on a face-to-face basis” but were forced to work indirectly through Vietnamese government forces and depend on secondary information in matters of “operational intelligence or psychological warfare”.*^ In Latin America. Spanish-speaking Special Forces units permitted a much more direct relationship with local intelligence and paramilitary organizations. The largest and most visible paramilitary organizations set up in Vietnam by the United States after 1960 were the “Civil Guards” - later renamed “Regional Forces” - and the “Self-Defense Corps” - later termed the “Popular Forces”. Already by July 1962 the growth of the two forces was the subject of boasting by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff: ... we support a force of 68,000 Vietnamese Civil Guardsmen, training them in 6 centers in a formal 12-weeks training program ... Likewise we are training a Vietnamese Self Defense Corps of 79,000 ... As of 1 July over 31.000 Self Defense Corps men had been trained.^^

These forces were initially envisioned to perform relatively static local defence duties: The paramilitary forces available for providing security in the hamlets were the Civil Guard (GC), a regional type force ultimately controlled by Diem from Saigon but under the operational control of the province chief, and the Self-Defense Corps (SDC), part-time soldiers controlled by the village and district chiefs who performed guard duty in the villages and hamlets.*"’

Civilian Irregular Defence Groups A considerably more covert organization raised by the Special Forces and the CIA in Vietnam, for active counter-guerrilla operations, was 25

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) system, organized, according to a Special Forces report, to provide local security for their own hamlet or village”, and “as search and destroy units, trail watchers and border surveillance patrols Established in 1961, and rapidly raised to level of about 20,000 - later augmented by unknown numbers of personnel assigned to the shadowy “Delta Project” - the CIDG forces were the pre-eminent counter-guerrilla/counter-terror organization in the early years of the war.“ Officially, the CIDG was not under Special Forces administration -it was “not a part of the Military Assistance Program” - although Special Forces were detailed “to staff training and operational bases of CIDG from the beginning”.®^ But although technically under CIA control, even CIA Director William Colby, in a top-secret policy paper in 1964, described it as “The Special Forces CIDG Program”.*® Some paramilitary groups raised largely from ethnic and religious minorities (such as the famous Montagnards and Nung guards) as an “in-country counter¬ guerrilla force” were included in the CIDG programme.*^ The CIDG, moreover, was only one of the paramilitary forces receiving CIA assis¬ tance in 1962, according to a Joint Chiefs of Staff report: ... in company with the Central Intelligence Agency, the US military is engaged in training [in 1962] some 9 [other] paramilitary forces. Youth groups, armed villagers, trail watchers, civic action teams and tribesmen in the highland plateau of Vietnam, aggregating about 17,000 people.'^

After 1965 the CIDG system was gradually merged with the Regional and Popular Forces; these in turn, expanded significantly, and were simultaneously called upon to take an increasingly active and aggressive role in the counter-guerrilla tasks of Vietnam's rural pacifica¬ tion programme. A 1982 study of US defence analyst Richard H. Shultz outlines their place in the campaign to root out the “Viet Cong” infra¬ structure in the 1969-72 period: The Regional Forces (RF) were concerned with ‘enemy provincial and local units’, and additionally were to assist ‘in neutralizing the VCI [Viet Cong Infrastructure], interdicting enemy LOCs [Lines of Communica¬ tion], and protecting local resources.' The Popular Forces (PF) were res¬ ponsible for local enemy guerrillas. The PF was also to participate in local VCI neutralization.®'

The influence of the paramilitary systems on the course of the Vietnam war, while seemingly not yet the object of serious study within or without the US military establishment, was surely significant if only on account of the enormous size of the paramilitary forces. In 1964 Regional Forces grew to 196,000 - nearly matching the regular army’s 250,000 men growing to 301,000 in 1972 (when the army totalled 570,000). The 26

Launching Special Warfare”: the Kennedy Era

Popular Forces grew from 168,000 in 1964 to 219,000 in 1972.''^ Available evidrace indicates that these irregular, paramilitary forces were the principal executors of the “acts of terrorism against known VC personnel that US Army Special Forces taught as part of their counter¬ insurgency brief in the 1960s. But their role went largely unremarked outside Vietnam during and after the war, only touched upon in the tlood ot memoirs and recriminations published in the aftermath of the war. Operation Phoenix”, calling on the paramilitaiy resources built up in the early 1960s to “root out the infrastructure of the Viet Cong” - in essence a programme of assassination and murder - is perhaps the best known application of special warfare through unconventional forces”, and the high point of counter-terror in the counter-insurgency prac¬ tice in Vietnam.

27

3. The New Battlefields

The changing perception of the security threats to the United States in the 196()s shifted emphasis from conventional battlefields to permanent undeclared ideological war, in the universities, factories, homes and fields of "friendly" nations, technically at peace but considered to be threatened by foreign and domestic subversion. The United States defence establishment's response to these perceived threats required the development of new military techniques and an increased reliance on the armed forces of countries supposedly in common cause with the US. Not that the armies of friendly countries were to be no more than proxies in a global battle: the policy makers saw the situation as one in which the US would provide the assistance necessary' for its allies to defend themselves against the common enemy. The new element identified the common enemy as almost exclusively internal', the subversive and the insurgent. Consequently, the previous close collaboration of Central American and United States armies was systematized, intensified and reoriented quite specifically toward crushing insurgency. For the field of action — the home front — new organizational systems were developed and innovations in technique designed and implemented. The "home" involved was. of course, someone else's; United States policy makers could be confident that the new form of contlict would not extend beyond the boundaries of the circumscribed and distant territories in which it was to be fought. Counter-insurgency doctrine provided orientation on where the battle was to be fought, how the friendly governments' forces should be organized and deployed (in specialized units and irregular, paramilitary formations), and suggested a range of techniques available for application (the tactics of total war adapted to the family feud). Conventional militai'y formations and conventional tactics were simply inappropriate for taking warfare into people's homes, neighbourhoods, offices, factories and fields. Counter¬ insurgency doctrine also provided motivation and justification for harsh action: the enemy was considered to use every dirty trick in the book and would kill the counter-insurgent if the counter-insurgent did not kill him first. 28

The New Battlefields The new assessment of threats to the United States and possible remedies or deterrents held that the "Communists'” had sueeessfully subveited friendly regimes beeause their opponents were naive or reluctant to use force to crush incipient revolution/” The Communists were seen to operate through a system of “political warfare”, and a US doctrine ot political warlare was a logical response in the escalation of mihtai7 one-upmanship. Political warlare is a sustained effort by a government or political group to seize, preserve, or extend power, against a defined ideological enemy, thiough all acts short ot a shooting war by regular military forces, but not excluding the threat ot such a war ... It embraces diverse forms of coeicion and violence including strikes and riot.s, economic sanctions, subsidies toi guerrilla or proxy wartare and, when necessary, kidnapping or assassination ot enemy elites.'^'* Political wartaie, toimerly theoretically exclusive to Communists, became a viable concept for the "Free World” and shaped an aggressive foreign policy ot limited warfare, counter-insurgency and “counter¬ revolutionary' oftensives in countries subverted to communism”.*^''

The Enemy is Within In the 1960s, the 1950s Cold War climate, warmed up by the Cuban revolution and the Vietnam war, induced blueprints for counter¬ insurgent action in friendly countries, at every level. This was seen as a matter of self-defence tor these eountries; the enemy was already in their parlour. Within each target countiy the doctrine and programmes of counter-insurgency internalized the global stalemate/conflict with the Soviet Union. It also tended to align the United States with the local military establishments and with the “haves” against the 'have-not.s’: perhaps inevitably as long as the “have-nots” were seen both as vulnerable to subversion and indispensable to its success; without their support subversion could not succeed. An Inter-American Defense College graduation speech by US Assistant Secretary of State Alexis Johnson in 1966 succinctly summed up the new attitude: It is no longer possible to make a division between the activities related to the waging of war and diplomatic activities . . . We have proven . . . that although the threat of a general war still weighs upon us, that the most immediate danger is of limited militai7 action.s, frequently of a subversive character, in which . . . one must weigh concrete military measures in terms of their political impact, and viceversa.'” 29

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

In practical or operational terms, placing local subversion in the context of permanent global war stimulated the development of those marginal areas of traditional military doctrine which could be adapted to serve a domestic police function and play a role in incipient or active civil conflict. A minor part of the military repertoire, built upon the experience of World War II and its aftermath, concerned behind-thelines operations in a conventional, total war, and the potential for assisting civilian resistance fighters to counter conventional occupiers or invaders of their countries. In 1944, for example, the US Army and the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA) began to assist Ho Chi Minh's resistance fighters to oust the Japanese from northern Vietnam.'^ The post-war period saw the “anything goes" philosophy of military, commando-type, support for the resistance movements in Nazi- and Japanese-occupied territories transformed into its mirror image. Those same techniques then used against an occupying force were inverted, to defend friendly governments from outbreaks of insurgency and. indeed, to pre-empt them by crushing all opposition. The use of violence, uninhibited by legalistic criteria, was not excluded, and sometimes took the form of reprisals or generalized terrorism against the population at large, as if the established government were an occupying force. A 1966 US \xxx\y Military Review article reproduced in the Guatemalan Revista Militar described “counter-terror" first in World War II terms: “... if a bridge is blown up, detain all of the villagers of the area and execute a few hostages".'^'^ But a more sophisticated approach was needed in the context of the fight against insurgency in the 1960s. More selective acts of “counter-terror" were recommended, and counter-guerrilla forces, raised from among the villagers themselves, would be organized to carry them out.'*’** The basic tenet of counter-insurgency doctrine is the identification of Communism as the threat and the enemy as its agents. There are, however, problems in its application. Is the shooting of a policeman in a grocery store an ordinary law enforcement problem or insurgency? Is membership of a peasant trade union “subversive" if such trade unions are illegal (as in El Salvador)? After the Cuban revolution US military doctrine tended toward the broadest possible definition of subversion, lumping together any and all opposition to the status quo as either incipient or actual insurgency. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 defined insurgency as a condition of “illegal opposition to an existing governmenf' that could range from passive resistance, illegal strike action or demonstrations, to large-scale guerrilla operations, but fell short of civil war.'"' Next to overt guerrilla warfare, the principal instances of insurgency were “urban political demonstrations, riots and strikes", and responsibility for insurgency was placed squarely on independent political opposition groups, student demonstrators, university communities, and labour organizations. 30

The New Battlefields

Training foreign military forces, both inside and outside the United States, was the principal vehicle by which the counter-insurgency orientahon was instilled in Latin America. The basic message of indoctrination was negative: the enemy is the Communist, insidious and omnipresent, unyielding and pernicious, powertul and perverted. An enemy that could be resisted only by annihilating him. The message was taken home by trainees, and propagated by doctrinal material from US military publications (notably the Mihtaty Review) regularly reproduced in publications ot Latin American armies. In 1973. the army olficer heading Argentina's National Security Council, described the US military s major role in Latin America after 1960, as an effort to reorient hemispheric defence to combat “inter¬ national communism and its internal allies” and, induce armies to "preserve internal order and to put down subversion”. US military doctrine co-ordinated perceptions, “especially by defining‘the enemy’ and how to combat him"."'-'* The meaning ot this “coordination of perceptions” in practice is clearly illustrated in some early field exercises of the Central American Defense Board (CONDECA), considered “indispensable" to combat “the constant communist threat to Central American peace”."’^ CONDECA’s regional war game in 1966. Operacion Centroamericana, played out on the north coast ot Honduras, involved an elaborate scenario. A general strike of peasants and workers had culminated in “mass assaults by armed civilians on the garrisons” and the capture of several ports by the insurgents. The insurrection began with the “sabotage of the industrial zones, consecutive strikes and stoppages, and street demonstrations”. Such activities were seen as the first steps in a full-fledged revolution, threatening the whole region, that had to be countered by the co-ordinated deployment ofCONDECA forces, including air. sea and land forces from four neighbouring countries, including Panama."’^ The counter-insurgency orientation that found every trade union, political group or peasant organization a threat equal to that of an armed guerrilla group, motivated concomitant acts of violent repression against these groups - a policy that has tended to backfire. In both Guatemala and El Salvador, and of course in Nicaragua, the generalized violence of the state provoked by such a broad definition of insurgency has, when applied to large sectors of the society, tended to convince potential victims that they have nothing to lose by taking up arms and joining the guerrillas. The strikes, stoppages and street demonstrations that sparked-off the Nicaraguan and Salvadorean revolutions were followed by massive, violent insurrection on\y after the ranks of lawful, non-violent organizations were decimated by massacres and government-controlled death squads. Political organizations, trade unions, peasant leagues, and. in Nicaragua, professional and commercial associations, were thus goaded by their respective governments into giving total support to 31

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

insurrectionary forces. The preconceptions regarding the innately subversive nature of these organizations tended to be self-fulfilling. Tht orientation of counter-insurgency towards no-holds-barred internal seeurity operations, carried out by irregular forces using irregular techniques, was the most important legacy of US security assistance to Central America, bringing with it a proliferation of state terrorism and, in some cases, a popular reaction which turned into revolution. This orientation not only dominated the curriculum of every US military training programme in and out of the United States, but coloured every grant of war material, as well as guiding American foreign policy. The impact on El Salvador of, say, a grant of a helicopter gunship can be assessed only from the viewpoint of counter-insurgency doctrine and its peculiarly pernicious orientation. This alone explains what motivates the gun crew in the helicopter to fire on a labour demonstratioa strafe a uni¬ versity. push a bound and gagged political prisoner out of the door, or fire on a herdsman and his cattle — as was reported by an American passenger visiting the Lempa River bridge in El Salvador in November 1981.

Alliance for Progress A final element of the new counter-insurgency orientation reflected the broader aims of US foreign policy; “insurgency" would also be fought through accelerated development — for example through the Alliance for Progress — and not solely through repression. As an integral part of overall US foreign policy, the military too, incorporated development into their counter-insurgency programme, in the form of “civic action" operations whereby military forces could integrate a “developmenf' function into their counter-insurgency role, improve their image, and justify the expansion of the military role in political life. Armies could be seen to do more than exercise a monopoly on violence; they could serve as public administrators, build roads, schools, and water-works. A US Army Special Warfare Glossary defined “civic action" as Any action performed by military forces of a country utilizing military manpower and skills . . . which is designed to improve the economic or social betterment of that country. Civic action programs can enhance the stature of indigenous military forces and improve their relationship with the population. Thus, such programs can be a major contributing factor to the elimination of insurgency.'*'®

Erom the United States military bureaucracy's point of view civic action also provided a way to increase funds for military assistance pro¬ grammes by obtaining them from other US agencies: a 1965 defence department study reported that 35% of the military civic action programme in Latin America was funded by AID.'"*' 32

The New Battlefields

Since the 1960s. several excellent, exhaustive and critieal studies of US assistance to Latin Ameriean armies for their civic action programmes have been published;'"’ the United States Armed Forces have, themselves, also published quantities of material on the theory and techniques for implementing civic action programmes. Here, civic action receives only cursory treatment as it has been a relatively unimportant element within the counter-insurgency programme in Central America, performing a primarily public relations function, and a poor one too. If that sounds cynical, we can only point out that the Civic ActiAn programme in Guatemala is still headed by the chief of the Army Office of Public Relations, and that, in the field, the policy fails to win over the population, who are — with good reason — mortally afraid of the army. The inbuilt duplicity of the civic action programme is such that, on occasion, even the delivery of patently lethal weaponry and equipment to Guatemala by the US has been placed in that context; see. for instance, US Ambassador John Gordon Mein's speech in Guatemala on the delivery of three helicopter gunships. five armoured cars, four jeeps and two trucks in 1967; The UH-1 H helicopters have a velocity of 135 miles per hour, a capacity of 2,600 pounds cargo and can be armed with machineguns and rocket launchers, with armor on sides and bottom. They will be of great utility in rescue operations and in other tasks in community assistance.'"

Who was fooling whom? Perhaps the United States public and its representatives in Congress were the main targets of the public relations factor in civic action. As the Alliance for Progress, granted the best of good will, still served primarily to provide a public relations smoke¬ screen for the blood and thunder counter-insurgency offensive then launched in Latin America, civic action provided a cosmetic veneer for military doctrine, and the real work of dirty warfare in Latin America.

Counter-Guerrillas: The Local Paramilitary Just as the range of tactics available to the insurgent were uncritically adopted as the basis of counter-insurgent tactics, an effort was made to imitate the organization of insurgency by creating special counter¬ guerrilla forces. The US Army Special Forces, trained to serve as “counter-guerrillas" themselves, rarely saw action, but were generally employed in organizing others to serve in irregular forces mimicking guerrilla organizations. The doctrine of counter-insurgency strongly emphasized the need both for regular armed forces' units with irregular warfare skills, and for irregular forces, often made up of civilians with a 33

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

military background to operate in their local areas. In June 1961 the US Secretary of Defense was requested to evaluate “requirements in the field of conventional warfare and paramilitary operations”. A first step would be to inventory the paramilitary assets we have in the United States Armed Forces |and| consider various areas in the world where the implementation of our policy may require indigenous paramilitary forces."-^

Technically, paramilitary forces were defined as anything “distinct from the regular armed forces of any country but resembling them in organization, equipment, training, or mission"."'^ In practice, parti¬ cularly when referring to the specialized counter-insurgent units of regular armies (the US Special Forces, the Guatemalan A^fl/6/7c5(Kekchi word meaning warriors), the Salvadorean Special Forces, the Nicaraguan forces of the Basic Infantry Training School (Escuela de Entrenamiento Basko de Infanteria), the term sometimes inAxcdikdi a type of action rather than a form of organization; in this sense “paramilitary" meant the activities of specialists in unconventional warfare. It could also refer to specific “military-like” organizations outside the conventional armed forces: militia-type bodies of military reserve men or veterans; semi¬ military forces such as fac comisionados militares of Guatemala (on the military payroll, but working only part-time for the army); or local forces of any kind raised as auxiliaries in counter-insurgency (local spies, guides to regular army forces, local army representatives, or assassination squads). Local forces could be raised from minorities, such as the Montagnards or the Catholics in Vietnam, and the Meo tribesmen in Laos and Cambodia, or from among the rural elites and their employees in Guatemala or El Salvador.''-^ While the logistic and intelligence advantage of anti-guerrilla forces operating in their home areas was one factor in favour of such organization, a second was provided by the strong motivation — mercenary, religious, ethnic, or ideological — of the individual members of these forces to willingly join the counter¬ insurgency fray. In South-east Asia, Catholics could be counted on to fight Buddhists (let alone Comm.unists) on religious grounds alone; Montagnards to continue their ancestral tribal warfare against the ethnic Vietnamese. In FI Salvador the paramilitary forces of the government's organization ORDEN were heavily indoctrinated to fear Communism as a threat to their lives, livelihood, and religion. A mercenary element was added in that membership in ORDEN was necessary in order to hold many government jobs, such as garbage collector or road mender, or receive any other form of political patronage. In Guatemala, the landowning elites, after the threat of land reform in the 1950s, were already highly motivated both ideologically 34

The New Battlefields

and economically to find Communists under every coffee bush and kill them on the spot, and awaited only the organizational initiative of the army to integrate themselves and their employees into the counter¬ insurgency crusade. Paramilitary irregulars, being drawn from the local population itself are generally more familiar with the local scene than are conventional forces, and thus capable of more effective local operations. But also, as a US Army study notes “paramilitary forces are primarily political. Their function is to provide visible and effective demonstrations of the power of the state.”"'" Paramilitary groups tend to reflect the interests and prejudices of the ruling political and economic powers. In the case of Vietnam, for instance, the doctrine called for the basic “civilian counter-terrorist organization" — in contrast to the special strike forces of minority tribesmen — to be: created from the young elite which exists everywhere: those who have a stake in the community because they have a family, own a house or a piece of land, are ambitious to get ahead in business, profession or politics.'" Setting up this kind of organization was the object: ... first priority after the military have cleared an area is to bring about the selection of an able man for that area, who will in turn go about creating a basically civilian counter-terrorist organization . . The “young elites” mobilized in local forces were to go through the area “with a fine toothed comb” and root out local subversives, and to have full support of “military, paramilitary and governmental persons.”"*^ By giving such political and economic tViXtsdefacto coercive powers, amounting to extra-legal authority to commit acts of “counter-terrorism”, the organizers of such groups added a very volatile ingredient to the existing social and economic structure. It was, of course, logical that counter-insurgents should turn to the “elites” for allies in Vietnam (apart from the use of mercenary tribal peoples), and in Central America; it was. after all, their interests that were at stake. With minor variations, this is what happened in the development of the paramilitaiy systems of Guatemala and El Salvador. Many examples of “counter-organization” may be drawn from the colonial experiences of the French, notably in Indo-China and Algeria, and the British in Malaya and elsewhere. The strategic hamlet idea was developed by the British in Malaya, encouraging the ethnic Malays in the hamlets to collaborate in “self-defence” operations, a strategy made possible because many insurgents were ethnic Chinese. The French raised “self-defence” units to oppose the Viet Minh in Indo-China but were relatively - and in the long run - entirely, unsuccessful, even 35

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

though religious groups, notably the Catholics, “went to the extent of raising their own private armies",'^*’ which survived long enough to become US allies after the partition of Vietnam. French “counter¬ guerrilla” forces in Algeria, though indigenous, were not locally based but highly mobile, and operated in lightly populated areas, sometimes being led by former insurgents. Students of counter-insurgency have emphasized that if these para¬ military organizations are left to fight semi-independently, under charismatic leaders, there is a tendency for them to backfire on their organizers. In May 1958, for example, only 300 men remained loyal to the French when the 3,300 strong “South Algerian Commandos” revolted against them.'-' One counter-insurgency text by a US Army officer uses the Algerian experience to illustrate the fickleness of counter-guerrilla forces when given too much independence, and, as a basis for one of the guiding principles of “counter-organization”; “A cardinal rule is that close military and political supervision must be maintained.”'-- This is of particular significance in the case of the present paramilitary systems of Guatemala and El Salvador. Historically, the respective military institutions in both these countries had bad experiences with armed civilian organizations and, therefore, reinforced their internal institu¬ tional controls on the new irregular paramilitary forces. This factor of loyalty and consistency is most generally cited in the context of institutional military controls over a paramilitary network, but is also a factor guiding recruitment. Economic elites are appropriate for recruitment both because they have an inbuilt motivation to oppose insurgents — who threaten their privileged status — and from the army’s point of view, they are less likely to defect or turn against the security system. A 1966 US Army Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines sees the elites, for this reason, as the best bet for local recruitment as counter-guerrillas: “Use of [elites] as the force in ’hostile’ area would encourage a sense of self-defense (with a low incidence of defections among patrols).”'--^ As the same source notes, however, members of counter-guerrilla or “self-defense” corps who are not highly motivated can be kept in line by other means: “Government will support families to show appreciation. If self-defense corps individual defects, family suffers the consec^uence.”'-"' In practice, we know that former members of Guatemalan assassi¬ nation squads have a high mortality rate. As the identity of individuals involved in paramilitary operations as auxiliaries to the regular security services is not always readily apparent to the observer, the murders of those who stray go generally unremarked. Occasionally, however, there are cases in Guatemala in which civilians reported abducted and murdered by police or military squads are said by the press to have pi'eviously served as undercover agents {confidenciales) of the same forces.'-*’ In any security system incorporating an irregular counter-guerrilla

36

The New Battlefields

organization the primary defence against it “back-firing" by defection or dereliction ot duty is to integrate its command structure into that of the regular mditary-police apparatus. A prime example of this arrangement existed in Greece after World War II. The Greek National Guard Defence Battalions or Tagmata Ethnofylackha Amyns (the TEA battalions) organized with the assistance of US and British intelligence bodies, had most of the characteristics of such widely distant counter¬ guerrilla paramilitary corps as the Civil Guard and Self Defence Corps in Vietnam and ORDEN in El Salvador. The TEA Battalions were formed during the Greek Civil War to oppose the Communist partisans who had fought the Nazis during the occupation ot Greece. Organized on a territorial basis in every village, particularly along the northern frontiers, TEA units were normally run by reserve Army officers, and the TEA organization “had its own chain of command into Athens where its headquarters is headed by a retired general In practice its administration was closely integrated into the military reserve system and linked to the command structure of the Army, with serving Army officers assigned to TEA units “at battalion and company level". In the event of emergency “the local battalions pass under control of the various army division commanders."'-^ Neither the political role of the Greek paramilitary network nor its internal security function was disguised: A significant element of the TEA training is political - as part of the Greek Army s “enlightenmenC campaign . . . the Greeks look upon the TEA organization as an important means of influence, commitment, and control of the population . . . TEA units also effectively carry out their operational duties. The men rotate guard duty at night. They patrol, especially along the frontier. Intelligence is collected. Eaced with such armed, trained and determined nucleuses among the people, the revolutionaries know they can no longer recruit and terrorize as they once did.'28

The TEA units were composed exclusively of local men who had completed their military service (there is universal conscription in Greece) and been screened as potential TEA recruits as a normal part of the routine of military service. In Greece, as elsewhere, patronage was one means of compensation for service in such an organization: . . . screening, plus the local reputation of each man. militates against Communist infiltration. The men serve on a part-time basis while maintaining their civilian occupations as farmers, shop keepers, clerks, mechanics and so forth. They receive no pay: however. TEA members do get priority in the occasional distribution of aid, international gifts, boots, and other equipment.'-'^

37

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

On almost every point, the Salvadorean ORDEN — and atter 1979 its successor, the Civil Defense organization — parallels the TEA system. After vetting for political views, recruits were systematically selected from among conscript soldiers returning to their villages. ORDEN had brigades in every hamlet and village; it carried out a regular patrolling system, including all-night road-blocks; actively collected intelligence on subversion; and, while maintaining a nominally separate identity, was administered from the Casa Presidencial (or presidential palace) through the military reserve system and local army or National Guard command posts. Both the Greek TEA and the Salvadorean ORDEN ideally illustrate the concept of counter-organization for counter-insurgency. A final element of the doctrine of counter-insurgency, inseparable in practice from the organization and orientation of counter-insurgent forces, is the body xnnovSiXtVQ techniques and guidelines developed for the pursuit of counter-insurgency operations. A concept of “counterterror". incorporating various forms of terrorism at the service of the state is our principal concern in this area and will be discussed in the next chapter.

38

4. “Meeting Terror With Terror”: a Policy of Failure

The willingness ot the counter-insurgent to mimic insurgent organiza¬ tion and guerrilla technique (or purportedly guerrilla technique) was a basic component in the strategy aimed at locating and physically eliminating the insurgent, the sympathizer and the suspect. Insurgent terrorism would be met by counter-insurgent terrorism. The routine practice of terrorism — or counter-terrorism — at the service ot the state came to dominate the application of counter¬ insurgency doctrine in Central America. In practice, the reformist components of counter-insurgency theory were largely cosmetic. Great importance was given to the ground level application of both counter¬ organization and counter-terror which, including selective assassi¬ nation on a large scale, was considered expedient and legitimate. It was justified both on the grounds that it was employed by the guerrillas, and on the quasi-moral grounds that it was a short-term tactic designed to end a confiict as rapidly as possible. In the long run it was expected to save lives. Counter-insurgent terrorism in practice, however, proved not to be short term, and neither a simple nor particularly low cost answer to insurgency. Easy to start, it was difficult to stop and impossible to moderate; even a minimum of terrorism tended to escalate. In Guatemala, massive counter-terror was introduced in 1966 to crush insurgency once and for all. Today counter-terror by the state still dominates the political system, has claimed some 50,000 lives, and utterly failed to crush insurgency, now stronger than ever before. Voices of dissent on both moral and practical or strategic grounds were raised from the beginning. As early as 1962 US scholar Chalmers A. Johnson wrote that “counter-terror” theory was based on an erroneous premise — that guerrillas achieve support through acts of terrorism — and stated that theorists cannot produce “a single case in which the principle of counter-terrorization has been effective in ending a guerrilla war. In fact, such counter-measures can easily be shown to have quite the opposite result": An emphasis upon guerrilla terrorization of an allegedly passive 39

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency population leads directly to policy failures.lt is supposed that successful counter-guerrilla operations involve the use of specially trained com¬ mandos who are, in effect, authorized to counter-terrorize the same population.

Nevertheless, in the early 1960s. a deluge of official and semi-official, public and classified papers appeared in US military and foreign affairs circles, promoting the virtues of “counter-terror” in defeating insurgency. At about the same time Johnson was writing, an advocate of counter¬ terror insisted that the counter-insurgent “must be prepared to meet terror with terror” in order “to forestall casualties and prevent the demoralization of his forces. . Terrorism was described as the “most powerful tool at the disposal of the guerrilla leader" and thus a necessary tool of the anti-guerrilla. The expression “meet terror with terror” appears repeatedly in counter-insurgency literature after 1960, both in doctrinal policy papers and in commentary on current affairs. Colonel John Webber, head of the United States military mission to Guatemala in 1967, took credit in a Time magazine interview for having introduced a system of “counter terror", explaining that, “The Com¬ munists are using everything they have, including terror. And it must be met."'-^^

French army counter-insurgency doctrine, drawing on the experience of colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria, promoted a nearly identical attitude; that harsh measures normally “alien to a civilized power” are justified because insurgent violence and terror is ended sooner, thereby saving lives. The immediate tactical advantage of a policy in which all limitations to potential action were lifted, appealed as a practical way of preventing casualties, eliminating risks vis-a-vis suspects, and getting immediate results by interrogations under torture, summary executions, burning the homes of suspects, and be damned the long range political implications: ... don't come back at me with words like justice and charity ... you can talk about that in Paris. . . But once you’re here, raising problems of conscience — and presuming the innocence of possible murderers — is a luxury that costs dear, that costs men . . . our men.'-^^

Another non-United States example was described by Chalmers Johnson when outlining two distinct counter-insurgency policies implemented by the Japanese during their World War II occupation of China. In the South a Vichy style Chinese proxy government was set up to administer “Model Peace Zones” and maintain agricultural produc¬ tion as its priority. According to Johnson, relatively benevolent rule there provoked little resistance, and Communist party leaders were isolated and driven out. In the North, however, the poor agricultural land offered little incentive to the Japanese for careful exploitation, and 40

"Meeting Terror with Terror ": a Policy of Failure

the population was forced to submit with none of the subtlety used in the South. Where guerrilla resistance occurred the Japanese ordered the physical destruction of all life and property ; a policy which sounds comparable to the present El Salvador’s government policy in poor rural areas, where a guerrilla presence is countered by burning entire villages and the wholesale execution of suspects by the security forces.'-'*'’ Chalmers Johnson points out that in the Japanese occupation of China the increase ot guerrilla activity in the North proceeded apace throughout the Japanese occupation — with the resultant establishment of a Communist stronghold there in the civil war — in part as a direct result ot the policy of counter-insurgent terrorism, or counter-terror: “... one can conclude . .. that anti-guerrilla terrorism will more than likely spread the mass mobilization upon which guerrilla movements thrive."'-^5 One of the principal arguments of this book is that prolonged state terrorism in Central America, as elsewhere, provokes and sustains mass resistance.

Institutionalized Brutality The institutionalization of counter-terror within Central American security systems came after its theoretical formulation in United States and regional counter-insurgency doctrine in the 1960s, and largely coincided with the reform and development programmes promoted by the US through the Alliance for Progress. The doctrine, effectively backed by the US's prestige, power, moral authority and material assistance, promoted the use of "uncivilized" methods quite contrary to the laws of American nations and of the international agreements to which they subscribed. United States counter-insurgency doctrine, as adopted uncritically throughout most of Latin America, rationalized, sanitized, mechanized and institutionalized what had been traditionally deplored as barbaric and shameful: torture and murder by the state. This new orientation was superimposed upon — and brutality accentuated by — the reality that, in the Americas, the ideals of national and international law had frequently been honoured only in the breach: that torture and government killings were already a part of the region’s experience. In the past, however, these excesses had always been deplored as uncivilized, as the aberrations of individual despots. The purport of the new doctrine, coming from the country which presented itself as the leader of the “Free World”, was that the excesses of the security forces — police and military — were to be considered legitimate in the new international context. The doctrine tended to make a virtue of terror, in so far as it was anti-Communist, counter-insurgent terror. 41

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

In those countries with incipient or active insurgent movements, counter-insurgency doctrine once introduced, quickly took root. Prescribed organizational changes in local security systems for the implementation of the policy, contributed to a permanent orientation toward counter-insurgency. The new organization and the orientation became institutionalized. By the mid-1960s counter-terror was a firmly established “technique” within the counter-insurgent arsenal. We know that already in 1962 high-level United States military teams were advising Latin America armies to organize counter-terror strike forces where guerrilla activity existed. A declassified report from 1962 cites General William Yarborough’s recommendations that the Colombian military form irregular civil/military groups to practise “terrorism” against “known Communist proponents”. In practice, counter-terror presented problems of scale. Could security services anywhere be expected to use “just a little” terrorism? Would not even a little terrorism, to the population whose hearts and minds were to be won, make the most lasting impression of all the techniques in the counter-insurgent repertoire? The matter of scale is addressed in an almost off-hand manner in a 1966 US Army counter-insurgency handbook which outlined a scenario in an imaginary Latin American republic called “Centralia”: a composite of characteristics of several Central American countries. The majority of the population were Spanish speaking mestizos, (people of mixed ancestry); the Indian population spoke Kekchi (a Guatemalan indigenous language); the coastal areas were populated by black, English speaking Creoles (as in Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua). The handbook outlined “solutions” to the problem of insurgency in “Centralia” as provided by some 20 counter-insurgency experts and called upon Area Commanders in the field to design comparable programmes. Counter-terror was one “technique” available to the commander for his programme, its use was, however, to be limited; “You may not employ mass counter-terror, as opposed to selective counter-terror, against the civilian population, i.e., genocide is not an alternative.”'^^ The distinction between“selective” and “mass” counter-terror was, of course, a matter of opinion. Does selective, become mass counter-terror when a certain threshold of deaths has been reached, say 10,20, 50% of the population? Or could a sliding scale be established for different social sectors, such as peasants, teachers, etc.? The handbook did not, of course, consider the moral implications of counter-terror, or its long¬ term effects. Much counter-insurgency literature focuses on the presumed effective¬ ness of counter-terror and counter-organization (particularly the use of irregular forces) in achieving the actual liquidation of the insurgents. But there is another aspect — the “public image” factor — with 42

"Meeting Terror with Terror ": a Policy of Failure

considerable bearing on how counter-terror has been implemented and sustained within modern security systems. The French in Algeria, as the United States in Vietnam, went to great pains to prevent reports of torture, assassination and other terrorist tactics used by their forces (and their allies) from reaching the public at home. But the slow accumu¬ lation of those reports that managed to reach the metropolitan countries eventually soured domestic public opinion toward waging counterinsurgent warfare. It is, therefore, obvious that manipulation of the news media by governments engaged in modern counter-insurgency was already a prerequisite in the 1960s, since the public in those countries has not yet accepted counter-terror methods as legitimate. The Algerians, the Vietnamese, and now the Salvadoreans, with first hand experience of counter-terror neither were nor are deluded by infor¬ mation campaigns intended to obscure its nature or provenance. As the blockage or distortion of information has been integral to the counter-insurgency package, so the creation of secret, nominally unofficial anti-guerrilla forces has assisted governments to avoid accountability for counter-terror operations. This unique organizational characteristic also provided means for disguising the source of counter¬ terror, particularly in the arena of international public opinion. The existence of irregular groups built within or around the military could be denied, or acknowledged but said to have no official ties and be out of control, or to carry out only civic functions. Abuses could be attributed to phantom, or independent groups, or their occurrence wholly denied. This has been the modern experience of Central America, but it too has historical precendents. American military intelligence reports after the departure of the Marines from Nicaragua in 1933 stressed the usefulness of the National Guard’s civilian auxiliaries as forces that were noX accountable for their actions, even though they went beyond the law on behalf of the government. The irregulars were: probably a more efficient combat force against bandits [than the Marines] ... unhampered by thoughts of court martial and congressional investigation if they retaliate using the bandit’s own, rather uncivilized methods.'^*

No one in Nicaragua believed that atrocities committed by “auxi¬ liaries” were not actually the work of the government but, since in postMarine Corps Nicaragua domestic public opinion was virtually stifled by the National Guard, the duplicity may have helped obscure the realities of Nicaragua vis-a-vis foreign opinion. The growing awareness that irregular forces, not immediately identifiable as government forces, could assist governments evade accountability for acts of terrorism, opened up new areas of action in the counter-insurgency scenario. One of the most bizarre, outlined 43

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

in the US army handbook quoted above, involves the deployment of forces to impersonate guerrillas while committing acts of terrorism against the population. The purpose being to excite public opinion against the guerrillas and justify further counter-insurgency measures: Create a pseudo-insurgent force. . . Select 20 of the best-trained Spanish speaking men, use polygraph as aid; copy insurgent uniform. . . Using [the] pseudo-insurgent force, the government generates incidents among the population. These incidents are used to indicate to the people the need for protection of the villages. . . [this] gives the government a pretext to move in and claim that population control is necessary to 1) protect the people, and 2) ‘stamp out’ the insurgents.*^^ Grotesque as they may seem, these text-book techniques have been implemented in Guatemala, and probably in El Salvador. In Guatemala a recent case of this particular brand of “counter-terrorism” involves the highland Indian areas of the North, particularly in the department of El Quiche, where terrorist actions both by uniformed and plain-clothes Army forces have been attributed to guerrillas and cited publicly as the justification for permanent population control measures. In common practice, however, counter-terror in most of its manifes¬ tations has been used as a direct means to destroy the real or imagined subversive. Refinements in the application of counter-terror — for example its use to incite the population against the guerrillas — are ultimately subordinated to this primary purpose. Usually counter-terror is merely a means enabling a government to break all the rules and kill its suspected enemies; and, as part of the counter-insurgency package, it has proved occasionally effective to that end: in the short term. The lengths to which counter-terror has been taken in modern counter-insurgency practice, leaving aside for the moment Central America, can be usefully illustrated by turning once again to the Vietnam experience.

Vietnam: Rural Pacification and the “Phoenix” Programme While US-backed “counter-terror” may be said to have arrived in Vietnam as early as 1954,''^* not until much later, after covert CIA forces were supplemented with regular Army military advisers, was a structure for the use of counter-terror on a large scale built and put into action. In spring 1961, President Kennedy secretly ordered 500 military advisers to Vietnam; 400 were Special Forces personnel specialized in the formation and training of the irregular counter-guerrilla forces which would subsequently be used to carry out counter-terror.'^^ proliferation of such irregular forces by mid-1962 has already been referred to. 44

“Meeting Terror with Terror": a Policy of Failure

The primary objective of Special Forces units in Vietnam was the formation of “indigenous, guerrilla-style” forces through which to exercise counter-terror. The 1965 document quoted above described the targets of terrorism as “known VC (Viet Cong) personnel”; it did not detail specific actions, or set guidelines for identifying them. As has been noted, terrorism was specified as a viable technique to be aimed not only at “VC personnel” but at persons under their influence, and “to include assassination”. Other sources have described such terrorist operations, again implicating the Army Special Forces, but under the operational direction of the CIA and its “Special Operations Division” (SOD): SOD operators and agency contractees ran the Counter-Terror teams which employed similar methods to oppose the Vietcong’s terror tactics of kidnapping, torture, and murder.''*^

A pacification programme formally entitled “Counter-Terror” or “CT' was reportedly established in Vietnam in 1965 by William Colby, then Chief of the Far East Division of Clandestine Services of the CIA, based in Washington, D.C.''^ Just as the role of civilian irregulars was to some extent a requisite for, but overshadowed by, conventional military operations, “Counter-Terror” was initially a nearly invisible component of the civilian irregular programme. Before 1967 it was apparently never even agreed upon with the Vietnamese allies: [Counter-Terror] was a unilateral American program, never recognized by the South Vietnamese government. CIA representatives recruited, organized, supplied, and directly paid CT teams, whose function was to use Viet Cong techniques of terror — assassination, abuses, kidnappings and intimidation — against the Viet Cong leadership.'"^^

In 1967 “counter-terror” was institutionalized, and concealed within a new programme designed to co-ordinate all aspects of pacification, particularly in the countryside. Euphemistically called “Rural Developmenf’, it was run by an agency called Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, CORDS, which, according to one specialist who worked closely with it, had “primarily counterterrorist functions”.*"^ Frank Snepp described CORDS in the context of the move of the CIA from intelligence-gathering into such fields as “the recruiting and training of counter-terrorist teams”.'"^^ “Rural Developmenf’ was conceived and set up by Robert Komer, a former White House CIA adviser, as a: coordinated approach to ‘rooting ouf the Viet Cong political apparatus [through counterterrorism] and ‘rooting in’ the government [through various public works projects in the countryside].''**^

45

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

Pacification in the hamlets was to be carried out entirely by special teams trained for the task; their first objective was always the “rooting out of the Viet Cong infrastructure”, using the same ruthless means they held were used by the NLF: None of these teams had any spectacular success, but they were nonetheless bathed in a certain Special Forces mystique, the principle behind which was that the Americans could win the war if they imitated the enemy tactics.’'^* The problem, apparently, was that the Rural Development teams had little to offer to satisfy village grievances — they could hardly eliminate corrupt but loyal local government officials.'^® The first stage of operations, “rooting out” an essentially invisible guerrilla infrastructure, and the technique of terrorism (“counter¬ terrorism”) is hardly conducive to winning friends. This aspect of rural development and pacification is the least documented in declassified documents; apparently no major internal study on its possible role in wrecking the rural pacification schemes has been produced: none, at least that is declassified. Scattered references to counter-terror must be fitted together from official and semi-official sources. In the critical literature on the CIA, we find that “Counter-Terror” teams set up by the CIA in 1965 were renamed in 1966 when “the agency became wary of adverse publicity surrounding the use of the word ‘terror The specialist “CT’ teams were subsequently called “Provincial Reconnaissance Units” (PRUs) and in 1967 integrated into the “Rural Development” programme. After 1967, PRU counter-terror teams functioned as the strike force of the “Phoenix” programme that dominated “Rural Development” under William Colby’s direction.*^^ At its peak this programme’s counter-terror teams included up to 30,000 specially trained agents,government terrorists supervised by US personnel. “Phoenix”, the culmination of the counter-terror pro¬ gramme in Vietnam is the operation to which the systems of regular assassinations in Guatemala, and more recently in El Salvador, are most often compared. The United States public first learned of “Phoenix” in 1971 from a private report on US congressional hearings by the House Foreign Operations and Government Information Subcommittee, leaked to and summarized by the press, which raised “serious moral considerations [regarding the advisability] of US support for a program that has allegedly included torture, murder and inhumane treatment of South Vietnamese civilians”. The official figure given in the report was 20,587 killed from 1968 through May 1971.The report pointed out that “it was possible that many of the more than 20,000 suspected Vietcong killed under the program known as Phoenix were actually innocent civilians who were victims of faulty intelligence.” 46

“Meeting Terror with Terror”: a Policy of Failure

In the 1971 hearings William Colby gave the following rather antiseptic description of “Phoenix”: The Phoenix program includes an intelligence program to identify the members of the VCI, an operational program to apprehend them, a legal program to restrain them and a detention program to confine them.*^^ Colby insisted that “Phoenix” was “not a program of assassination”, yet provided the figure of 20,587 suspects killed;*-*’^ the South Vietnamese government credited “Phoenix” with 40,994 “kills”.The true number of civilians assassinated or executed under the auspices of “Phoenix” will never be known, no more than the true toll of the counter-insurgency policies launched at about the same time in Guatemala. Despite Mr Colby's disclaimer, on the basis of the evidence, we cannot doubt, that the objective of the programme, the rooting out of the “Viet Cong Infrastructure”, was pursued largely through assassination, very often of innocents. In 1969 the United States set a goal for the Phoenix program to “neutralize” twenty thousand NLF agents during the year, and at the end of the year Government of Vietnam authorities reported 19,534 agents “neutralized”. The figure was unsettling in that there had been no corresponding decline in American estimates of NLF agents at large. Who. then, were the 19,534 people, and what had become of them?'^* United States personnel who testified in the 1971 hearings said that to “neutralize” meant to murder, either at the moment of detention, or after interrogation.*^^ The 1971 hearings were chilling not only for the deaths attributed to the “Phoenix” programme, but for the information given on the organizational complexity of the programme, particularly the adminis¬ trative isolation of its supervisors, responsible for the designation of targets for arrest and/or murder, and, in any case, nearly certain death, from the PRU gunmen themselves. Compiling lists was described as an almost mechanical, clerical procedure, an academic exercise. Three entries in a dossier, three denunciations from whatever source, automatically placed the suspect on widely distributed lists as a person to be sought for immediate detention and interrogation, with no right to trial: If a person has three such references in his dossier, whether verified or not, he or she is targetted as ‘VCI cadre’ [VCI was jargon for “Viet Cong Infrastructure”] or‘VCI suspect’ and his/her name is added to the ‘blacklist’ [or “greenlist”] carried by all military and police units in South Vietnam. Once on the blacklist a person is liable to immediate arrest interrogation and detention without right to trial or other judicial safeguards.'^ 47

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

The “Phoenix” programme introduced mechanistic criteria for the targetting of suspects, and administrative procedures using computers,'^' quotas, and indirect impersonal supervision by CIA officials who never entered the villages in which they were targetting suspects. Two principal methods were used in the field to execute the decisions made by central supervisors who compiled the lists of suspects to be detained or “neutralized”: a) Counter-terror teams would be deployed to the countryside to grab a previously located suspect, usually at night, and often summarily execute him on the spot,'^^ or b) “cordon and search” operations would be used to locate and detain suspects in their village or hamlet. . . . the National Police with the Regional Forces or the Popular Forces cordon off a village and send everybody in that village through a singlefile line where they are looked at and examined and searched by the National Police and are checked against the‘blacklisf or'greenlisf and if they are identified as . . . having a dossier in existence, they are arrested and sent to the province interrogation centre.'^^

This procedure is almost identical to that described in 1962 by Philippine Army counter-insurgency specialist Lieutenant-Colonel Luis A. Villarreal, who had had combat experience against the Huk rebellion in the 1950s: Screening points were set up periodically in each community, and all persons were screened against the (intelligence) files... After the screening the civil affairs unit held a rally, with short educational talks on citizenship, democracy, the role of the army in antiguerrilla warfare, and communism.*^

Whether many villagers in either the Philippines or Vietnam could appreciate lectures, or be convinced by instructive films on democracy after experiencing a “cordon and search” operation in which their close relatives or neighbours had been dragged off, is questionable. In Vietnam, where over 20,000 were "killed in such operations, we can presume that an atmosphere of terror surrounded them. In Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s, villages are also surrounded by army troops on market days — when the maximum population is present — with single-file screening against “black lists”, with an impersonal, blind implacability perhaps more terrifying even than in Vietnam or the Philippines. And the Guatemalan and Salvadorean military have tended to dispense with the lectures and films. In essence, the “Phoenix” programme in Vietnam, and the analogous systems of counter-terror in Central America, rendered large portions of the population vulnerable to arbitrary, inescapable terrorism supported 48

"Meeting Terror with Terror": a Policy of Failure

by all the power of the state. Local officials, both civil and military, with the powers of “Phoenix” or similar programmes at their disposal, can use them to eliminate personal enemies, extort payment for protection, or simply arbitrarily pick out “suspects” to fill a quota.

Counter-Terror and the Winning of Hearts and Minds Ironically, the state terror tactics that dominated counter-insurgency operations in Vietnam and many Latin American states in the 1960s and 1970s were implemented along with programmes to “win over” the population, aimed at pulling local support from under the guerrillas. In Vietnam, these programmes — vocational schools, clinics, and so on — were considerably more grandiose and expensive than those in Central America, and are evidence that contemporary counter-insurgency textbooks’ insistence on “development”, as well as repression, was not simply a screen. There was, of course, the problem of relative resources — most of these were invested in patently military or police operations — and relative impact — a 500 pound bomb made a bigger impact on a hamlet than a new school; new shoes for the children has less impact than the “disappearance” and murder of their fathers. In any case, counter-terror, as a policy, conflicted with an essential counter-insurgency maxim that in the final analysis, the population must be won over. Just as the supervisors of “Phoenix”, in their airconditioned offices in the capital, could never be sure that a “Phoenix” agent was not lining up an old enemy for targetting, the policy makers failed to take into account the human factor involved in opening the floodgates to official terrorism. This was compounded by secrecy — integral to terrorism, official or otherwise. The policy makers con¬ ceivably wanted no details, only statistics, hard and dispassionate, to be labelled as convenience dictated. If “Phoenix” planners were informed that 20,587 “Viet Cong” were “neutralized”, that is killed, they may have concluded that counter-terror had been effective. It would have been inconvenient to ask if the victims were really NLF supporters, if their assassinations stirred others to join the NLF, and if localized government terrorism was not destroying government authority in the villages by arbitrary abuse of government power, and disintegrating any residual respect for the law on the part of the authorities themselves. In official discussions on counter-terror as part of counter-insurgency doctrine, emphasis has generally been laid on the necessity that it be both highly selective, and short in duration. It has been considered expedient as offering a quick solution to insurgency by liquidating chief insurgents. In practice, however, counter-terror in US military doctrine was built upon a widening definition of insurgency that, by the mid1960s,could categorize as an insurgent almost any person in active, passive, or even potential opposition to a given government. This 49

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

conceptual expansion complicated the element of selectivity. Even more problematic, where counter-terror did not bring about a quick solution, the tendency was to determine its targets less selectively, and broaden the scale of counter-terror. It could then become a permanent feature of the security system. Even given a narrow conceptual guideline for identifying targets for counter-terrorist attacks, say limiting these to the authentic gun-toting guerrillas, the counter-terror theorist must face the problem shared by all counter-insurgents: how to locate and grab that particular indi¬ vidual. Where counter-terror operations are entirely covert and disavowed by their government sponsors — as in Guatemala — the problem is just as daunting as in overt counter-insurgency of the Vietnam type. The only advantage of secrecy is governments’ easier evasion of accountability. The Vietnamese government, isolated from world public opinion by communication barriers of language and policy, actually legalized the operations of the “Phoenix” programme; in Central America, terrorist government policies have been entirely clandestine, although facilitated by certain aspects of the law. In both cases operational policy glossed over the distinction between the authentic guerrilla or revolutionary and the ordinary citizen. The [Phoenix] program in effect eliminated the cumbersome category of ‘civilian’; it gave the GVN [Government of Vietnam] and initially the American troops as well, license and justification for the arrest torture, or killing of anyone in the country, whether or not the person was carrying a gun. And many officials took advantage of that license.'^^

This generalization of the enemy, and the accompanying sanctions, would make more sense if the “win the hearts and minds” component of counter-insurgency doctrine were wholly a sham; perhaps to the military and intelligence agencies thdii executed policy it was. For a more acceptable explanation we might reconsider the problem posed by the difficulty of distinguishing the guerrilla from other human beings. Presumably a military occupation force would find it quite baffling to try singling out guerrillas moving within a relatively homogeneous population: their task would be simpler if the population were divided into mutually antagonistic ethnic, religious or linguistic groups, of which only one group supported the rebels. This, however, is rarely the case. On the other hand, a government based upon a small elite economic group, or an unrepresentative political clique, confronted by domestic insurgency, might face similar difficulties in identifying its enemies. Where the population can generally be divided into a small group of “haves”, and a very large one of “have nots” (or of “ins” and “outs”)’^ the potential insurgents might be found throughout most of the population, making identification of the true guerrilla especially difficult. 50

“Meeting Terror with Terror": a Policy of Failure

[

I I I 1 : '

j ;; ■i

"

In Guatemala and El Salvador (and in Somoza's Nicaragua) traditional social and economic divisions have been so extreme that the people have always been divided into “ins ' and “outs’’ in the minds of those wielding economic and political power. In Guatemala the “outs’’ have always been set apart by poverty, but now these traditional “outs” — the poor, the Indians, the peasants and slum dwellers — are allied through political movements with a growing sector of the Guatemalan middle class, the clergy, intellectuals and organized labour. This is the sea in which the guerrilla fish now moves. The same is true of El Salvador where the “outs” are also largely made up of rural peasants and urban poor, with political allies in middle income groups analogous to those of Guatemala. A parallel process took place in Nicaragua where, in the wake of the 1972 earthquake, the Somoza clique's massive profiteering accelerated a process of alienation and marginalization of all but the Somoza family's immediate economic circle. By 1978 the “outs” included many of the traditional elite families of Nicaragua, and the anti-Somoza rich, as well as the poor, were hit by government terrorism; torture, assassination and summary executions. In all three of these Central American countries terror tactics intended to destroy guerrilla movements led to indiscriminate attacks on anyone considered to be a member of a troublesome social group; rural school teachers, sociologists, trade unionists, Roman Catholic catechists, or the unfortunate residents of isolated rural areas where guerrilla groups were known to operate. Thus, in 1980, nearly 200 members of El Salvador's National Education Association. ANDES, mostly members of local chapters, were hunted down, dragged from their homes and murdered, or machine-gunned in their classrooms. Since ANDES as a whole was labelled a “leftist” organization, and leftist organizations were considered as supporters of insurgency, being a member in the only national teachers' organization in the country was tantamount to bearing arms in open revolution. Schoolteachers who saw so many of their colleagues equated with guerrillas and killed were given a particularly strong incentive to join the guerrillas. In Guatemala there are numerous similar examples; in 1980, in two separate daylight raids, authorities first arrested 27 leaders of the Central Nacional de Trabajadores, the major national trade union federation, in their downtown office, then 17 others who were meeting at a church conference centre. Authorities refused all requests for information on their fate and it is generally assumed they were murdered. To be a trade unionist is to be an insurgent is to be the target for murder by the state. In Nicaragua, in the final year of fighting, to be young was to be an insurgent to be put against a wall and killed. After the rebellion of cities such as Esteli and Leon, the National Guard went systematically from door to door in some neighbourhoods, removing and shooting boys and young men between the approximate ages of 12 and 30. 51

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

The steady expansion of the group liable for targetting as presumed insurgents is, of course, an indicator that previous counter-insurgency policies have not been successful, or, indeed, that they have rebounded and fed the fires of insurrection. An excellent example happened under the Somoza regime. After 1974, the government fought the Frente Sandinista with massive arrests, killings in the university community, and scorched earth depopulation operations in the rural north-east of the country where the guerrillas had their initial strongholds. In 1974 the targets were peasants in isolated areas, students, and others believed to have direct contact with the insurgents. By 1978 the scope of the target had expanded to include leaders of the local Chambers of Commerce. Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and officials of the local Red Cross: all were associated with insurgency and subject to state terrorism. Finally, in September 1978, the major cities were largely destroyed by bombing and in July 1979 the government fell. In Guatemala, El Salvador and pre-revolutionary Nicaragua only the “ins ’ — quite a small group — have been relatively immune to state terrorism. The vast and expanding sea of “outs”, within which the guerrillas hide and gain their strength, is wholly vulnerable to counter¬ terror. State terror tactics in Guatemala and El Salvador, and in the last year of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, have taken on an almost random, mass-oriented form. The net result has been to drive the mass of the “out” groups to actively join the insurgency: they have had no alternative. Only the rich could emigrate. Part of the classic doctrine of counter-insurgency urges the protection of innocent civilians both from the “depredations” of the guerrillas and the reaction of the state. However, in the case of a mass-based insurgency, seconded by the vast majority of the population, the perception of the “innocent civilian” becomes obscured. In 1978, in El Salvador, a series of full-page advertisements paid for by private enterprise, declared that, “You are either With us or Against us”, and prophesied death and destruction for those Salvadoreans who did not take up the sword with them to fight “Communism”. When so pressed, a society becomes wholly polarized. A point can be reached when the guerrillas no longer move through a medium of passive sympathizers, but, as in 'Vietnam, in Nicaragua, and now El Salvador and Guatemala, a substantial part of the population actively joins the insurgency. Where does this leave counter-insurgency theory? If the guerrillas cannot be distinguished, much less isolated from the people, then counter-insurgency takes on the characteristics of conventional warfare, with the ‘enemy’ the people as a whole. This was the point reached in September 1978 in Nicaragua, where the counter¬ insurgency war became indisputably the “conventional” war of a private army against an entire people; there is no other explanation for the near destruction of Nicaragua’s major cities with artillery, 500 pound bombs and rockets. The individualized acts of counter-terror of 52

"Meeting Terror with Terror ": a Policy of Failure

previous years were translated into proportionately greater acts of terror intended to punish and intimidate entire towns and cities. All counter-insurgency doctrine begs the question of the political motivation of insurgency, its justification, and its scope; furthermore, it is assumed that any insurgency, given appropriate technique, can be satisfactorily quelled. The dilemma of the counter-insurgent facing an insurgency truly supported by an entire people is described in Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars as both a practical and a moral problem: ... what if the guerrillas can not be isolated from the people? What if the levee en masse is a reality and not merely a piece of propaganda? Characteristically, the military handbooks neither pose nor answer such questions. There is. however, a moral argument to be made if this point is reached: the anti-guerrilla war can then no longer be fought: and not just because, from a strategic point of view, it can no longer be won. It cannot be fought because it is no longer an anti-guerrilla but an anti-social war, a war against an entire people, in which no distinctions would be possible in the actual fighting. . . But this is the limiting feature of guerrilla war. .

This problem is probably very much in the minds of United States policy makers dealing with El Salvador, and would explain the effort by these officials to claim that the Salvadorean insurgency is not supported by the population (giving, for example, official assessments of general strike action as "unsuccessfuf’); that foreign (other than US) inter¬ vention is a major factor in El Salvador (suggesting that the insurgency did not originate with the Salvadorean people); and that a large proportion of the population has been “won over” to the US-backed government through “moderate” reforms. The only answer necessary is to point out the governmenf s actions against the general public that supposedly supports it: the villages bombed and burned, the mass killings, and the terrorism that has claimed the lives of some 50,000 Salvadoreans who never saw “combat” but were killed while helpless in the hands of the security forces.^^^ This is not a reaction one would expect to an insurgency lacking popular support, but would appear to verge on the edge of Walzer’s “anti-social” war: no longer a war against insurgents, but a war against all of the “outs”, who are most of the people.

53

5. The Role of Intelligence and the CIA’s Public Safety Programme

The United States military assistance programme dominated the counter-insurgency effort with its doctrine, funding and large con¬ tingents of personnel, but after 1960. much of the expertise and material assistance was provided by US civilian agencies. The CIA and AID in particular appear to have been the principal providers of intelligence assistance, both to civil and military forces. The influence of these agencies on the security assistance programmes in El Salvador and Guatemala had its greatest impact on the respective intelligence systems, through the creation of national intelligence centres to co¬ ordinate and control information gathering and operations of all the disparate parts of the security systems. The desire to strengthen internal security systems in the wake of the Cuban revolution resulted in a consolidated programme of police assistance under the direction of AID's Office of Public Safety. The emergence of Public Safety as a semi-autonomous agency was one outcome of President Kennedy's instruction to AID to review its support of “local police forces for internal security and counter¬ insurgency purposes” in order to ensure these programmes would not be “neglected" within the overall foreign assistance programme.'^*^ In 1962 an Ad Hoc Inter-Departmental Committee on Police Assistance was appointed to prepare a study of existing internal security assistance programmes and propose a course for the future. The Committee included one representative from each of the departments of Defense and Justice. AID. and the CIA. and was chaired by Byron Engle, identified in the committee's final report as the representative for the CIA. (Mr Engle subsequently served as the Director of the Office of Public Safety from November 1962. when it became semiautonomous from AID. until April 1973. shortly before it was phased out. He ritually denied he or the programme had any links with the CIA throughout his tenure of office.)'^*^ The policy study produced by the Committee established a framework for a co-ordinated US effort to improve the capabilities 54

The Role of Intelligence . . .

of civil police and paramilitary forces abroad through “training, technical assistance, and equipment". The stated objectives were twofold: to assist friendly governments “to enforce the law and maintain public order", and to “counter Communist inspired or exploited subversion and insurgency".'^' The latter objective is given considerably more weight in the summary of the reporfs findings: The police forces of the Free World comprise an important source of power for combating indirect aggression. Through a properly organized, directed, coordinated and integrated police assistance activity, it is possible to focus the immense latent resources of these forces against a common enemy which employs indirect aggression to attain its goals . .. Properly organized, directed and fully supported by the responsible agencie.s, the police assistance program can become an effective instrumentality [sic) in accomplishing US security objectives.'^-

The Committee concluded that police assistance objectives should be met by centralizing all programmes under the Office of Public Safety, improving training systems (by expanding overseas Public Safety advisory staff and establishing the International Police Academy), improving the provision of material assistance, and establishing “a central body of knowledge of tactics and techniques [and to] translate this knowledge into doctrine".' The report also stressed the primary role of police intelligence agencies in counter-insurgency: These forces when properly trained, equipped and directed can be important instruments for combating the spread of Communist-inspired insurgency. Their investigative mechanisms are responsible for detecting and identifying individuals and organizations engaged in subversive insurgency in its incipient state . . .

Theoretical writing on counter-insurgency, in the 1960s, and earlier, invariably emphasized the particular advantages of police over military bodies in establishing and operating intelligence systems. Sir Robert Thompson, for example, drew upon his experience with the Malayan “Emergency" (and the British concept of the civil police) when he stated that the “special branch" (the pre-existing political branch of the civil police) was the logical organization within which to concentrate intelligence resources:“The police force is a state organization reaching out into every corner of the country and will have had long experience of close contact with the population.Or, in the words of another counter-insurgency specialist, “the police intelligence system adapted to rooting out the non-political criminal can easily turn its attention to the political criminal."'^-'^ The United States government counter¬ insurgency establishment shared this perception. In a 1965 speech at 55

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

Public Safety’s International Police Academy (IPA), General Maxwell Taylor. President Kennedy’s chief military adviser and counter¬ insurgency expert, called explicitly for strong police intelligence organizations as a requisite for counter-insurgency; The outstanding lesson is that we should never let another Vietnam-type situation arise again ... We have learned the need for a strong police force and a strong police intelligence organization to assist in identifying early the symptoms of an incipient subversive situation.

The advisability of strengthening police intelligence organizations across the board, however, posed some ethical questions. The distinc¬ tion between a professional police intelligence organization and a classic political police is. at best. hazy, and whether the first assumes the characteristics of the second may ultimately depend upon the previous existence of a strong law enforcement system and a healthy civil police tradition — before any counter-insurgency brief for police intelligence is introduced. When police intelligence agencies become so oppressive that they can fairly be called political, or secret police, they become what author Milton Lipson. in United Nations World (February 1948) called the “antithesis” of “legal or ordinary police” forces.'^^ The political police, in contrast, he described as the instrument of terror, the world's fastest growing business . . . maintained by authori¬ tarian regimes to safeguard themselves, to perpetuate themselves in power. They are superimposed on society, their function being not the enforcement of the law. but the protection of a minority system of government: not suppression of crime but suppression of opposition.

Lipson. of course, was writing when the atrocities of the Gestapo and the death camps were still fresh in the mind of the public, and when news of Stalin’s purges was trickling out to the West; in the same year the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed. According to civil-military relations expert Morris Janowitz of the University of Chicago, “political police” have certain generic functions: [They] engage in surveillance, intimidation and direct coercion, physical control and detention, and the endless variety of manipulative devices that centuries of human exploitation have developed.*^'^

Political police activities were already part of the history of El Salvador and Guatemala; but in the course of the 1960s the traditional political police forces underwent radical expansion and change. They continued to engage in “surveillance, intimidation and direct coercion” 56

The Role of Intelligence . . .

but assisted by United States programmes operated more systemati¬ cally and in concert with all other areas of the security system. The special role to be played by updated and rationalized intelligence organizations in a situation ot actual or incipient insurgency was summarized by General William Westmoreland in his 1%8 speech to the 8th Conference of American Armies: In what wc call conventional warlarc. the intelligence agencies of one nation operate in complete isolation troin the intelligence agencies of their allies. In most countries the intelligence agencies ol government services even isolate themselves Irom each other. In an insurgency situation this method of handling intelligence will not work. Here more than ever, intelligence collection must be timely, responsible, and detailed. And particularly important is the requirement that at each level of government particularly within the police forces — efforts and resources must be pooled to meet the common need. Intelligence must not be viewed as an end in itself; it must be used as a means to an end. By this I mean that the finest intelligence available is worthless until it is coordinated, evaluated, and put into the hands of the user — the commander — the man who can do something about it.'^**

The creation of central agencies at the highest level to co-ordinate intelligence collection, evaluation and operations was essential to the new counter-insurgency model. The new intelligence bodies were to co¬ ordinate the intelligence activities of all civil and military agencies, and to subordinate all branches of the security systems to a political police function. In Guatemala and El Salvador these administrative inno¬ vations placed all facets of the intelligence function under the direction of presidential intelligence agencies which became inter-agency command centres directing all parts of the security systems. After 1962, the development of sophisticated intelligence systems fell primarily to the Office of Public Safety, and to the CIA.

Police Assistance: The Agencies Involved The CIA’s close relation to the Public Safety Program, from Public Safety’s Director to its field advisers and the International Police Academy, was a permanent subject of speculation during the Pro¬ gramme’s lifetime, and. in 1974, largely contributed to the eventual suspension of all police assistance abroad by the US Congress. The extent of formal CIA participation in the police advisory effort was outlined in the 1962 Ad Hoc Committee report quoted above: The CIA provides personnel, training, equipment, and intelligence and logistical support to the interagency (police assistance) programs, and

57

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency direct assistance to police where this must be done covertly... The Agency has personnel integrated in AID police programs in ten ofthe27 countries in which AID has programs and is spending some $2 million annually in these and other countries in activities which further the police assistance aspect of US Basic National Security Policy Objectives.'^'

CIA headquarters maintained a special department for matters concerning police assistance, from provision of support to advisory staff in the field to liaison “with other US Government agencies on police matters [and] with foreign police executives and police professional associations under appropriate cover.Close contact was maintained by CIA headquarters both with its own personnel in Public Safety, and with the Chief Public Safety advisers in the field: The Agency renders intelligence support to the police programs by providing the Chief Advisors with timely intelligence information concerning matters which may affect program implementation. CIA provides the latest information on developments in Sino-Soviet strategy and techniques to its personnel in the AID police programs who are working as advisors in the counter-intelligence, counter-espionage, counterguerrilla, and other countersubversive fields . . . CIA's logistical facilities in the United States and abroad are sometimes used to facilitate the emergency procurement and delivery of material in situations where normal US Government procedures are a handicap to immediate action.'"-^

This enumeration of the wide range of “countersubversive fields” on which Public Safety/CIA personnel were advising, to some extent defines just which parts of Public Safety's advisory programme were staffed by the CIA. In any case, traffic consultants, experts in police administration, and many other authentic police scientists — who had little to do with the overtly political aspects of the programme, or the CIA — were also involved in the programme. A reading of Public Safety's reports from Central America gives the impression that most of the work, and most of the advisers had dealt with conventional and unexciting aspects of law enforcement, apparently trying, in good faith, to create a professional system for law enforcement. The work of members of advisory teams dealing with intelligence, however, effectively hijacked the programme and redirected it towards less conventional objectives. The CIA's police assistance operations, as defined in the 1962 Ad Hoc Committee's report, were not necessarily limited to the use of Public Safety cover; whether or not Public Safety had a programme, “The CIA maintained a covert relationship with most of the police and internal security services of the Free World, which in a few instances may involve the provision of advice, training and equipment.”"''* In most of 58

The Role of Intelligence. . .

these relationships, however, the major concern was the development of friendly countries’ domestic intelligence apparatus, or in CIA parlance investigative mechanisms . Assisting the creation of intelligence counterparts in second countries could, ol course, be seen as a measure to ensure eflective counter-insurgency measures, with the fringe benefit of placing the CIA in a privileged position to share in information gathered, and to diplomatically steer the intelligence apparatus toward its own objectives. A principal role ot the CIA after 1960 was training foreign police personnel, in either the United States, their own, or third countries. In 1962 it was acknowledged in contidential documents that CIA conducts covert police training in the United States, host countries, and third countries... Selected AID participants are given this training in the United States. CIA has provided training annually for approximately 150 foreign police in the United States. 100 in third countries, and 1,200 in host countries.'*^-''

Training at that time included "anti-Communist operations, sur¬ veillance. interrogation, handling of informants, and . . . other techniques and skills necessary in effective investigation.”'*^^ Evidence that the CIA also trained foreign security personnel in terrorism techniques came to the attention of Congress and the public in 1973, when information became available on students brought to the United States to attend the International Police Academy being trained in the making and use of explosive devices at a secret camp in Texas. Disarmingly called the"Technical Investigations Course”, its substance became known after an inquiry by Senator James Abourezk forced the AID to release the information in September 1973.'*^^ In a letter dated 25 September 1973, AID acknowledged the existence of the course, which involved fourweeks of lectures and seminars at the International Police Academy and four weeks of “practical exercises” at the Border Patrol Academy at Los Fresnos, Texas; the course began in 1969 and was staffed with CIA instructors: Prior to establishing the first course in 1969. and not having the needed skills within its own staff. OPS attempted without success to obtain instructors from the Department of Defense with expertise in demons¬ trating the construction, use and counter measures against homemade bombs and explosive devices used by criminal terrorist.s. Subsequently, the Central Intelligence Agency agreed to provide guest lecturers for this portion of the training program.'*^**

AID said the course was expressly designed to instruct students in making terrorist devices from easily obtained materials:

59

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency The thrust of the instruction at the Border Patrol Academy introduces trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques likely to be used by criminal terrorists in the manufacture of explosive and incendiaries so that the trainee will be able to identify them and take preventive action to protect lives and property upon his return to his country. Different types of explosive devices and “booby-traps and their construction and use by terrorists are demonstrated. This entails practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices.'*^*^

AID might have attempted to justify the CIA training programme as designed to teach students to deactivate or to dispose of terrorist devices, or stressed its strictly forensic element but on the contrary, it noted that the course was not designed to train bomb disposal technicians; The Technical Investigation Course is the only course offered by the Office of Public Safety where attention is directed to the investigation of criminal manufacture and use of explosive devices. A police bomb investigator must be thoroughly familiar with the components and effects of explosive devices used by terrorists. The course is not designed to. nor does it prepare the student to be a bomb or explosive disposal technician, but rather to enhance his investigative skills.'*^*'

A course outline attached to the AID letter to Senator Abourezk elaborated on the practical skills taught including work with “Terrorist Devices; Fabrication and Functioning of Devices; Improvised Triggering Devices; and Incendiaries'"; lecture/demonstrations were also provided on “Assassination Weapons: A discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin". A more dramatic, or literary account of the Texas “bomb schooF, based largely on interviews, appeared in A.J. 'Lo.ngguXh'sHidden Terrors (1978) and was fairly consistent with AID’S view on the technical aspect of training, but places it in the context of practical exercises in political warfare, fighting terror with terror; The students were called guerrillas, and they were told, this is what guerrillas do... The students were required to sign oaths of secrecy, and to live at the camp, under permanent guard, in tents on the isolated Texas plain. Their course began with a review of various explosives, including D-3 and C-4 plastic bombs, and a scientific analysis ofTNT. The students were instructed in fuses — how to light them, how to time them . . .'‘^-

Training in the use of terrorist devices, according to Langguth was eminently practical: ... the students had to race the clock, setting a charge against a gas tank or a telephone pole in a specified number of minutes. . . Finally, the thirty

60

The Role of hi telligence . . . students of the eoiirse. all from Central and South America, were given a major assignment: blow up a convoy oftrucks; hit a gas depot surrounded by booby traps; interrupt enemy communications by slipping past sentinels and knocking over telephone poles . ,

Although the CIA participated in major training programmes for foreign security personnel within the United States, declassified documents from the late 1960s suggest its principal training and advisory role was performed to a large extent within the foreign intelligence and police agencies overseas. Documentation from the Public Safety Program on the advisory programme in Guatemala and El Salvador confirms that, on paper. CIA advisers/operators were integrated into the Public Safety teams although they spent most of their time working directly with the respective intelligence and political police agencies. The degree of autonomy accorded the CIA’s people left Public Safety' advisers on “legitimate” law enforcement projects somewhat disgruntled. A 1967 survey of the Public Safety Program in Central America, already cited, pointed out that the ’nvestigations advisers" assigned to the Public Safety teams worked from the CIA office and spent virtually all their time with the intelligence agencies, to the neglect of Public Safety's own. more conventional work.'*^'^ This, according to the author of the report, former Ambassador to Venezuela C. Allan Stewart, left unsatisfied a serious need for “real” criminal investigations advisers. The Chief Public Safety Advisers in both Guatemala and El Salvador are quoted as having expressed concern that “investigations advisers” had made no effort to assist with conventional law enforcement problems, or even to co-operate with their ostensible superiors and colleagues. Ambassador Stewart himself was perturbed when “investigations adviser” Daniel Smith, an OPS employee, would not even meet the OPS evaluaters. and the Chief Adviser complained that sometimes he did not see the adviser for weeks at a time.'*^-’’ The “investigations adviser” was included in the formal complement of Public Safety advisers, but was “nonexistent as far as relating his activities to the Public Safety Program is concerned”'*^^ (perhaps to the credit of the Public Safety Program). According to Ambassador Stewart's report, the “investigations adviser” in El Salvador worked solely with the political sectors of the security system, including the secret 15-man Presidential Security Service (“It was learned that the investigations advisor works with the Security Service, the intelligence units of the National Police and National Guard, and the Immigration Service, all of which receive assistance under the Public Safety Program”). In 1967. the situation in Guatemala was similar, although the particular “investigations advisor", Dave Wright did meet the evaluation mission from the Office of Public Safety. As in El Salvador, he worked exclusively with top intelligence/political police agencies — (“He works

61

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

with the intelligence unit of the National Police . . . but spends the majority of his time with the Security Service which coordinates intelligence activities of the National Police and Army’.)'*^^ The Guatemala Security Service was a direct counterpart of the Salvadorean Presidential Security Service; both began operation in 1964, and linked police and military intelligence networks at the presidential level. In both countries, after 1964, the presidential agencies were the central co-ordinators of civil and military intelligence networks, and the nerve centre for the counter-insurgency programme. These agencies are discussed in detail later; there is some evidence, however that a principal objective of security assistance in the intelligence area throughout Latin America was the creation of similar agencies. The 1967 survey report quoted above, for example, describes the assistance given by “CAS" — an acronym used for the CIA — to help the Costa Ricans create their own “Security Agency", which Ambassador Stewart described as “well housed and self-sufficient . . . This unit is almost autonomous in operation and is trained to be a quick action group".Like its counterparts in El Salvador and Guatemala, the Costa Rican “Security Agency" controlled a central communications nexus linking all national intelligence agencies, and provided permanent contact with top intelligence agencies throughout the region, and with US agencies based in the Panama Canal Zone: While I was in San Jose TDY Communications Advisor... was assisting the Costa Ricans in installing the Security Communications Operations Center in new quarters. All communications networks are combined in one building and in event of an emergency there is space to install a joint operations center. Thanks to AID/PS. Costa Rica has a nation-wide radio network . . . The Central American network is also housed in the communications center, operates around the clock, and is extensively used . .

Not to belabour the CIA’s role in security assistance, it should be emphasized that each of the US agencies with overseas security concerns contributed in some way to police training programmes, and had a counter-insurgency brief Even the Eederal Bureau of Investi¬ gation (FBI) had some involvement in training foreign security personnel, although this was largely limited to advising AID on technical aspects of law enforcement, on curriculum, and the distri¬ bution of FBI publications to foreign police bodies. The presence of FBI officials abroad was, according to declassified documents, limited strictly to activities “in connection with FBI internal US responsi¬ bilities”; a limitation that appears to have been respected.-*^' In the 1962 Ad Hoc Committee report, the FBI's overseas role is described as “foreign liaison”:

62

The Role of Intelligence. . . The FBI has rendered considerable technical and training assistance to foreign police incidental to discharging its foreign liaison responsibilities. It maintains personnel abroad in connection with FBI internal US responsibilities. FBI representatives located in 11 major foreign capitals... maintain contact with police and security agencies in these countries and in approximately 35 adjacent countries. As attaches of the embassies where assigned, they maintain cooperative relationships with the Country Team; they exchange law enforcement information with foreign officers; participate in police training programs of foreign countries|etc.| . .

In the 1960s the formal delegation of responsibilities for major areas of United States security assistance was defined as follows; State: Formulation of policy, general coordination and review of country programs; d/D; Assistance to conventional police forces including those having constabulary/paramilitary umts: Defense: Assistance to police and security elements in military forces including military counterintelligence unit.s, and Special Forces; CIA: Covert assistance to the intelligence and investigative units of police and security forces.-"-^

Perhaps most of interest in this breakdown is the distinction of those aspects of the Department of Defense's assistance programme con¬ sidered to fall outside conventional military assistance; assistance dealing with counter-intelligence and Special Forces. While the CIA has reportedly placed personnel under both Public Safety and military mission cover for its advisory and intelligence work, evidence exists that the Department of Defense has performed its role in the programme for police and security assistance by placing its personnel under civilian cover. The 1966 classified US Army “Counterinsurgency Bluebook" reports on the army's collaboration with the police assistance pro¬ gramme: "the US Army has supported the Public Safety Program throughout the world with the loan of US Army Police Corps Officers as police technical advisors".-'*^ In 1965, a total of 10 army officers were “on loan to the Office of Public Safety/AID", and. as Public Safety advisers, were based in Guatemala. Honduras, Brazil, Ecuador, the Philippines and Indonesia.-*’-'’

Substance of Intelligence Assistance Intelligence was the vital area for effective implementation of all aspects of counter-insurgency organization, and that in which military and non-military security assistance appears to have been most closely intermeshed. US Assistant Secretary of State Covey T. Oliver, in an appearance in the 1969 congressional hearings, attributed utmost priority to the “upgrading of Latin America s intelligence forces , and 63

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

said that this was “a major area of technical assistance on our part . Upgrading was, according to Mr Oliver, supported by “grant assistance of equipmenf'.-*’^ The same hearing,s, called to review Latin America security assistance programmes, heard testimony from distinguished civilian experts on the importance of boosting the intelligence capabilities of friendly security services: . . . the strengthening of intelligence services is based on the obvious fact that few Latin American police or military establishments are effective in collecting and evaluating crude data. Intelligence, as used here, includes police files on common criminals and subversives.-*’^

The same witness, a civilian academic, added one cautionary note: Professionalization will not. in and by itself, prevent use of intelligence to repress legitimate or loyal opposition. It needs to be combined with intensive training on the role of the police in a democracy.-***

This point however, was not pursued in the 1969 hearings. Communications and Intelligence Intelligence for counter-insurgency required systems for information gathering and analysis, and for covert or overt action upon such information. One precondition for sophisticated intelligence systems was the development of communications capabilities adequate for co¬ ordination and control of all parts of the security systems. In the congressional statement cited above. Secretary Oliver in 1969 described intelligence as a matter both of detection and communications: ... we are discussing both the detection capability of civilian and other counterintelligence police forces... as well as communications between units involved in meeting guerrilla attack. We are helping, we are working hard in this area.-**'*

Sophisticated systems of data collection, processing and analysis, requisites for the intelligence “detection” (or interdiction) role, could be built only if good communications facilities existed. Public Safety Program spokesmen themselves, when praising the achievements of the programme, stressed its success in setting up communications systems, often from virtually nothing. In the 1973 congressional hearings, a spokesman described the programme’s achievements in the Dominican Republic, where “for the first time a police telecommunication network was developed”; in Brazil, where a “technical telecommunications center” was set up to serve the Federal Police (created on Public Safety advice); and in Ecuador, where “a telecommunications network has 64

The Role of Intelligence . . .

been set up in Quito and another is planned in Guayaquil". In Colombia "telecommunications networks have been initiated to provide nation¬ wide police coverage"; in Uruguay, "a police telecommunications network and interagency emergency network have been established”; and in Jamaica a "country-wide telecommunications network was installed".-"* Intelligence networks are basically systems devised to collect and to communicate information to central agencies (or individuals). At the turn of the century, the development of the telegraph networks in Guatemala and El Salvador did much to tighten the control of the caudillos of the day. extending their eyes and ears to the farthest reaches of the countryside. One of the most eloquent analogies for an intelligence net appeared in Guatemalan Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias' El Sefwr Presidente, modelled on a tyrant contemporary with the introduction of the telegraph. The president's omnipresent spy network is described as a web similar to the wires of a telegraph, communicating to him all that passed even "in the most secret hearts of the citizens"; ... a monstrous forest separated El Senor Presidente from his enemies, a forest of trees with ears that at the least echo revolved as if stirred by a hurricane... A network of invisible wires, more invisible than the wires of a telegraph communicated each leaf to El Senor Presidente. alert to all that passed in the most secret hearts of the citizens.-"

The "invisible wires" of modern telecommunications would, in the 1960s, reinforce the invisible networks of the traditional political police. The communications assistance provided by the US was designed to tie all elements of the security system into a central command structure, centralize the collection of information, and facilitate rapid, controlled deployment of forces to act upon it. In Guatemala and El Salvador, communications assistance is one of the most easily measurable achievements of the Public Safety Program. Communication within both security systems, extremely primitive in the early 1960s, was by 1964 rapidly brought to a level of some sophistication. In each country, communications systems within separate security forces were to be linked into central communications/intelligence agencies. Public Safety Program reports on Guatemala in 1960 described the police communications system as "virtually non-existent", but in 1963 the programme took credit for having provided the commodities and training to set up nationwide radio networks within the National and the Treasury Police, with base stations at the Casa Presidencial and National Police Headquarters.-’- In 1964, a central communications centre was established under the control of the presidential security service. A 1956 survey of El Salvador's National Police, produced by the US 65

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

International Cooperation Administration (ICA). found the polices communication with its provincial detachments was still through the public telegraph offices, and concluded dryly that “communications practices were inadequate"r'-^ By 1967, the various permanent detach¬ ments of the National Police, National Guard, and the Immigration Police (called at the time the “political police” by opposition groups) were linked up with their respective headquarters, and with a communications centre in the National Police headquarters.-''^ Communications were also of particular importance to the control and efficient use of networks of paramilitary civilian irregulars developed in Guatemala and El Salvador. It was the paramilitary apparatus of ORDEN in El Salvador, and the military commissioner system in Guatemala, that provided the “eyes and ears" of the security systems at the grass roots level. Systems channelling information from the rural areas were a major objective of the US security assistance programmes and of the military establishments in the region.-'^ A 1970 article, published in El Salvador's General Staff College's review by Salvadorean General Carlos Guzman Aguilar (on “Communist Sub¬ version and Guerrilla Action") deals explicitly with the use of such paramilitary “counter-guerrilla" organizations as ORDEN as an intelligence resource.-'^ General Guzman stresses the need to co¬ ordinate intelligence collection through such networks from the highest level: To develop an information service at a national level, the General Staff of the Armed Forces must elaborate plans and programs for the preparation of personnel to carry out specified missions ... it will be necessary for agencies to penetrate the governmental dependencies and recruit agents for intelligence networks at the level of villages ... It must be stated beforehand what agency or office of the Government will be the general coordinator, and what levels and grade of coordination will be carried out, indicating the responsibility for coordination of every intelligence *>17 agency^*'

Information gathered at the local level was to be collated by local or regional collection centres and channelled directly to the Army General Staff: The system that can be employed is the system of information collection centers. Under this system an agency, established permanently in the area, functions as a center for the collection and dissemination of intelligence . . . One form of this system would be the establishment of information collection centers with each Local Commandancy in each area of responsibility. The centers could be operated by Officers with the rank of sub-Lieutenant, Sergeant or Sub-sergeant with the necessary training for fulfilment of duties.-'^

66

The Role of Intelligence . . .

Government "guerrillas" within the paramilitary network could themselves be directed to act on the basis of centralized information, or vice versa; The information obtained by these centers in collaboration with the military canton patrol and civilian personnel would be disseminated to guerrilla units operating in the district . . . The guerrillas can provide information, including the identification of targets and the evaluation of damage ... to conventional Military Commanders.-''^

In the 1960s. the development of intelligence networks based on paramilitary organization became a principal achievement of the military, in both El Salvador and Guatemala, blow these networks were run — in general much as General Guzman suggests — is outlined in later chapters. The intelligence function in Central America was also influenced by regional intelligence co-operation and communications. In 1964, an agreement was made between the United States and each of the Central American countries to set up a “Central America and Panama Security Telecommunications Network", intended “to permit police and security agencies of Central American countries to communicate directly with one another information on identity, movements, activities and plans of subversives and criminals.”--'* In operation by October 1964, the network operated through a radio-teletype system, with each station under the control of the countries’ top security/intelligence agencies — “Each of these countries owns, operates and maintains its respective station equipment under the control of the major security group in that country. In Guatemala, the Centro Regionalde Telecomunicaciones under the Casa Presidencial controls and operates the station".--' Erom its inception, monitoring the control of the Central America communications network appears to have been in the hands of the US military, although it was set up under the auspices of the Public Safety Program. US Army Latin-Americanist. Lieutenant-Colonel John Childs, has stated that the network was parallel to the military communications networks linking the armies of the region, all of which have “a net control station in the Canal Zone”.--- Childs adds that It is hard to avoid the impression that these communications nets came under US aegis since their net control stations function as adjuncts to US military communications facilities in the Canal Zone.”--^ The Central American security network required an agreement that some secrets would be shared between the region’s top intelligence agencies, and with the parent station in the Canal Zone. The distinction between the civilian and military assistance provided for regional telecommunications appears to have been tenuous. The Commander of the US armed forces’ Southern Command — SOUTHCOM — in the 67

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

Canal Zone told the US Congress in 1966 that military communications assistance in the region was designed to mesh with civilian security assistance in order to ensure “effective national and regional military command and control systems for support of counterinsurgency operations”.22t Information Gathering, Detection, and Targetting A principal facet of the intelligence function depends on the collection (or extraction) of data, and the identification, location and observation of organizations and individuals. Means of detection may range from torture to sophisticated data processing techniques, including the electronic collection, storage, analysis and retrieval of data. Security assistance for counter-insurgency was built upon traditional police investigative skills, with a view to enhancing detection capability. Just what, or who was to be detected was defined in accordance with threat perceptions underlying counter-insurgency doctrine. An appendix to the 1962 report of the Ad Hoc Inter-agency Committee on Police Assistance states that: CIA financed and directed police assistance programs... which had overt as well as covert aspects and which sought to develop investigative mechanisms capable of detecting subversive individuals and organi¬ zations, collecting and collating information relative to their activities and neutralizing their efforts.^^^

In the same report a section on “The AID Public Safety Program”, implied that the CIA also actively .collaborated in the task of detecting “subversives”, and possibly in actions to neutralize them once detected; “A limited number of CIA personnel are integrated into the AID program for assistance to investigative units combating subversion.”^^^ The thin line between advisory and operational assistance is particularly blurred in the intelligence field. Intelligence advisers could, without leaving their offices, assess individual cases and suggest a course of action, which in practice would target people for extra-legal detention, torture and/or assassination. Any list of “subversives” (true or false) could at some time lead to irremediable, violent action against those included. “Operational” assistance might be limited to partici¬ pation in the investigative tasks by which “subversives” were identified and lists of names drawn up. The actual detention — or elimination — of the individuals so targetted would not require foreign assistance. Public Safety/CIA assistance in setting up systems for detection/ targetting of “subversives” is more easily documented than any direct involvement in the targetting of specific individuals. A Public Safety Program spokesman told the US Congress in 1973 that almost every assistance programme in Latin America had improved “administrative and management skills” related to the detection capacity of the security 68

The Role of Intelligence . . .

systems.^-^ Among the programme's stated achievements were those related to the “identification of subversives" in Brazil; the improvement in the “records and identifications system” in Jamaica, and “significant improvement... in the police ability to identify and apprehend urban terrorists” in Uruguay.--^ Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of Public Safety's or CIA's direct involvement in developing and operating a detection/targetting system is exemplified in the “Phoenix” programme in Vietnam, already discussed. In the case of “Phoenix”, a sophisticated data processing system was developed for the compilation of “black lists” and “green lists” of suspected Vietnamese insurgents and sympathizers.229 Military analyst Michael Klare has assessed information received by Congress¬ man Les Aspin from the US General Accounting Office in June 1973 relating directly to the computerization of the “Phoenix” intelligence apparatus, and has described its link-up with a central telecom¬ munications facility at the level of the Prime Minister.^^o This is seemingly a direct parallel with Guatemala's presidential intelligence agency, based in the “Regional Telecommunications Center”. The General Accounting Office — according to Klare — reported that after the closure of the Public Safety Program by congressional action, the Department of Defense had contracted a Los Angeles based corpora¬ tion to complete the police assistance programme's development of the Vietnamese Prime Minister's internal security computer centre with “the introduction of automatic data processing to plan, direct, control, and evaluate developments, and nationwide police operations.''^^' aid's police assistance programme is also on the record as having provided data processing equipment and technique to some of Latin America's most repressive regimes. Computer Decisions magazine (February 1977) described the provision of computer equipment to Chile, financed through the AID agricultural assistance budget, but found to have been destined for an address on Santiago's Calle Belgrano identified as the communications centre of the presidential security agency Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) (National Intelligence Directorate) and its successor agency, the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) (National Information Centre), Chile's most feared secret police.^^^ Former CIA agent Philip Agee, maintains that CIA stations in each Latin American country run their own systems to compile lists of leftists considered “most dangerous”, lists which, on occasion, could be provided to their counterparts for action; this was identified as the CIA's LYNX list which: is a list of about 100 communists and other activists of the extreme left whom the station considers most dangerous. The LYNX list is a requirement for all Western Hemisphere stations, to be maintained in case a local government in time of crisis should ask (or be asked by the US

69

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency government) for assistance in the emergency preventive detention of dangerous persons.^^^

Agee claims the CIA data base for compiling such lists in Ecuador, where he was stationed, was enormous, drawing upon the Ministry of Government's identity card records, providing full name, date and place of birth, names of parents, occupation, address and photograph of “practically any Ecuadorean’’-^^"* Agee’s account appears wholly plausible. If anything, Agee appears to understate the scope of US intelligence capabilities in compiling data on “suspect” persons. From the experience of Guatemala and El Salvador (let alone South-east Asia) it would appear that US agencies maintained detailed records of membership in everything from clandestine political groups to legal, but leftist trade unions or professional associations. The lethal use of such information is, of course, a development that awaits only a change in the security forces' criteria for action; and a decision to act. Identification as a “Communist proponent” or subversive on a CIA L'VNX list or a Phoenix “green list” or in a security system’s central data bank could, of course, be entirely arbitrary, and there was no appeal against inclusion. In any case, the crucial factor transforming a collection of names into a “hit list” is the decision on action to be taken against those listed. This could range from blacklisting for employment purposes (or exclusion from public office) to detention, interrogation and murder.

Public Safety Program’s Demise: Proposed Alternatives In autumn 1973, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, alarmed by the findings of its investigation into the Public Safety Program’s lesser known aspects, and motivated by the changing tide of public opinion, recommended the suspension of foreign police assistance. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1973, Section 112, as amended in December 1973, banned AID’s overseas training of foreign police personnel, but not instruction within the United States. The Public Safety Program was ordered to phase out its operations and withdraw all Public Safety advisers by 30 June 1974.^35 Whether or not Congress really believed the charges that the Public Safety Program taught torture or was involved in other aspects of police terrorism, there is no doubt of its conviction that the charges were widely believed both in the countries assisted and in the United States, and that it was best to cut losses by discarding the programme altogether. Section 660 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, “Prohibiting Police Training” (30 December 1974) withdrew Public Safety’s support On and after July 1, 1975, none of the funds made available to carry out

70

The Role of Intelligence . . .

this Act. and none of the local currencies generated under this Act, shall be used to provide training or advice, or provide any financial support, for police, prisons, or other law enforcement forces for any foreign government or any program of internal intelligence or surveillance on behalf of any foreign government within the United States or abroad.^^^ But there were several loopholes, particularly in the intelligence field. The original amendment put before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Senator Abourezk differed from the final text of Section 660 in that it stated that “None of the funds made available to carry out this or any other Act... shall be used..for security assistance. CIA took immediate issue with the draft and. CIA Director William E. Colby, in a letter, on 31 July 1974, to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright,^^^ concludes that “the amendment would curtail various CIA activities abroad which are in support of approved national intelligence objectives. We therefore recommend that it not be adopted.” In making his case, Colby outlined the range of CIA activities within the field of security assistance, and pointed out its problems with the draft amendment: Senator Abourezk’s amendment considerably expands the restriction on US support to police and related programs that was enacted last year... The 1973 restrictions apply only to activities funded under the Foreign Assistance Act whereas Senator Abourezk’s amendment would extend the restriction to specified activities funded under any law. Another important aspect... is that it applies restrictions not just to involvement with foreign police services and related programs as the 1973 law did but also to “internal security forces of any foreign government or any program of internal intelligence”. The Committee deleted “or any other Act” from the draft, but retained the broad interpretation of those security agencies not to be assisted. Colby had maintained that “limited and specialized training” or intelligence and security services abroad was an essential quid pro quo by which CIA obtained its own objectives, a practice not to be lightly abandoned: The amendment would appear to restrict activities now undertaken by the CIA under the National Security Act of 1947 for the purpose of obtaining foreign intelligence information from cooperative foreign security and intelligence services, some of which are within national police forces. In addition, in many areas of the world the protection of US personnel, installations, and security interests depends heavily on the effectiveness and support of foreign internal security services, as does effective action to counterterrorist activities and narcotics traffic. An essential ingredient of 71

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency many CIA relationships with foreign security and intelligence services is some limited and specialized training and other support, as well as the exchange of information and advice. If the Agency were restricted in these activities, our ability to perform our assigned intelligence mission would he severely curtailed.

In its final form, the Act permitted the Drug Enforcement Adminis¬ tration (DEA) and the EBI to continue dealing with foreign police bodies in pursuing their particular law enforcement mandates, and leaving the CIA with its powers intact.^^^ it only remained to find an alternative for the defunct Public Safety Program capable of continuing indispensable police assistance, and within which the CIA could continue to deploy its own security assistance specialists. Alternatives to the Public Safety Program were discussed in a 1973 Brookings Institution report commissioned by Public Safety. A section on “Alternative Administrative Arrangements” by which the substance of Public Safety’s work could be continued, despite impending closure, discussed the advantages and disadvantages of placing police assis¬ tance within the Military Assistance Program, using the logistic and administrative resources of the Defense Department, or developing the assistance capacity of other agencies to take on Public Safety's tasks. Two proposals for which few disadvantages were seen were: 1) to hive off training activities to a private, non-profit corporation (“Theoreti¬ cally it could take over the existing personnel and facilities of OPS [and] receive funds from the United States government and other sources if they were available.”), and 2) to transfer the programme to the supervision of the Justice DepartmenU^^

Notes to Part One Chapter 1 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

72

See below. Cited in Resolution III, ‘Coordination of police and judicial measures for the defense of society and institutions of each American state', adopted by the second meeting of consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Reproduced in Pan American Union, Department of International Law, Strengthening of Internal Security, Washington, D.C. (1953), Appendix 6, p. 97. Ibid. Ibid. 'Ley del 25 de junio de 1941. Contra propaganda de doctrinas comunistas'. decreto 119 del Congreso de la Republica de Nicaragua, Reproduced in Reglamento de la Policia (Managua: Talleres de la Nacion), (1951) ‘G-2 Report’,‘General Conditions, Guatemala’, 20 June 1941 (record group 165, file 2357, National Archive, Washington, D.C,). Robert Varney Elam, “Appeal to arms, the army and politics in El Salvador, 19311964", PhD dissertation. University of New Mexico, (1968) pp. 48-9, citing State Department files, National Archive, 816.00, No. 1797 Frazer to Department. 22 October 1941. Elam’s is the best study to date using primary sources to produce a

Notes for Part One

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

comprehensive description and analysis of the military role in Salvadorean politics. New York Times. 15 June 1940 pp. 49-50, cited in ibid. The Salvadorean War Ministry s 1938 annual report included reference to four scholarships from Italy; one recipient was Captain Oscar Osorio, invited to attend the Superior War Institute of Torino; in 1950 Osorio became President of El Salvador for a six year term. Memoria de Guerra. Marina v Aviacion (1938). G-2 Report, 20 May 1941, Military Attache A. Marsh, Anastasio Somoza Garcia of Nicaragua, the third principal dictator of Central America in the 1930s and 1940s. cannot be excluded from a discussion of regional strongmen's affinity to totalitarianism and dubious value as US allies. Somoza Garcia captured the Presidency and assumed military and political control with the forced resignation of President Juan Sacasa (6 June 1936) after a putsch launched on 29 May, combining National Guard and civilian Camisas Azules (‘Blue Shirts' modelled on Mussolini's Squadras d'accione). Like Martinez and Ubico he was considered neither a particular menace to, nor a particularly trustworthy 'friend' of the Allied cause. A secret FBI inquiry (FBI Director J, Edgar Floover's private letter. I May 1941 to Assistant Secretary of State Berle, included with G-2 Report: ‘General Conditions, Nicaragua' 1 May 1941; Record Group 165, file 2657) reporting his commercial dealings with Japan, surprised the Department of State, but this apparently reflected Somoza's greedy opportunism rather than ideological conviction. See also G-2 Report, Alex. A. Cohen, No. 3476,29 May 1936; G-2 Report No. 2487. 5 June 1936; and Richard Millet, Guardians of the Dynasty. Mary knoll, NY: Orbis Books (1977), a comprehensive study of the National Guard with reference to the "Blue Shirts" role in the putsch. "By the end of World War II the United States in effect had a monopoly on [military'] missions'. ... 'to acquire the friendship and good will, to train for hemispheric defense, to encourage standardization on US weapons and equip¬ ment, training and doctrine, and to block entry of foreign missions." (Ft.-Col. John Childs. “The Inter-American Military System", PhD dissertation. American University, (1978). p. 185). Ibid. p.238.citingJointChiefsofStaffI233/2,31 January 1945,“MilitaryObjectives in Latin America" Record Group 218. National Archive. Foreign Relations of the United States. (1943) Volume VI. pp. 308-312. G-2 Report. “Guatemala, Situation of the Military", Lt.-Col. J. H. Marsh, Military Attache, 24 June 1941. Foreign Relations of the United States. (1948) Vol. IX, p. 193. Pan American Union, op. cit. Strengthening of Internal Security. Ibid. pp. 76-8. The United States McCarran Act (The Internal Security Act of 1950) is cited as a model (p. 395) in that it "requires the registration of communist organizations, prohibits the issuance of passports to subversive elements and contains, . . . numerous provisions intended to counteract the activities of world communism." The Chilean “Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy" of the same period, cited in the Pan American Union document, deprived political rights to citizens 'opposed to the democratic order", denying them the right to vote, hold public office or public employment. Throughout the Americas in the 1950s new measures legalized imprisonment for what in 1980 would be considered reasons of conscience. Ibid. p. 76. Ibid. pp. 79-80. Before the 1960s “age of counterinsurgency" almost continuous clashes existed between the Department of State and the US military vis-a-vis Latin America policy. Childs (op. cit, p. 243) outlines the Department of State's inter-departmental battle to have a diplomatic corps member present during “Staff Conversations — a demand grudgingly acceded to after five months of haggling. The State Department also opposed the American military's independent

73

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

"foreign policy" activities in Latin America. State Department memo, 21 November 1944, "Certain Activities of War Department and Army Officers in the Other American Republics”, SWNCC Box 139, National Archive, Record Group

23.

353, cited in Childs, op. cit., p. 143. Childs, op. cit., pp. 331, 336. Memorandum. Acheson to Pattenson and Forrestal. 17 April 1947. reproduced in Foreign Relations of the United States. (1947) Vol. 8, p. 106. Memorandum, Patterson to Acheson, 27 March 1947, in Foreign Relations . . . p.

24. 25.

108. Ibid. Memorandum. Patterson to Acheson. 17 April

21. 22.

. 'm Foreign Relations ...

ciU

p. no. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

For text of "Policy with Respect to Transfers or Sales of Arms, Ammunition, and Implements of War to the Republics of the Western Hemisphere". 22 August 1947, see Foreign Relations... pp. 120-1. The policy defines criteria for transfers to include considerations of each country"s defence requirements, to carry out its inter¬ national obligations, and whether the transfer "is determined to be reasonable and necessary [for] a country to maintain internal order in the reasonable and legitimate exercize of constituted authority.” For an overview of post-war changes in assistance policy, see especially Edwin Lieuwen./4mjs and Politics in Latin America (New York: Praeger. for the Council on Foreign Relations (1960). Childs, op. cit.. p. 400. Ibid. Childs, p. 216 notes, after 1967 resentment of US domination of the armies' conferences, and US policy that Latin American armies should focus exclusively on internal security, met with discord and opposition from representatives of larger military institutions in the region, particularly Brazil and Argentina, then developing their own “doctrines of national security” integrating counter¬ insurgency doctrine into a larger framework. Ibid. p. 385. Ibid. See Chapter 5.

Chapter 2 32.

33.

34

35.

36. 37.

38.

74

Military magazines reviewed from the period included the Guatemalan army’s Ejercito. and Revista Militar de Guatemala, and El Salvador’s Revista de la Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor "Manuel Enrique Araujo". Writers on the CIA have notedthat the military regularly "loaned” personnel to the ClA”s Special Operations Division (SOD). See 'Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. (New York: Dell, 1974), p. 123. William F. Barber and C. Neale Ronning, Internal Security and Military Power: Counterinsurgency and Civic Action in Latin America. (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1963), p. 142. General L.L. Lemnitzer, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 17 July 1962, “Memo for the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs”, enclosing “A Summary of US military Counterinsurgency accomplishments since 1 January 1961”. Carrollton Press Declassified Documents Reference System, retrospective through 1976. US Congress, Senate “International Development and Security”, Part 1, Com¬ mittee on Foreign Relations, 87th Congress, 1st Session, Washington D.C., p. 598. US Congress, Senate, Hearings of the Subcommittee on American Republics Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, 28 February 1968, Survey of the Alliance for Progress, p. 415. A January 1961 Policy Planning Staff paper presented the first major policy formulation of internal security strategy in Latin America integrating proposals for a revised military assistance programme for internal defence with one of

Notes for Part One

39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

development, to be promoted by counterpart armies: “A New Concept for Hemispheric Defense and Development” is seen by US military historians as the basis for the doctrine of "internal defense and development” around which subsequent counter-insurgency theory accumulated. See, for example, Childs op. cit. pp. 372-3. National Security Action Memorandum 124 "Establishment of the Special Group (Counter-Insurgency)”. 2 January 1962. Carrollton Press Declassified Document Reference System (9000 (1974). Carrollton Press (900C) (1974). In 1966 (by National Security Action Memoran¬ dum 341. 2 March 1966) the President assigned "The Direction. Coordination and Supervision of Interdepartmental Activities Overseas” to the Secretary of State, replacing the Special Group with the "Senior Interdepartmental Group” to assist the Secretary of Slate. Underthe Nixon administration the Special Group's previous role largely devolved on the National Security Council, and particularly on the National Security Advisor to the President. Emphasis here on Special Group's role is based on the significance of developments under its supervisory and catalysing aegis that in effect irrevocably established the norms for counter¬ insurgency doctrine and activities in the 1960s. In April 1962 Robert W. Komer. White House CIA adviser, encouraged the President's continued support for the Group, noting it: “had already performed a real service in the pushing, prodding and coordinating so essential to getting and keeping counterinsurgency activity underway.” Memorandum, R.W. Komer to McGeorge Bundy, 10 April 1962: Carrollton Press (901A) (1976). General Taylor resigned as Army Chief of Staff under President Eisenhower "because he thought that the new doctrines of counterinsurgency were being slighted”; he was appointed Ambassador to Vietnam in June 1964. Richard J. Barnet. Intervention and Revolution. New York: Mentor, (1972) pp. 244, 252. See, for example, Marchetti and Marks, op. cit. pp. 308-9. Department of State Cable, 6 July 1962; for information to all diplomatic posts; for action to: Caracas. Guatemala, Phnom Penh, Quito, Rangoon, Teheran, Yaounde; a joint State/Defense/AID/USIA message. From Freedom of Infor¬ mation Act request, declassified 1979. Department of State Cable, 6 July 1962. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Concern with "police and/or military capabilities” was considered a quite separate "line of defense" from "development". Police and military assistance was to be promoted strictly for its control function, but justified in congressional hearings, in assistance programmes' documents as 1) a means to encourage military and police institutions to contribute to development through civic action; 2) a means to "professionalize” and thus theoretically reduce the police and military's political involvement; and 3) by establishing civil police concepts and withdrawing the military from police roles, assistance would eliminate one cause of the population's discontent. These rationales were used to justify assistance (plus the larger need for law and order) but whether their defenders believed them is open to speculation. Department of State Cable, 6 July 1962. Ibid. Memorandum. 16 January 1963. to Attorney General from Thomas W, Davis at the request of Mr Dungan; "Subject: Future role of the special Group (Cl)”. Carrollton Press (902A) (1976)). A Memorandum from Mr Davis Jr. to McGeorge

75

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

Bundy, the President's special adviser on national security. 12 January 1963 (Carrollton Press, (9010 (I976-). expressed the same view that if insurgency is thwarted “Communists will concentrate on gaining power through other means", means "sufficiently well known" ("other means" might include 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

76

elections). Carrollton Press (9()2A) (1976). Barber and Ronning. op. cit., p. 41 noted that only Nicaragua and Paraguay continued to be governed "by old style military strongmen ... Both have developed efficient systems for dealing with the symptoms of insurgency. Secret police, a controlled press, and the arrest or exile of labor, student and party leaders have kept potential insurgents under control ". Op. cit. Department of State cable, 6 July 1962. Ibid. American Embassy. Guatemala airgram to SecState: “Subject: Internal Defense Plan-Guatemala". 15 September 1962. Freedom of Information Act request declassified 1979. Ibid. National Security Action Memorandum 177, August 1962; AID had overall responsibility for co-ordinating police advisory and assistance programmes after 1962; see Chapter 5 for a detailed discussion of police assistance programmes as they related to counter-insurgency. Joint Chiefs of Staff, introduced by General L.L. Lemnitzer, "A Summary of US Military Counterinsurgency accomplishments since 1 January 1961". 17 July 1962; citing Kennedy directive from National Security Action Memorandum 162, June 1962. Such as Sir Robert Thompson, architect of counter-insurgency campaigns in Malaya, who was hired as a consultant. Counter-insurgency was not foreign to military thinking at the time; Childs, op. cit. p. 372. notes there had long been “an identifiable body of strictly military tactics and techniques with which to face the guerrilla". Op. cit.. General L.L. Lemnitzer, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 17 July 1962. Sources detailing the diverse military training establishments, their curriculum, and nature of their student body, include Barber and Ronning. op. cit.. and more recently, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) reports. Emphasis here is on doctrine and training made operational; consequently more attention is given to that element of training conducted in the target countries themselves. Op. cit. General L.L. Lemnitzer, Joint Chiefs of Staff. 17 July 1962. Marchetti and Marks, op. cit. p 136. Barber and Ronning, op. cit. pp. 142-4. Op. cit.. General L.L. Lemnitzer, Joint Chiefs of Staff. 17 July 1962. Barber and Ronning, op. cit. pp. 149-50. Talks with former US representatives to the Inter-American Defense Board. 1979, Childs, op. cit. p, 408. Major John S. Pustay, US Air Force (1965) Counterinsurgency Warfare. New York: Free Press (1965), pp 169-70. Childs, op. cit. p. 408. Pustay. op. cit. p, 169, citing US Congress, House Committee on Appropriations. 87th Congress. Hearings, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1963. Washington; US Government Printing Office, p. 344. James A. Donovan The US Marine Corps. New York: Praeger (1967) p. 138. Military posts and United Fruit Co. offices were attacked on 6 February 1962 by forces led by Lt. Luis Turcios, Lt. Yon Sosa, and Luis Trejo Esquivel; the revolt was crushed, but strikes and student demonstrations in the capital in support of the guerrillas continued.

Notes for Part One

75.

Report to Joint Chiefs of Stall: Subject: Visit to Colombia, South America, by a Team from Special Warfare Center. Fort Bragg, North Carolina (Special Warfare Mobile Training Team MTT); Secret supplement Colombia survey report, 26 February 1962; signed: Gen. William Yarborough. Carrollton Press (I54D) (1976).

76.

Special Forces report on Colombia quoted above, secret supplement. The report also speculates that “CAS" (the acronym for the CIA in classiFied reports, according to Pentagon Papers) had already organized and deployed such an apparatus: "3. (S) 11 we have such an apparatus in Colombia il should be employed now before communist proponents become too strong to combat. The team has reason to suspect that the Rurales operating in the Llanos are CAS directed . . . ”. Department of the Army. Army Concept Team, Vietnam, “Employment of a Special Forces Group". 20 April 1966. Carrollton Press ((R)204B) Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. General L.L. Lemnitzer. Joint Chiefs of Staff. 17 July 1962. James W. Dunn. “Province Advisers in Vietnam. 1962-1965". in Richard A. Hunt and Richard H. Shultz. Jr., (eds.) Lessons from An Unconventional War: Reassessing US Strategies for Future Conflicts. New York: Pergamon Press (1982). The military's control system for the semi-military or paramilitary Civil Guard and Self Defense Corps overlapped military control of provincial and local government. Frances Fitzgerald, in Fire in the Lake. New York, Vintage (1973) p. 163, writes that by 1962 village chiefs were appointed by the military, and “installed in most... villages and military officers assigned to almost all... crucial territorial posts of province and district chief. . . “security” and “control" system was then complete. The village chiefs reported to the military district and province chiefs, the province chiefs to the three (later four) corps commanders, and the corps commanders to the presidential palace". Local “self-defense" forces, and local government itself could then slot neatly into the hierarchical military command structure. Carrollton Press ((R)209B); Marchetti and Marks also note the role of the Special Forces, but focus on the CIA's role with all Vietnam's paramilitary groups. Thus “the CIA supported and financed . . . roughly 45,000 Civilian Irregular Defense Guards (CIDGs). local guerrilla troops who fought under the operational direction of the US Army's Special Forces.” Marchetti and Marks, op. cit. pp. 132-3. Carrollton Press ((R)209B). Ibid. “Colby Draft". “The Situation"; II May 1964, typescript copied to “Forrestal in Saigon. Secretary of Defense MacNamara. General Taylor. DCM. DCM Nes. General Stillwell". From L.B. Johnson Presidential Library, National Security file. Ibid. General L.L. Lemnitzer, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 17 July 1962, op. cit. Richard H. Shultz, Jr. “The Vietnamization-Pacification Strategy of 1969-1972: A Quantitative and Qualitative Reassessment", p. 56, in Hunt and Shultz, op. cit., citing “The Area Security Concept", August 1970. a study of the Pacification Studies Group, part of the US Military Assistance Command. Vietnam and the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support; CORDS. Ibid., p. 99. citing Southeast Asia Statistical Summary. Office of the Secretary of Defense (Comptroller, 13 February 1973, Table 3),

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92.

77

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

Chapter 3 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101.

102.

103.

104.

105. 106. 107.

108. 109.

110. 111. 112.

113.

78

Frank R. Barnett, "A Proposal for Political Warfare", A////ra;y Review (US Army), March 1961, p. 3. Ibid. Ibid. See Part 2 for quotations from speeches and articles along these lines. Revista Militar de Guatemala, April-June 1966; unless otherwise noted, all quotations from original Spanish translated by the author. Richard J. Barnet, Intervention and Revolution. New York: Mentor (1972) p. 214. The irony of the reversal of tactics of resistance movements to crush such movements has been much remarked, particularly in the context of the CIA; see Marchetti and Marks, op. cit., p. 127. "El Patron de la Guerra de Guerrillas", Gen. Michael Calvert. Revista Militar de Guatemala, October-December 1966. Ibid. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Washington, D.C., Dictionary of US Military Terms for Joint Usage, 1 February 1962, p. 114; quoted in "A History of Patterns and Techniques for Insurgency Conflicts in Post-1900 Latin America", ARPA project no. 4860 (Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense, 15 January 1964). Ibid., p. viii. The ambiguity and leeway for abuse of new definitions of insurgency did not go unremarked even in the 1960s; see Barber and Ronning, op. cit.. p. 44. Marcha, 7 December 1973, reproducing Col. Hector Ballesteros' address to the Tenth Conference of American Armies in September 1973, quoted in Estrategia (Argentine military review) No. 24. 1973. Revista Militar de Guatemala, October-September 1966, “Informacion sobre el Consejo de Defensa Centroamericana". Col. Del Estado Major, (DEM) Jorge H. Hernandez Mendez. Ibid., "Operacion Centroamerica”, Capitan Cesar Elvir Sierra, Ejercito de Honduras. Ibid, Civic action perse was not a new concept. US experience had included opening up the American west, involving the massacre of indigenous peoples there, and the setting up of transport and communications infrastructure. The US Army Corps of Engineers became a major instrument of public works projects in the US such as building dams in the Tennessee Valley. There is a considerable body of literature on military role expansion since the 1960s relating to the concept of civic action. Carrollton Press ((R)204B), p. 4. citing special Warfare Glossary. US Army Special Warfare School. 20 January 1964. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for National Security Affairs, “US Policies toward Latin American Military forces", 25 Eebruary 1965; L.B. Johnson Presidential Library, National Security File, Latin America, Vol. Ill, 1/65-6/65. including comments on the paper by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of State. Barber and Ronning, op. cit., is perhaps the best. Revista Militar de Guatemala, October-December 1967, speech on 9 November 1967. Ambassador Mein was murdered the following year. McGeorge Bundy. Memorandum to Secretary of Defense, “Subject; Evaluation of Paramilitary Requirements". 28 June 1961, National Security Action Memo¬ randum No. 56. declassified 1975. Carrollton Press (1976). Ibid. Within the United States “paramilitary assets" included units specializing in training and assistance of foreign forces, and US forces prepared for direct involvement in irregular warfare (paramilitary operations); these, in practice, were often the same forces. The report of the “inventory" of these assets is apparently still

Notes for Part One

114.

115.

116. 117. 118.

119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

classified, but presumably it repeated virtually the same outline of specialist units as those already cited as "special warfare" units. "US Policies toward Latin American Military Forces”. 25 February 1965.(Defense Department Study), p. 44. in the L.B. Johnson Presidential Library, National Security File, Latin America, Vol. Ill, 1/65-6/65; quoting Joint Chiefs of Staff publication No. 1. 1 December 1964. Some political repercussions on the creation of militia-type bodies in Central America are discussed further below. Recruitment ot ethnic minorities as special counter-guerrilla forces in IndoChina is well documented; Miskito and Sumo Indian involvement in US-backed organizations engaged in guerrilla warfare against the present Nicaraguan government recalls the fate of the Meo and the Montagnards. Military doctrine, developed in the 1960s from the Vietnam experience, emphasized the mobilization of ethnic minorities as counter-guerrilla auxiliaries to US forces or allies. See a 1967 study by US Marine Lt. Col. Howard J. Johnston. "The Tribal Soldier; A Study of the Manipulation of Ethnic Minorities", inNaval War College Review. Vol. 19, No. 5. January 1967. The doctrine is summarized in War on theMind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology, by Peter Watson, Penguin Books. Harmondsworth, (1980) pp. 270-1. "US Policies toward Latin America Military Forces", op. cit. Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Combined GVN-US Effort to Intensify Pacification Efforts in Critical Provinces", 19 June 1964 (SECRET); Carrollton Press (90A) (1979). Ibid. The "counter-terrorist" organization is to be created at the "precinct" level: "A "precinct” is the smallest practicable political subdivision, just above the block or the apartment house in numbers of people. Selected military, paramilitary and governmental persons must support this organization. It will be created from among the young elite which exists everywhere . . .”. Ibid. See also US Army Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines for Area Commanders: An Analysis of Criteria. January 1966 (Headquarters, Department of the Army Pamphlet No. 550-100). Lt. Col. John J. McCuen. US Army, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War: The Strategy of Counterinsurgency. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books (1967), p. 110. Ibid. Ibid., p. 224. Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines for Area Commanders, op. cit.. p. 251. Ibid. See Volume 11. Guatemala. McCuen. op. cit., p. 111. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid. Ibid.

Chapter 4 103. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

136. 137.

Chalmers A. Johnson. "Guerrilla Conflict”, in World Politics. July 1962, pp. 65051. Ibid., quoting Virgil Ney, "Guerrilla War and Modern Strategy", in Orbis. Vol. II, Spring. 1958. pp. 75-6. Time magazine, 28 January 1968, as cited in NACLA, Guatemala, op. cit. Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Lieutenant in Algeria. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1957; quoted in McCuen. op. cit. Chalmers Johnson, op. cit., pp. 351-2. Ibid. For a theoretical examination of the phenomenon see E. V. Walter’s landmark study. Terror and Resistance. A Study of Political Violence. Oxford University Press. Oxford (1969). US Army Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines for Area Commanders, op. cit. Ibid. Douglas Pike, head of the Psychological Warfare Section of the US military

79

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency

138. 139. 140. 141.

142. 143.

144. 145.

146. 147. 148. 149.

80

mission in South Vietnam during much of the 1960s provided a working definition of "terror” as: "the systematic use of death, pain, fear and anxiety among the population (either civilian or military) for the deliberate purpose of coercing, manipulating, intimidating, punishing or simply frightening the helpless into submission”. Douglas Pike, "The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror", 1970, quoted in Frances Fitzgerald, op. cit,, p.505. G-2 Report. Military Attache A.R. Harris. 24 April 1934, Record Group 165, National Archive. Washington. D.C. US Army Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines ... op. ciL (1966), Appendix C. See Volume II. For reference to early Vietnam experiences of what was then another aspect of “psychological warfare” see Pentagon Papers, Document 15. In the 1960s, the concept of "psychological warfare” of the 1950s, was broken down into components, among them forms of “counter-terror”. President Eisenhower himself, was unhappy with the former term as imprecise, and maintained it could mean almost anything: Memorandum for the Secretary of State, from President D.D.E.. 24 October 1953. Carrollton Press (1975). “Psychological Warfare” was, however, the catchword for the prosecution of the Cold War in the 1950s, apart from the battlefields of Korea and intermittent large scale covert actions (that, for example, overturned threatening regimes in Guatemala and Iran in 1954). A special committee set up by President Eisenhower in late 1952. chaired by Bill Jackson, was to provide a policy for the conduct of psychological warfare in the Cold War. According to a “Top Secret” memorandum to President Eisenhower, it was to prepare: “An analysis of all Psychological Warfare presently conducted by this country; an appraisal of Russia”s cold war efforts; conclusions and recommendations as to how we should prosecute the cold war, assuming Psychological Warfare is not a freak of one or more Departments of the Government, but a considered policy of the entire Government to win World War III without having to fight it.” Memorandum. CD Jackson to General Eisenhower, 17 December 1952, “Psychological and/or Political Warfare”, from Carrollton Press, ((R)219F). Pentagon Papers, New York Times, New York, 1971. Marchetti and Marks, op. cit., p. 123. For a summary ofpacification” initiatives of this kind undertaken before 1969 see Director of Central Intelligence/United States Intelligence Board, “Special National Intelligence Estimate”. No. 14-69, "The Pacification Effort in Vietnam", 16 January 1969; in Carrollton Press (355B) (1979). Marchetti and Marks, op. cit., p. 236. Ibid., quoting Wayne Cooper, former Foreign Service officer, adviser to the South Vietnamese internal security programmes for 18 months. Virtually the only references to Vietnam “counter-terror”, apart from the few official documents available, appear in writings exposing CIA activities; reference to US Army participation in such operations is fleeting. As even a cursory review of declassified documents from the Army Special Forces experience in Vietnam, in the context of a search for parallels with Central America, turned up quite solid information on US Army involvement in counter-terror, scholars should be encouraged to complete the puzzle through more intensive research into counter-terror in Vietnam. William Colby in the “Colby Draft”, op. cit., refers to casualty figures for “CT’ (counter-terror) teams. CIA Special National Intelligence Estimate, “The Pacification Effort in Vietnam”. 16 January 1969. Carrollton Press (355B) (1979). See Snepp, op. cit. p. 10; a similar description is given in Eitzgerald op cit p 412. ■’ Snepp, op. cit., p. 11. Fitzgerald, op. cit, p. 412.

Notes for Part One 150.

Ibid., pp. 411-12.

151.

Marchetti and Marks, op. cit., p. 236. See also Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, New York, Pocket Books (1981), p. 228. Powers, op. cit., p. 231; ... in March 1968 Colby returned to Saigon |he had been Station chief there between 1959 and 1962 according to Powers] as Komer's deputy at CORDS. Later that year he replaced him ". This is obliquely confirmed in "Special National Security Estimate", No. 14-69. op, cit,, p. 5. on the "Small American-sponsored guerrilla eflort, now called Provincial Reconnaissance Units," Frank Snepp, op. cit.. p. 577. Ne\\' York Times, 3 October 1971. "House Panel Criticized", Michael Klare. "Operation Phoenix and the Failure of Pacification in Vietnam", Liberation, May 1973, p. 22. quoting US Congress, Hearings on "US Assistance Programs in Vietnam”, 1971, pp. 122-3. Ibid. Marchetti and Marks, op. cit.. p. 237. Fitzgerald, op. cit., p. 548. Klare, op. cit.. p. 23, quoting Hearings on US Assistance Programs in Vietnam, 1971. p. 321. See also Thomas Powers, op. cit., pp. 230-1: "The idea was to identify the VCl... [then] send Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) or police teams to get the men or women singled out. This sometimes involved straightforward arrest in the cities, more often a paramilitary raid into NLF-controlled or contested hamlets in the countryside. Ideally, "neutralization" meant capture, so that each link in the chain might lead to others, but in practice death was the usual result, sometimes in the course of a firefight as a PRU team [shot] its way into an enemy camp at... dawn, and sometimes through assassination .,. Vietnamese veterans of the Phoenix program tell of creeping into a man’s house in the night and shooting him with silenced pistols as he lay asleep . . . ". . . Komer established quotas for the Phoenix units in South Vietnam’s 242 districts, with the inevitable inflationary results. One was indiscriminate killing during hit-and-run raids, with every dead body arbitrarily labelled "VCI" after the fact." Power’s account of Phoenix operations is echoed by the mass killings, including virtual exterminations of villages, in the Indian highlands of Guatemala in the 1980s, where the Indian population as a whole was considered “lost" to the guerrillas. Klare, op. cit.. quoting Hearings on US Assistance Programs in Vietnam. 1971. p. 331. CORDS drew upon the computerized "Hamlet Evaluation System" (HES) and the "Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Program" (ICEX); the latter was a system for data collection on the “Vietcong Infrastructure". See Powers, op. cit., pp. 228-9 and Fitzgerald, op. cit.. p. 453. Klare. op. cit., p. 22, quoting Hearings on US Assistance Programs in Vietnam, 1971. p. 34. Ibid., p. 22, quoting Rep. Jerome Waldie who investigated Phoenix in 1971, from Hearings on US Assistance Programs in Vietnam, op. cit., p, 34. Major John B. Bellinger. Jr., US Army. "Civilian Role in Anti-Guerrilla Warfare", Military Review, September 1961. Fitzgerald, op. cit. p. 550. Michael Walzer.Tui/ and Unjust Wars, a Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, Harper, New York (1977) p. 186. Ibid., p. 187. Reporter Allan Nairn writing in theAew York Times on mass counter¬ insurgent killings in Guatemala (“Guatemala Can’t Take Two Roads". 20 July 1982) pointed out the inherent contradiction in United States’ demands that the Guatemalans respect foreign sensibilities on human rights, while simultaneously demanding the guerrillas be crushed, whatever their level of support.

152.

153. 154. 155.

156. 157. 158. 159.

160. 161.

162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

81

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency 168.

See Chapter 5. for reference to US assistance in targetting for counter-terror.

Chapter 5 169.

170.

171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176.

177. 178. 179. 180.

181.

182. 183.

82

US Department of State, “Interdepartmental Technical Subcommittee on Police Advisory Assistance Programs". Report of the Interdepartmental Subcommittee on Police Advisory Assistance Programs. 11 June 1962 (Freedom of Information Act Request, declassified 2 April 1981). p. 2, citing National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 132, 19 February 1962. The same report summarizes the background of US police assistance programmes, attributing the policy in force at the beginningof the Kennedy administration to "NSC [National Security Council] Action 1290-d and ... presently set forth in Paragraphs 25 and 39 ofNSC 5906/1 ... designed to strengthen internal security forces of the Free World as a means of combating infiltration and subversion." As noted, reorganization and rationali¬ zation of the programme was impelled in the 1960s by key NSAMs 56 (28 June 1961) ordering "the evaluation of paramilitary requirements" for “counterinsur¬ gency". and 114 (22 November 1961) which assigned the Department of State primary responsibility, in collaboration with the Secretary of Defense and the Director of the CIA to make “a continuing review of US support for friendly police and armed forces and their training in riot control, counter subversion, counter insurgency and related operations." Ibid.. Interdepartmental Subcommittee, pp. 2-3, and Attachment A, Memo¬ randum, 2 May 1962 to U. Alexis Johnson. Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, from Byron Engle, Subject, “Suggested Terms of Reference for Technical Subcommittee". NSAM 132, 19 February 1962. ordered the review of AID police operations, and NSAM 146, 20 April 1962. ordered the creation of the inter-departmental subcommittee. Appointments to the "Technical Subcom¬ mittee" reported in the 2 May 1962 memorandum were as follows: “The following individuals have been appointed to the Technical Subcommittee; Lt. Col. David Dingeman (Defense); Mr H. Lynn Edwards (Justice); Mr Byron Engle, Chairman (CIA); Mr. Edward Kennelly (AID)" Ibid., p. 4. Ibid,, p. 63. Ibid., p. 55, Section 12, Eindings and Recommendations. David Epstein. “The Police Role in Counterinsurgency Efforts", Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Political Science. Vol. 54, 1968. Ibid., p. 149. Cited in Nancy Stein, “Policing the Empire", The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the US Police. Berkeley. California, Center for Research on Criminal Justice, (1977). Milton Lipson, “Terror; The World"s Fastest Growing Business", United Nations World. February 1948. Ibid. Morris Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in Developing Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1977), p. 29. “Address of General William Westmoreland to the 8th Conference of American Armies", Rio de Janeiro, 25 September 1968, cited in NACLA Newsletter, Vol. 11, No. 6, p. 10. Interdepartmental Subcommittee on Police Advisory Assistance Programs (hereafter Interdepartmental Subcommittee, 1962), op. cit, “Central Intelligence Agency participation in police advisory programs", pp. 16-7. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 16. “Counter subversion", the overall term applied to various fields of CIA action in the police advisory and assistance programme was defined in Department of Defense Field Manual 31-16, p. 18 as; “that part of counter¬ intelligence aimed at destroying the effectiveness of subversive activity by means of detection, identification, exploitation, penetration, manipulation, deception, and

Notes for Part One

184. 185. 186. 187.

188. 189. 190. 191 . 192. 193. 194.

195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200.

201. 202. 203.

204.

205. 206.

207. 208. 209.

repression of individuals, groups or organizations that carry out or are capable of carrying out such activities. Cited in Americas Watch/American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Report on Human Rights in El Salvador. Second Supplement, 20 January 1983, p. 88. Apparently, most clandestine, or e.xtra-legal governmental action against opposition groups or individual dissidents, fell within the definition of “counter subversion". Ibid. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid. Letter, 12 September 1973, Senator James Abourezk to Lauren J. Goin, then Director of the Office ot Public Safety; and letter in response from AID official Matthew J. Harvey, 25 September 1973 (photocopies). Letter. 25 September 1973. Matthew J. Harvey to Senator Abourezk. Ibid. Ibid. Course outline for "Course No. 6" (photocopy). A.J. Langguth. Hidden Terrors. New York: Pantheon (1978), p. 243. Ibid. Office of Public Safety, "Report on Visit to Central America and Panama to Study AID Public Safety Programs". Ambassador C. Allan Stewart (ret.). Declassified 4 April 1980. through a Freedom of Information Act request by the author, pp. 5 and 23. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid. The same source describes the security system in Costa Rica in terms that might shock those who know only that the country “has no army". "Costa Rica has a hodge-podge of law enforcement agencies, some4.500 people being supervised by ten distinct agencies under five ministries. Costa Rica boasts of no army but its 1.700 man Guardia Civil is a military-type organization that has been trained over the past 26 years by a US Military Mission. It is the backbone of the security forces in Costa Rica." Interdepartmental Subcommittee, 1962, op. cit., p. 19. Ibid. Ibid., p. 3; the situation in 1962 was outlined: "Currently. AID has 38 programs, six . . . concern the training of participants or provision of equipment only; DOD has six programs. CIA has no overt police assistance programs. In general CIA endeavors to develop the investigative techniques, and AID the capabilities of the police to deal with the militant aspects of subversion and insurgency". Joint Chiefs of Staff. Office of the Special Assistant for Counter-Insurgency and Special Activities. MJCS 331-66. 15 November 1966, Counterinsurgency Bluebook Fiscal Year 1966, p. 256. Carrollton Press Declassified Documents Reference System ((R)242D). Ibid. Subcommittee on America Republics Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, 91st Congress, 1st Session. Survey of the Alliance for Progress, Compilation of Studies and Hearings. 1969, Statement of Covey T. Oliver, who at the time was also “Coordinator" of the Alliance for Progress. Equipment provided was not described. Ibid., Testimony of David D. Burke. Associate Professor of History, University of Indiana, p. 495. Ibid. Ibid., Statement of Covey T. Oliver.

83

The United States and the Doctrine of Counter-Insurgency 210.

211. 212.

213. 214. 215. 216.

217.

218. 219. 220.

221. 222. 223. 224.

225.

84

"Accomplishments of US Public-Safety Programs in Latin America , Journal of Inter-American Economic Affairs. Vol. XXVI, Spring 1973, No. 4, pp. 83-90, reproducing extracts from "Hearings on Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1973, Subcommittee on Appropriations, US Senate’, pp. 413-30 and Hearings on Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1973, Subcommittee on Appropriations, House, Part IF, pp, 789-826, Miguel Angel Asturias, El Sehor Presidente. Edicion Universidad de San Carlos, Guatemala (1967), p. 54 (translated by the author), Office of Public Safety, Chief Public Safety Advisor(Guatemala) David Laughlin, 27 April 1960 and OPS, USAID Mission/Guatemala, D,L. Crisostomo, Chief Public Safety Advisor, 6 December 1963. International Cooperation Administration, Report on the National Police of El Salvador. November 1956. OPS. Ambassador C. Allan Stewart, op. cit.. p. 24. See ibid., and below. General DEM Carlos Guzman Aguilar, "Ea Subversion Comunista y las Acciones Guerrilleras". Revista de la Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor "Manuel Enrique Araujo". July-December 1970. Ibid., p. 17. Here General Guzman also recommends the use of the intelligence collection network as a resource in the conduct of “psychological warfare operations" using Civic Action programmes and propaganda; “psychological operations" are to be carried out “in support of our regular and guerrilla forces"; “The organs of information such as the press, radio and television are propitious means for dissemination of programs prepared in order to develop a patriotic spirit within the national civil population ... to win converts to our cause as well as to justify any warlike attitude on our part, and any position taken by our Government in order to preserve our national sovereignty before the rest of the world." Ibid. Ibid., p. 16. Office of Public Safety. Termination Phase-Out Study: Public Safety Project Guatemala. July 1974, p. 81. OPS. Ambassador C. Allan Stewart, op. cit., (p. 8) reported in 1967 that each station in the net was manned on a 24 hour basis, and linked into “the local police, border patrol, customs and military systems," OPS. Termination Phase-Out Study: Public Safety Project Guatemala, op. cit., p. 81. Lt. Col. John Childs, “The Inter-American Military System”. PhD Dissertation, American University (1976) p. 403. Ibid. Ibid., citing General Porter, Commander SOUTHCOM, in hearings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1966. Gen. Porter also noted that “communications equipment provided through the military assistance program is compatible so that it will function in a regional system." Interdepartmental Subcommittee, 1962, op. cit., p. 16. The stated CIA objective to "develop investigative mechanisms capable of detecting subversive individuals and organizations ..." (1962) is similar to a 1967 memorandum to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee outlining objectives of the Public Safety Program: “Individual Public Safety programs... are focused in general on developing within the civil security forces a balance of(l) a capability for regular police operations, with (2) an investigative capability for detecting criminal and/or subversive individuals and organizations and neutralizing their activities ranging from demonstrations, disorders, or riots through small-scale guerrilla operations. This requires a carefully integrated effort between the investigative element and the regular police, paramilitary or military force, operating separately or in conjunc¬ tion with each other." Agency for International Development, Office of Public Safety. 1 February 1967, "AID Assistance to Civil Security Forces"; “The balance of this paper is excerpted

Notes for Part One

226. 227 228. 229.

230. 231. 232. 233. 234. 235.

236. 237. 238.

239.

from recent testimony before a Senate Committee by former Administrator Bell describing the AID Public Safety Program". Ibid., p. 10. Journal of Inter-American Economic Affairs. Spring 1973. No. 4 pp 83-90 Ibid. Michael Klare, "Phoenix Reborn: US Continues Support for Thieu's Police", typescript, 1973. Klare produced some of the most detailed writing on Phoenix, and documented the perpetuation of the programme after the Paris peace accords of January 1973, after its official disbanding. Ibid. Ibid. Laurie Nadel and Hech Weiner, "Would you sell a computer to Hitler?", Computer Decisions. February 1977, pp. 22-5. Philip Agee. Inside the Company: CIA Diary’. New York: Bantam (1978) p. 114. Agee refers to his experience in the CIA office in Ecuador in 1960. Ibid. A principal factor in congressional decisions first to limit, and finally to abolish police training and assistance programmes was the evidence that the Public Safety Program had taught or encouraged torture, and that its personnel were (rightly or wrongly) identified with "police terrorism" in the countries assisted. Research by aides of Senator James Abourezk in 1974 centred on the International Police Academy in Washington. D.C., where they examined a selection of the papers prepared by trainees and found many that openly justified the use of torture. Jack Anderson, syndicated columnist, summarized findings of his own inquiries in "The Torture Graduates" New York Post. 3 August 1974. Public Law 93-559. Letter. William E. Colby to William J. Fulbright. 31 July 1974 (photocopy). The CIA was also provided with an escape clause: "Sec. 662. Limitation on Intelligence Activities. - (a) No funds appropriated under the authority of this or any other Act may be expended by or on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency for operations in foreign countries, other than activities intended solely for obtaining necessary intelligence, unless and until the President finds that each such operation is important to the national security of the United States and reports, in a timely fashion, a description and scope of such operation to the appropriate committees of the Congress, including the committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate and the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the United States House of Representatives." Brookings Institution (Ernest W. Lefever). US Public Safety Assistance: An Assessment, December 1973, pp. 137-44.

85

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Part 2: Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

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6: The Politics of Land and Labour

For more than a century after its independence from Spain, in 1821, the United States' influence on El Salvador was minimal. Legend has it that in 1822, as the militia of the former colonial province of San Salvador fought off occupation troops from Agustin Iturbide’s newly founded Mexican Empire, the gentry appealed to the US to accept San Salvador as a new state. Subsequent events overwhelmed this appeal, if indeed it had ever formally been made. Iturbide was overthrown and executed and the Empire dissolved, with only one province of the former Cap¬ taincy General of Guatemala — Chiapas — opting to join the Mexicans. Under the leadership of Salvadoreans, a constitutional assembly rep¬ resenting Guatemala, Honduras, San Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, which met in Guatemala City in June 1823, founded the United Provinces of Central America. Manuel Jose Arce — leader of San Salvador's abortive 1814 revolt against Spain - was elected president, but the union endured only until 1838. The collapse of the United Provinces was a symptom of the irrecon¬ cilable differences between the Liberal and the Conservative factions into which the elite classes of Central America, and most of Latin America, had divided by the time of independence. Liberals stood for radical change in the structure of the economy, in the relation of the Church to the State, and, in Central America, for the concept of the federated provinces. The Conservatives sought to keep things much as they were a century before: to preserve the traditional systems of agricultural production and land ownership, maintain inviolate the Church's privileges and generally to maintain the role or structure of government as near as possible to that of colonial days.' In 1838, the United Provinces collapsed with the defeat of the great Liberal leader. General Francisco Morazan, by Guatemalan Rafael Carrera, an illiterate of Indian descent and military genius backed by the Church, the great estate owners, and others threatened by the ‘mod¬ ern' ideas of 19th Century Liberalism. A champion of Conservatism, he took periodic military action to keep hand-picked Conservatives in the presidency of each of the other new states of the region throughout his 27 years in power until his death in 1865. 89

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

The concern here is not with the formal structures of Central American governments, or the influence of the United States, the French Revolution or other factors on the formulation of constitutions, but with the development of organized police and militaiy bodies to maintain public order and internal security. The exigencies of inter¬ state warfare in the 19th Centuiy significantly influenced how military institutions developed, but the greater influence on both military and police development was wrought by the necessities of internal order; these, in turn, were dictated largely by the division of land and the changing requirements for agricultural labour. Rafael Carrera’s long reign effectively froze most military institu¬ tions in the hybrid form which had emerged as, without preparation, colonial militias of each region's cities stepped into the roles of armies of independent states. In this regard El Salvador’s problems were less serious than Nicaragua’s, where the city militias’ of Granada and Leon clashed for a long period, and the new country effectively had two com¬ peting armies throughout most of the century. The development of national armies in the region was based on ad hoc adaptations of the city-based militias, in some states retaining the legislation of the 18th Century, although departing from the colonial laws’ exclusion oiIndian troops.’ Officers remained almost exclusively cno//o5 - Central Americanborn citizens of Spanish parentage — but turned to the use of pressganged Indian conscripts for occasional expeditionary forces against neighbouring states. As in the colonial period, a principal function of the militias and incipient armies was to be available at short notice to put down the regular Indian rebellions throughout the region,^ and to provide a mechanism to forcibly overcome Indian communities’ reluctance to comply with tax, labour, and other obligations required of them by the state. The militia or military forces were the means whereby Indian communities could be threatened with reprisals, through exemplary violence, for the trangressions of their individual members. The structure of local government, inherited from the Spanish at independence, played a major role in how central government could deal with Indian communities, and how the communities themselves could be entrusted with the performance of basic police functions: obligations to maintain order, health and safety, and decorum. From the first years of independence these police functions were defined to include the obligation to ensure members of each Indian community provided the labour required by neighbouring private farms. • . Centuiy, when a series a Liberal governments introduced radical changes in the very landscape of El Salvador and much of the rest of Central America, the cities and towns, and the small Indian communities, were governed in accord with essentially democ¬ ratic systems inherited from the mid-16th Century, when the laws governing the Spanish colonies of the Americas were reformed to 90

The Politics of Land and Labour

introduce a model of municipal government based on the Spanish cabildo. The intention was to restore responsibility for local affairs in

Indian communities to traditional Indian leadership, and to “eliminate the worst of the abuses perpetrated... against the Indians”." Also inherited from colonial legislation, and, indeed, a relic of pre¬ colonial indigenous settlement patterns, was a system whereby the agricultural lands of Indian communities were held in common; a land tenure system that conflicted with Liberal ideology. Efforts by Liberal governments to eliminate corporate landholdings (and to redistribute them to agricultural entrepreneurs in private estates) were a primary cause of 19th Century Indian revolts, and at times joined the communites in common cause with the region’s largest corporate landowner; the Church. Alienation of Indian lands remained the major factor in the revolutionary impulses of the Salvadorean peasantry in the 20th Century; containing these impulses became the primary function of government. In El Salvador the triumph of the Liberals in the late 19th Century was followed by the creation of a secular state, and the fragmentation of much of the Church's property; but the Church endured without the extremes of anti-clericalism experienced elsewhere under Liberal rule, and subsequently turned away from its defence of the rights of the Indian communities. For the people of El Salvador, the limitations on the Church's powers were less significant than the systematic breaking up of the Indian communities, by confiscating and redistributing their communal lands to non-Indian entrepreneurs. In El Salvador this process advanced perhaps more rapidly than elsewhere in the Americas, and transformed the nature of society more closely to the pres¬ criptions of Liberal ideology, with the land almost wholly turned over to the cultivation of agricultural products for export. During 1825, General Manuel Jose Arce was temporarily assisted in training his militia by two French army officers; but not until the arrival of a French Military Mission under the presidency of Gerardo Barrios (1858-63) was El Salvador's army separated from its militia roots and reorganized systematically as a national army on the European model; this progress was encouraged by the foundation of a military academy in 1869.' The development of police systems beyond the strictly local patterns of colonial society paralleled the evolution of urban elite-based militias toward institutions concerned with national defence against foreign enemies. Police structures developed late in the century were intended to take over much of the internal security function hitherto performed by the militias or the army.' The police would, moreover, be required to contain the enormous unrest provoked by Liberal measures to deprive the Indian population of their land.’

91

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

The Police: Role and Function Police legislation in early post-colonial El Salvador dealt primarily with Indian communities’ authorities’ duties to ensure that community obligations to the state were fulfilled. The police function was defined to include matters of public safety and, for example, keeping the streets clean and walls whitewashed. A primary obligation of community government, spelled out in a law of 29 April 1825 which remained in force for most of the century, was the detection and punishment of vagrancy.^ Vagrancy was defined broadly, and the implementation of the vagrancy law was a principal means to ensure a labour supply for the plantations or estates surrounding the communities. The 1825 statute declared that members of Indian communities lacking visible means of support were to be detained and sentenced as vagrants, and “dis¬ tributed” to the local “hacienda and farm owners”. The hacienda owners in turn were obliged to report to local officials if the former vagrants were satisfactory workers; if they were not they could be punished as recidivists in vagrancy. The alcaldes,, or mayors of the com¬ munities were also required under the law to compile a list of all the day labourers — jornaleros — of their communities, and to ensure on their own responsibility that “each Monday, they leave to work on the haciendas”. The mayor and the town council of the Indian communities were also personally responsible under the law to provide the labour necessary to the local haciendas, whether or not any vagrants were on hand. As the leaders of their community, these officials were required to provide “the assistance of the numbers of people requested for labour”. Unless the community could prove that the labourers needed were not available, it could be made collectively liable for any loss incurred by the hacienda owners, although this particular provision may not have been enforced. To prove that no labour was available the law provided for town leaders to list all local day labourers and their place of employment One can only speculate on the capability of the almost entirely illiterate Indian communities to produce such an account. “Vagranf' women were required to work as servants in houses that requested their services. The first code of “Police Regulations” was issued in a law of 12 May 1843, collating previous legislation, including the 1825 police and vagrancy law. The principal executor of the police function remained the local authorities of towns and communities. After 1843, a new ele¬ ment in local government and law enforcement was the appointment in each community of special constables (Alcaldes de Policia) under the mayors’ authority. For primarily Indian towns (pueblos de indigenas) a separate post was created which was hierarchically subordinated to the (elecUd) mayor, but exercised the principal police function in the com¬ munity. Called Corregidores, they were to be appointed directly by the provincial governor. They carried the same symbol of authority as did 92

The Politics of Land and Labour

the mayor, a ceremonial cane or bastdn, and were to act as inter¬ mediaries between the hacienda owners employing day labourers and the communities which provided them. Payment was no longer to be made to individual labourers, but to the Corregidor, or, where none was appointed, the mayor himself. In either case the intermediary was entitled to a “gratification" based on a percentage of the total. This new post forced a wedge into the traditional autonomy of local government and opened an avenue whereby hacienda owners could buy off local community officials. In 1854, for misdemeanour offences, a body of police regulations approximating a penal code became law; to be enfor¬ ced by local government it focused on maintaining a peasant/master social order. Its first chapter dealt with vagrancy, its sixth and seventh with punishments for workers whose obligations to their employers were not fulfilled. The punishment for farm workers who failed to arrive at work, was from 15 to 30 strokes of the rod, plus paying the cost of their capture. Hacienda owners were to inform authorities of a runaway farmworker within 48 hours. Runaway wet-nurses “will be pursued and forced to provide milk to the children in their charge” or, should their employers no longer want their services, face 20 days' imprisonment. Vagrants were to build and repair roads. Other chapters of the regula¬ tions concerned gambling, illegal alcohol-making, begging and carry¬ ing prohibited weapons. Despite the violence that horsemen sent from the capital could wreak on uncooperative community leaders, these efforts to regiment the labour force proved quite inadequate. The weakness was met by a new set of laws intended to bridge the gap between local law enforcement resources and the crisis-oriented deployment of militias or Army troops by the central authorities. In 1855 a new set of regulations was issued to organize the first effort at a non-local “Rural Police” forcef roving inspectors who were to pat¬ rol the highways and the countryside, supervise the transport of prisoners, protect travellers and pursue highwaymen. They could also request military escorts from the local Army commandants, and were empowered to call on hacienda owners for assistance in the pursuit of bandits or rebels, along the lines of the sheriffs posse of the American Old West. The inspector could fine those who refused such assistance, although, presumably the non-Indian elites, haeienda owners and townsmen alike, would have co-operated in defending their own interests. These rural police inspectors were also empowered to act as magistrates, and could penalize those minor offences codified in the police regulations with fines, or jail sentences of up to 30 days. An important difference between the new plan and earlier proposals was that it provided for costs to be covered by central governmenfs budget.'" , . • u f Despite these early efforts to extend the state s authority by means of a national police network covering the rural areas, only after radical 93

Land. Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

changes in the land tenure system in the 1870s and 1880s was a really effective national police system developed. The new rural police legisla¬ tion and organization which resulted was, as before, primarily oriented to controlling rural labour.

“A Revolution in Our Agriculture”: Coffee Cultivation A major change took place in El Salvador with the introduction of cof¬ fee culture; suitable only in the highlands, where the traditional Indian communities were concentrated, requiring several years capital out¬ flow before the first crop was harvested, and a large, permanent, labour supply. The arrival of coffee not only provided a strong incentive to drive the Indians off their communally held lands, but eventually resulted in a wholly new settlement pattern, a new relation between labourer and private farm owner, and an improved security system to regulate the transition from traditional society, and the smooth functioning of the new society. Private landowners' unplanned yet continual encroachment on the Indian communal lands after about 1850 was judged inadequate by pro¬ ponents of a rapid transition to export agriculture. Advocates of state intervention to force the transfer of lands to those prepared to invest in a cash crop economy argued that the system of communal lands impeded progress and encouraged the peasantry's laziness: peasants could pro¬ vide their own basic needs from community lands and, therefore, had to be forced to work on the private estates." Legislation introduced between 1879 and 1881 first regulated the use of ejido communal lands, and then abolished them, organizing their transfer to private ownership. “We are witnessing a true revolution in our agriculture,'' trumpeted an editorial in the Diario Oficial of 11 December 1879. “In all the Republic we are enclosing and dividing land for the cultivation of coffee, cocoa, agave, rubber and other valuable crops.''" It was, indeed, a revolution, but wholly at the expense of the peasantry, who lost most of their land in the process and were forced to become plantation workers. Private investors, upon guaranteeing to divert former community lands to cash crops, received title to the lands, and were then authorized to evict the former residents, as squatters, and could call on the army to assist them. The takeover was fiercely resisted; there were frequent disturbances and, occasionally, judges responsible for adjudicating formerly communal lands to private owners were cap¬ tured by the aggrieved communities and their hands cut off." Initially, legislation for the reallocation of community lands was to be implemented by local government, but it was clear from the outset that to force the transfers, direct intervention of central authority was necessary, at first in the form of the army. In 1888, however, the gap bet¬ ween the army and the local authorities was bridged by legislation 94

The Politics of Land and Labour

tailored strictly to the needs of the coffee growers of Western El Salvador, where unrest was threatening the early success of the coffee industry. A Legislative Decree, in force from March 1888,'^' authorized the formation of a rural mounted police corps for the Western depart¬ ments of Ahuachapan, Sonsonate and Santa Ana, and its preamble referred to the national importance of the agricultural enterprises of the region, the growth of crime there, and the need to protect coffee produc¬ tion. The law stated that the new force would be financed exclusively from a tax on coffee exports from the districts where the units were based. In 1900, legislation extended this “security tax” to exports from other plantation districts to which rural police units had been dispatched.'^ These rural police were to patrol all settlements not under effective control of a local municipal government, an increasingly large propor¬ tion of the coffee lands, as communities literally disappeared as the land - their traditional means of livelihood - was absorbed into private estates. The police were to protect the private estates and, prevent the firing of fields, the clearance of timber and undergrowth from the banks of the rivers, unauthorized hunting and fowling... the settle¬ ment. clearing, and burning of any land belonging to private estates.'^

There was to be no subsistence outside of the plantation system. In 1887, local city police organizations, departing from the law enfor¬ cement tradition of watchmen and part-time constables, were established in the prosperous cities of the coffee growing areas, Santa Ana, Son¬ sonate and Ahuachapan, their charters approved by the central govern¬ ment. In San Salvador itself a permanent professional police corps of 100 men and 18 officers and administrators had been set up since 1883." Provisions to force the peasantry to work on the private farms and estates were, on paper, similar to those laid down in the police legisla¬ tion regarding “vagrancy” and labour obligations enacted soon after independence; they differed in that they were now enforceable by the new rural police which could override local government, or hold it accountable for non-compliance. The Army, of course, could always be called in when things got out of hand. Another innovation was the appointment in each village of, ‘agricultural judges’... [who] were to keep lists of all day labourers (jornaleros), arrange for the capture of those who left an estate before fulfilling their obligations, and visit private estates regularly to check the need for workers”.'*

Propertyless labourers or those without permanent paid employment were required each week to produce a receipt from a farm owner as 95

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

proof to the local police, inspector or mayor, that they had not been idle. Increasingly deprived of their lands, seeing themselves reduced to regimented day labourers, the existing communities began to disin¬ tegrate. In a measure designed to ensure the permanent labour supply necessary to coffee culture, without depending for support on the fragile structure of local government, the new coffee barons began to require labourers to live in entirely new settlements within the large estates. These settlements, still to be seen strung out along internal estate road¬ ways, fell outside the scope of legislation governing population centres and local government, and administration was entirely the respons¬ ibility of the landowner. The traditional practice, whereby farmworkers had their own patch on the large estates to grow subsistence crops, was abandoned, in part because coffee lands were too valuable, but also because their labour was required all year round. Denying the workers any recourse to subsistence farming (food was supplied by the adminis¬ trators) and maintaining the option of expelling recalcitrant workers from the settlements, placed the labour force entirely at the owners' mercy. As provisions intended to force the peasantry to work on the private estates were, in substance, new forms of the old vagrancy and labour laws, so legislation dissolving and redistributing the communal lands was to some extent mere legalization of a process already well underway. David Browning, in his study El Salvador: Landscape and Society, des¬ cribes the whittling away of the community lands of just one village, Juayua, in the department of Sonsonate, initially surrounded by exten¬ sive and fertile communal lands. By 1858 three large plantations had been established on its outskirts; by 1877 the village was renamed “El Progreso” because of the prosperity of its surrounding coffee planta¬ tions. By 1879 official reports stated that the Indians of Juayua no longer held sufficient lands for their traditional subsistence crops. In 1881, when the holding of community lands was abolished, little was left to surrender. “The ultimate reaction of the villagers to this situation was demonstrated when, in 1932, Juayua became the headquarters of the largest peasant uprising Central America has experienced.”*’ The expropiation of their lands and the regimentation of their labour left lit¬ tle alternative when the coffee economy crashed in the World Depres¬ sion of the early 1930s, taking away their only means of subsistence, leaving them with nothing to eat. By 1912 the process of accumulation of the land alienated from the Indian communities had largely been completed, and the famous “14 families”, still said to dominate El Salvador, had established their domains. There was no longer enough land attached to communities to permit widespread subsistance farming, and, especially in the heavily populated western area, farmworkers either worked for the planters, starved or emigrated. Thereafter, the police function was directed away 96

The Politics of Land and Labour

from forcing workers, through vagrancy laws and labour levies, to pro¬ vide labour for the planters, and toward the new problems of public order and political control that emerged with the disappearance of com¬ munity structures and the self-policing role of the local communities with them.

Creation of the National Guard In 1912, the evolution of a specialized rural police system culminated with the creation of a National Guard, modelled roughly on the Spanish Civil Guard and organized by Spanish Civil Guard officers. Captains Juan F. Velutini and Alfonso Martin Garrido. The National Guard was placed under the operational control of the Ministry of Government and Development, and at the time considered a progressive alternative to the involvement of the army in rural law enforcement functions.^” From the beginning the National Guard was a rural force, charged with enforcing new legislation intended to deal with political or trade union organization among the rural workers or, more precisely, to stop it. The uprooted population presented a much more complex public order pro¬ blem than did the earlier, traditional society: to meet it a ban on trade union organization among agricultural workers imposed by the 1907 Agrarian Code (Ley Agraria) was enforced by the National Guard. While the Guard’s main duty was to enforce political control on the rural population, it was also to continue enforcement of more petty pro¬ visions which had been part of agrarian legislation for many years. Pro¬ tecting coffee and fruit plantations was a priority: Guardsmen were admonished not to permit fruit gatherers to work without the owner’s or his administrator’s written permission; and to arrest strangers on sight if found gathering firewood, picking berries, or otherwise harvest¬ ing fruit without written authorization; the Guard would also take on the former municipal task of keeping records of names and descriptions of employees and dependants of the plantations."' While the National Guard was a major contribution to the Salvadorean security system, there was also a parallel improvement of the urban police system, which was integrated with a national network comparable to the Guard. Already in 1905 an executive decree had ordered the transfer of part of San Salvador’s police force to San Miguel, the second city of the Republic, with central government funding; the San Salvador police were already a nationally supported body. By the end of 1906 the full time police forces of the other major cities were linked administratively to the San Salvador police, to create the nucleus of a national police corps. This was regularized in 1912, when Spanish army captain Alfonso Martin Garrido was appointed commander of all the perma¬ nent civil police organizations, and supervised the setting-up of a train¬ ing programme. At the same time, a parallel political investigations 97

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

branch of the national police was initiated, to be controlled by the Presi¬ dent and the Ministry of Government, under the direction of Juan F. Velutini (who subsequently developed the National Guard). The Cen¬ tral Security Corps {Cuerpo de Seguridad Central de la Republica) was a prototype for the political police organizations which were to follow.^^ President Manuel E. Araujo (1911-13) is generally credited with having established the basis of a professional law enforcement system, and sought to relieve the army of its police function; he is also credited with reforms to the army itself which have permanently influenced the security system. Today, Salvadorean army writers date to Araujo's short presidency the introduction of elements conducive to greater professionalization in the army, including the creation of a General Staff - again on the advice of Spanish officers; the creation of an army educational corps to give troops minimal education; the reorganization of the army hierarchy along present-day lines; and the organization of a workable army reserve system (that, as one source puts it, could be “mobilized within 72 hours’’).^^ The reserve system entailed conscript soldiers, on completing their active service, remaining on reserve duty for a period to take part in neighbourhood patrols (patrullas de barrio, patrullas cantonales) under the command of the local army or National Guard post.^'^ The army, then, was not relieved of local law enforcement as President Araujo may have hoped. The test of the new rural security apparatus came years later, in 1932, with the overthrow of another President Araujo - Arturo Araujo - and the outbreak of widespread agrarian revolts.

98

7: Buying Time Against Revolution

Massacre: 1932 The development of an elaborate security system, the recent explosive escalation of state terror, and violent revolution in El Salvador today, would be inexplicable without reference to events that rocked El Salvador in 1932. In January that year Indian peasants in western El Salvador revolted; the revolt was crushed within 48 hours. In the follow¬ ing days 30,000 of a population then of less than one million Salva¬ doreans were massacred. Since then, the civilian elites of El Salvador have ceded the direction of government to the army, whose prirnary objective has been to ensure that the opportunity for peasant majorities to rise up in a greater and less easily crushed revolt never occurs. Given the national obsession with the possibility of vengeful peasant hordes marching on the towns and into the villas of the rich, the development and strengthening of the security system remained a major area of initiative under each military government since 1932. Today's security system is a pastiche of elements of the elaborate sys¬ tem developed in the wake of the 1932 revolt and modern organization and techniques introduced in the 1960s. Examination of the organiza¬ tion and operation of this system since 1932 reveals considerably more of the nature of political power and authority, of privilege and oppres¬ sion in El Salvador, than a reading of the various constitutions in force during the period, or analysing the political platforms published by the succession of official parties through which the military have ruled. Salvadoreans of all social classes consider 1932 as a year of almost mys¬ tical significance. For the rich, the revolt that triggered the massacre is the main topic; had the godless (Communist) savages (Indians) not been crushed, the country would have been over-run and civilization itself destroyed. Among the poor, the killing grounds of 1932 are still pointed out, and the fear, the hatred, still remain, burned into the minds of each successive generation. In the 1970s Salvadorean elites began to look on 1932 as a model res¬ ponse to the threat of rebellion - and, indeed, placed paid advertise¬ ments in leading newspapers warning that a similar remedy remained a 99

Land Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

possibility should “subversives” continue their activities - but in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, revulsion, guilt and, perhaps, fear of revenge contributed to an effort to erase the events from Salvadorean history. Those involved in the killing preferred that nothing remained on paper. The archives of daily newspapers removed all material from the year 1932. Government archives were purged of all documents which might be incriminating and historians have found that Salvadorean civil or military authorities hold almost no records on the events of 1932, and have been informed that all were destroyed at the end of the Martinez regime. Whatever the motive for this destruction, Salvadorean elite groups have never shown, other than by their reticence, that the massacre was considered anything less than wholly justified. Only in the 1970s, however, did such bodies as FARO, the Eastern Salvador Landowners’ Association, and the organizations of Salvadorean coffee growers, openly refer to the massacre as having achieved 50 years of “stability” and, implicitly, as a viable model for a repeat performance which would ensure “peace” for a further similar period. Indisputably, the events of 1932 were instrumental in guaranteeing 50 years of privilege for the privileged; but to hope that killing even a million Salvadoreans today would have the same result enters the realm of fantasy. With Salvadorean landowners’ organizations’ current tossing around of figures such as “250,000” or “half a million” killings as the level the army s backers are willing to go to wipe out “Communism” from El Salvador, 1932’s relevance for the present becomes all too clear. Miguel Marmol, the union organizer and left-wing leader who sur¬ vived a 1932 firing squad, summed up the effect of that year on modern El Salvador, as that of a spectre haunting the nation and influencing the very nature of the people: Since that accursed year, all of us have become other people, and I believe that El Salvador has become another country. El Salvador is today above all a creature of that barbarity... The style of the rulers may have changed but the basic way of thinking that still governs us is that of the perpetrators of the massacre of 1932.^^

While the Salvadorean records of the 1932 massacre are slim, there is considerable material produced by American and British officials in the country at the time, in military intelligence reports sent to the US and in the reports filed by Canadian Naval Commander'V.G. Brodeur, who toured the country at the time. Major A.J. Harris, United States military attache to Central America, warned, in a report of 22 December 1931,^*' that social conditions in El Salvador were explosive; the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few made the country “ripe for communism”:

100

Buying Time Against Revolution 1 learned that roughly 90 percent of the wealth of the nation is held by about Vi of 1 percent of the population. Thirty or forty families own nearly everything in the country. They live in almost regal style ... The rest of the population has practically nothing. 1 imagine the situation in El Salvador today is very much like France was before its revolution, Russia was before its revolution and like Mexico before its revolution.

Major Harris concluded his report predicting that revolution might be delayed “for several years, ten or even twenty”, but that when it comes it will be a bloody one”. According to its date stamp, this seemingly prophetic report reached the Department of State on 20 January 1932, the very day a state of siege was declared after the first sporadic outbreaks of revolt. Salvadoreans generally consider the events of the following days to have been the “revolution”, long predicted not only by Major Harris but by the Salva¬ dorean military itself After the revolt had been “put down”, the Major even apologized, in his report of 28 January, that he had failed to indicate in his report just how ripe the country had been for revolution. But were the localized, agrarian uprisings of 1932 the social revolu¬ tion Major Harris had predicted? The scale was hardly proportionate with the Russian. French or Mexican revolutions. The revolts were not only short-lived, but limited to the western third of the country, and the rebels were apparently responsible for somewhat less than 100 deaths among civilians and members of the security forces combating them. The 1932 affair is outstanding not as an agrarian revolt, but because of events after the uprisings ended, when some 30,000 peasants, trade unionists and opposition members were exterminated, most of whom had seemingly little or nothing to do with the revolts. In the process every vestige of labour or independent political organization was In a sense Major Harris' national social revolution never happened. The sporadic revolts of January 1932 (and December 1931) differed little from the earlier traditional, localized Indian peasant revolts in the sarne area. But in 1932 the scattered uprisings in the countryside and the failed plans of urban political activists served as a pretext to eliminate the potential for a more serious attempt at revolution in an uncertain future. The very bloody revolution, foreseen by Major Harris, is only now taking shape in the 1980s. The British Consul in San Salvador, A.J. Rodgers made remarks similar to Major Harris’ in a report of 7 January 1932 criticizing t e conspicuous wealth of the landowners and the miserab e and politically dangerous - condition of their workers. With the fall of coffee prices on the world market, planters had adopted “the unwise course of reducing the wages of their labourers” (from 75 to 25 centavos a day), wages which were “already low enough”, and even reduced the 101

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

traditional food ration of tortillas and beans. Much discontent was caused on certain plantations when the workers’ food was reduced and their pay diminished. It is in districts where the most unpopular planters have their estates that there is the most unrest.

In the aftermath of the 1932 revolt and massacre Canadian Naval Commander V.G. Brodeur attributed the “revolution" to injustice, pure and simple; In conclusion, my personal opinion is that the revolution was entirely due to lack of consideration for the Indians. There are only two classes in Salvador, i.e., the very rich and the Indians. The very rich are very few and it is noticeable that these left the country the minute the trouble star¬ ted... From observation, it is very doubtful if the Indians who took part in the revolution knew what bolshevism meant. To them it meant an organization to release them from slavery.^*

Commander Brodeur's assessment of the nature — and causes — of the 1932 revolt could well describe the revolutionary situation of the 1980s: one need only substitute for “Indians” “the poor". The rich, in 1932, left for Europe; in the 1980s, for Miami. The 1980s revolution and the revolts of 1932 and before have been a response to pressures on the land, to the imprisonment or murder of local non-violent leaders, and to the lack of alternative means whereby El Salvador’s peasant farmers could hope for some assurance of their families physical survival. While the violence with which the security services are at present confronting pressures for change suggests a direct throwback to the 1932 massacre, it differs in many ways; not least in the involvement of foreign advisers. The 1932 events were followed by 40 years of tinkering with the security system in order to avoid the repetition of the exemplary violence epitomized in the 30,000 dead. The refinement of a system of stricter control of the rural population began immediately after the kill¬ ings ended in 1932, and continued throughout the 14-year regime of General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, building upon the pre¬ vious rural security forces to create a system rendering massive violence largely unnecessary. The system held until the middle 1970s when mass killings once again became the order of the day. In January 1932, Major Harris reported the massacre in terms familiar to those following present events in El Salvador; bodies lining the road to the airport, piles of multilated bodies of “Communists” executed and left as “examples”. Photographs of slaughtered “Com¬ munists” sent by Major Harris with his reports were described in one of his accounts as evidence that “the government is doing its best to 102

Buying Time Against Revolution

exterminate communism from the land”.’'^ In a comparable report, in August 1981, the international press reported the discovery outside San Salvador, of the heads of 85 Salvadoreans described by police spokes¬ men as “guerrillas”. Major Harris described the immediate effect of the 1932 massacre in suitably apocalyptic terms: All work is paralyzed on the farms. Half the servants have fled. Commerce is ruined. Nobody dares trust anybody else. The whole situation is really terrible and the future looks very dark.'^*'

How the revolt and massacre came to pass and the aftermath of the dark days of 1932 are of the utmost relevance to subsequent develop¬ ments in the security system and the political life of El Salvador.

Coup d’Etat and Agrarian Revolt After what was arguably El Salvador’s only democratic presidential election, Arturo Araujo began his term as President in March 1931. His overthrow in a military coup on 2 December 1931 ushered in Eatin America's longest uninterrupted military dictatorship. During Araujo’s ten months in office, economic crisis leading to a series of revolts set the stage for a nationwide massacre and placed the nation’s destiny entirely in the hands of its security system. That even this one election occurred as it did, and that Arturo Araujo was permitted to take office was in part due to the quirks of his immediate predecessor in the presidency — Don Pio Romero Bosque (1927-31) - and of his sole supporter in the army high command. General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez (General Martinez) whose support probably owed more to political foresight and personal ambi¬ tion than to any democratic vocation. Since the assassination of Manuel Enrique Araujo (1911-13) nearly 20 years earlier, the presidency had been passed from Carlos Melendez (1913-18), to his brother, Jorge Melendez (1919-23), to Carlos Melendez’ brother-in-law (Vice-President to both of them) Dr Alfonso Quinonez Molina: the nearest to a family dynasty El Salvador has had. Although civilian's, the three men ruled by force, the security system turned to their own advantage. American military intelligence commented in 1927 that Dr Quinonez “practically entered office over machine-gun fire”.^' The period was also the peak of the coffee boom, with coffee exports leaping in value from $7,372,000 in 1915 to $22,741,000 in 1928, and with the land dedicated to coffee culture doubling between 1918 and 1928.^^ A national infrastructure of highways, port facilities and a telegraph system, was built, funded by new sources of revenue stemming ultimately from the coffee economy. A new headquarters for the national police, with a 103

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

police communications centre tied into the telegraph system was also constructed. The improved communications network enabled central government, for the first time, to exercise some control over all aspects of national and local affairs.^^ Following carefully orchestrated elections in 1927 the presidency passed from Dr Quinonez to his relative by marriage and former Minis¬ ter of War, Don Pio Romero Bosque. Once in the presidential chair, however. President Romero Bosque, veered from the pattern of his erstwhile dynastic partners, and began to fulfil his election promise to relax political control. The nearly perma¬ nent state of siege was lifted, press censorship ended, the national university was granted autonomy, and an amnesty granted to political prisoners and exiles of the past six adminstrations.^"* More surprisingly, Romero Bosque three open the 1931 elections to all candidates, refusing to express a personal preference, or, more importantly, to act behind the scenes to favour any candidate. As a result the victor of this first and last democratic contest was a candidate quite at odds with the economic elites of the day. The 1931 elections came not only at a time of economic crisis, but after a decade of labour and political organization wholly at variance with the country’s almost feudal social structure. The Melendez Quinonez period had seen the beginning of active labour organization in El Salvador, and the first big strikes; the railway workers’ in 1921, tailors’ in 1920, shoemakers’ in 1921, and numerous partial strikes by groups of craftsmen. The craftsmen and manual workers employed in the urban service sector formed the nucleus of a labour movement, and by 1924, according to one of the early trade union organizers, “... the trade unions gathered into a single organization the craftsmen and workers of the various kinds of production and services, called the 'Union of Various Trades’ {'Sindicato de Oficios Varios)."^\ In 1924 the trade unions joined forces in a national federation linked to the newly formed Central American Workers Federation {Confederacion Obrera Centroamericana (COCA)). By 1930 the Salvadorean branch {Federacion Regional de Trabajadores de El Salvador (FRTS)) had some 1,500 members, mostly among shoemakers, carpenters and bakers in the departments of San Salvador, Santa Ana and La Libertad”."** Labour organization was paralleled by the growth of a small Com¬ munist Party, in existence by 1925, and of the Socorro Rojo Internacional (International Red Aid).^’ Thomas Anderson describes Communist Party activity in El Salvador as having taken off in the spring of 1930, when Mexican leader Jorge Fernandez Anaya travelled throughout the country hitting especially the western zone and concentrating on the farm workers”.-’*^ The Communist Party and the Salvadorean Labour Federation (FRTS) did not converge until 1930 when the former moved to expand 104

Buying Time Against Revolution

its membership among working people in the countryside. After January 1930, FRTS and the Communist Party made a combined effort to organize in rural areas. By April 1930 FRTS had collected some 50,000 signatures demanding legislation to “guarantee farm contracts and set a minimum pay for agricultural workers”.^'' On Labour Day, 1 May 1930, thousands of newly organized workers and peasants marched through the streets of San Salvador; one source claimed the marchers totalled 80,000."" Don Arturo Araujo declared his candidacy for the 1931 presidential elections in July 1930 and campaigned on a populist platform promis¬ ing social reforms. In 1919, he had unsuccessfully run for the presidency against Jorge Melendez, his candidacy strongly opposed by the govern¬ ment in power and by those who feared his appeal to the peasantry and the working people. US military intelligence reported strong support for Araujo by “the labor unions and the laboring people” and the major effort of the authorities to “discourage his campaign”: All of the leaders of the Araujo party who attempted to organize clubs or carry on his campaign were quietly taken to the various prisons throughout the country and it is reported that they number nearly five hundred..

US military intelligence also reported fears that an organization of peasants created by the Melendez-Quinonez clique to intimidate opposition groups, known as the “Red League” {Liga Roja) might get out of control and turn on their masters: ... the plantation of Arturo Araujo is carefully surrounded and guarded by National Guards as it is feared [the Red League] might rally to him as a leader. All communications with his plantation have been severed, both telegraph and telephone communication having been denied him two weeks preceding the election ... the first day of the election was as far as I can ascertain free ..

In 1931 Araujo’s candidacy was seen with great hope by the people at the bottom, supported by a sector of the urban professional classes, and rejected by the great landowners. US military intelligence gave a relatively objective view in December 1930 and a virulently critical view in January 1931: Araujo, the candidate of the common people, is enormously popular in the Western departments. His enemies declare that he is wholly unreli¬ able, and is furthermore a communist."^ Araujo is nothing but a labour agitator and admitted anarchist... It is certain that the State Department would have constant and serious dif¬ ficulties with a man of the type of Araujo.""

105

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

Arturo Araujo was sworn in as President on 1 March 1931 after a campaign based largely on promises - perhaps impossible to fulfil - to improve the lot of the peasants and working people. When he took power the national economy was in serious trouble owing to the world depression. Coffee, virtually the sole export crop, was worthless, the 1929-30 crop left to rot in the fields.'’^ By the end of 1931 there was little work on the plantations; those still employed were reportedly paid only 15 centavos, two tortillas and a ration of beans for their day’s work, in contrast to the 50 to 75 centavos paid in the past.'^ The peasantry and the urban working class, organized in national labour and political organizations, were striking for better treatmenC^ The pressures became too much for Araujo. Outbreaks of political protest and localized rebellion, reported within weeks of his inauguration, were put down in the traditional way. “President Araujo is handling affairs in Salvador much more firmly than had been expected”, reported the US military attache in April 1931. “In most of the difficulties which have arisen he has relied on the Vice President, General Maximillian [sic] Martinez .. “On May 17th there were serious disturbances in Sonsonate... caused by Communist agitators. The Police and Military handled the situation with considerable severity.”'*’ Martinez, who, on top of the vice-presidency, had wangled for him¬ self the post of Minister of War, commanded the army and security for¬ ces, and was apparently given a free hand by Araujo, who trusted him. It was perhaps an indication of Araujo’s political naivete to have agreed to appoint General Martinez Vice-President (his constitutional successor should he be obliged to step down) as well as his Minister of War com¬ manding those very forces capable of forcing him to do so. While the decisive factor in Araujo’s overthrow in December 1931 may have been the coffee growers’ concern over his sympathy with the rebellious peasants, another oft-repeated explanation lays the coup at the door of issues affecting the military itself In February 1931, officers of the Circulo Militar (the prestigious officers’ club) requested Araujo to revise military pay procedures: payment at the beginning of each mon¬ th, rather than daily, and equal pay regardless of the province in which personnel were stationed. Araujo not only failed to accede, but in August 1931, sharply reduced the military budget. Possibly the last straw was that officers received no payment from September to November 1931; on 2 December the army revolted.^® But although military pay issues were a real concern, the timing of the coup suggests it was a pre-emptive strike against an old, but now bet¬ ter organized and more threatening enemy: the Indian peasants. Municipal elections were scheduled for 15 December, to be followed shortly by legislative elections. Local government was deemed very important by the peasants, who believed that if they could elect their own municipal officials changes would really begin. In the coffee¬ growing areas the Labour candidates, including many put up by the 106

Buying Time Against Revolution

Communist Party, threatened to sweep the field. Reinforcing the threat of a left-wing victory in the elections were con¬ tinual mass meetings on the farms and street demonstrations in the cities, leading to clashes with the security forces and revealing a poten¬ tial tor greater violence in the near future. Long before the 2 December coup the peasantry was virtually up in arms, held in check only by the promise of municipal elections. Late in 1931 in Ahuachapan, for exam¬ ple, contingents of up to 900 peasants frequently marched on the local garrison with the idea of forcing it to “render accounts for the arbitrarities of the military authorities"; local left-wing election candidates talked them out of attacking it.*" A final factor which helped to provoke a coup was a longstanding plan to organize — in the words of Communist Party leader Miguel Marmol — “a great national strike of the coffee workers, planned to achieve substantial salary increases, but that could be turned toward political ends related to an event like the elections.”^- From a coffee planter’s letter to US military intelligence we know the authorities were aware of the planned strike two months before the 1931-32 harvest: In the Report... 1 sent from Sonsonate, a meeting of peasants and coun¬ try people was described held on Sunday 15 August at Rio deCeniza (Son¬ sonate) ... for the purpose of listening to a letter... from San Salvador signed by Miguel Angel Marmol... [in which] Sr. Marmol had recom¬ mended the procedure that has been followed [public meetings and demonstrations] on all of the plantations during this harvest with the intent of filling the Republic with unrest. All of this information ... was placed in the hands of Don Salvador Lopez Rochas, then Director General of the Police ... ^’

By 2 December 1931, Martinez, backed by the coffee growers, had multifarious reasons to wish to oust Araujo in order to deal with the impending crisis on the land on his own terms. The advantage still lay with the security forces, but it threatened to be temporary. As has happened repeatedly since then in El Salvador, the coup was nominally led by a group of young officers, none above the rank of colonel. The operation successfully completed, command was prom¬ ptly turned over to General Martinez, who, as Vice-President, could claim the presidency when Araujo fled the country.^'' Within a year, all the young officers involved in planning the coup had been ousted and an old guard, loyal to Martinez, ensconced in their positions. As US military intelligence put it, Martinez “managed to side-track all of the young irresponsible element which overthrew Araujo. That Mar¬ tinez had planned it all along seems likely, but he vigorously denied this. One of the first measures Martinez took was to postpone the 15 December municipal elections to 3 January. In a measure that in retrospect 107

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

appears to have been designed to encourage Communist Party suppor¬ ters to reveal themselves, Martinez declared the elections would be open to all parties, but that in order to vote one had to be registered in the books kept by each municipio, where one inscribed his name and that of his party. Allowing the Communist party to register presented the government with a list of its adherents. When the time came for rounding up communists, the election registers would serve as a handy guide.^*

Most sources confirm that Martinez spent his first weeks in office preparing “the repressive machinery of the state, police, guardia, army, judges, state of siege, etc.’’^^ as a means, first, to immobilize the left and deny it any chance of success in the municipal elections, and then to finally crush it and the threatening peasantry. Miguel Marmol claims that friendly army officers warned him that Martinez intended first to deal with the problem of the elections, and then, as a purely military operation, “to physically eliminate” the supporters of the left.^* On 2 January 1932, Martinez again suspended municipal elections this time indefinitely. This precipitated scattered revolts in the coffee¬ growing areas of the west where the peasantry was most organized and restless. Within weeks the departments of Sonsonate and Ahuachapan (except for their capital cities) and the Indian towns of Nahuizalo, Sonzacate, Izalco, Juayua, Apaneca, Concepcion de Ataco and Jujutla, were up in arms.^’ In Ahuachapan peasants responded to the elections’ postponement by launching a general strike in several areas of the department and attacking National Guard posts on coffee plantations; sporadic out¬ breaks also occurred in Sonsonate. In the town of Santa Rita, district of Turin, some 400 men invaded plantations and attacked the Atuquizaya guard detachment, wounding a sergeant and killing one guardsman. Guardsmen from Ahuachapan and Santa Ana were called to the scene and routed the peasants, killing “a number of agitators, including Miguel Angel Zelaya and Indalecio Ramirez, leading Reds of the dis¬ trict. On 10 January at least 30 striking farm workers were killed on plantations near Turin and the town of Ahuachapan.'’' The most serious incident occurred at a mass meeting on 7 January on the “La Montanita plantation in the department of Ahuachapan, where a strike was in progress. The owners called in the National Guard which, after an exchange of threats, fired into the crowd, wounding many strikers, including women and children, and killing peasant leader Alberto Gualan. The strikers then turned on the small detachment, over¬ powered it. and killed 14 guardsmen. Miguel Marmol describes this bloodletting as marking the beginning of generalized reprisal against the peasants of the region.*"^ 108

Buying Time Against Revolution

The same day. Communist Party leaders, who had called for the general strike on the coffee plantations, requested a meeting with Presi¬ dent Marti'nez.^^ The next day (8 January) representatives of the central committee ofthe party were received by the Minister of War and the pre¬ sident's personal secretary. The delegation raised the “La Montanita” affair but was told the Minister knew nothing. An attempt to offer to pacify the workers in exchange for an end to the repression just getting under way received an unequivocal response; the Minister was not authorized to make any agreements and there would be no com¬ promises. The last thing Martinez desired then was a truce with the peasantry - which, in any case, the Communist Party could hardly have arranged. According to Thomas Anderson, one observer at the meeting quoted a delegate as warning the Minister that “The peasants will win with their machetes", to which the Minister replied “You have machetes; we have machine guns."” A risible note to the organized left's last doomed effort to call off both the peasants' uprising and the government's repression is Marmol’s image of Martinez, who had avoided the meeting by claiming a “severe toothache", peeking coyly into the meeting room, a handkerchief tied around his jaw.*' According to Miguel Marmol (whose account of other aspects of the events leading to the 1932 uprising rings true and is confirmed by other sources) not until the night after that meeting in the palace did the Com¬ munist Party's Central Committee decide to call for a nationwide revolt.** By this time the peasants of Ahuachapan and Sonsonate were already engaged in sporadic uprisings, and facing ferocious reprisals; preparations for trouble had also been made by the landowners them¬ selves and, of course, by the military and security forces: “For the most part, the finca owners had perceived the rising danger and come to the capital where as it turned out they were entirely safe;"*’ “[In San Salvador] the Army had installed machine gun nests in all of the high places of the city, rooftops, monuments, barracks, etc.”** It seems everyone was aware that a great uprising was brewing, agrarian and Communist in one, but there is no indication that anyone tried to halt it. On 13 January British Consul Rodgers (rather unrealistically) repor¬ ted that: Communist revolution could still be avoided if the planters would com¬ bine to provide their workers with reasonably healthy and comfortable living conditions together with pay not lower than what they have been accustomed to.*'’

But the planters were doing quite otherwise, and there is some evidence, again from Rodgers' report, that they preferred to fuel the flames and let the uprisings run their course. Rodgers reports that on one plantation in 109

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

the area of unrest, where 1,500 labourers were employed, “no wages had been paid for about eleven weeks”, bringing the workers to the brink of starvation. Outbreaks of insurrection were already rippling through the coffee lands on the night of 8 January, when the Communist Party belatedly called for a revolt. Initially the date set was 16 January, but on the 14th it was decided to postpone the insurrection until the 19th on what now appear to have been rather foolish grounds: Communist hero Farabundo Marti argued that more time was needed to convince certain officers and troops to join the revolt. Shortly before zero hour it was again postponed - to 22 January.^" If the authorities themselves had not forced the issue the “Communist Revolution” might have simply petered out in a series of spasmodic, localized revolts along the lines of traditional Indian uprisings. Thanks to the repeated delays and Martinez well-developed spy network, the authorities probably knew more about the revolutionary plans than did most of the revolutionaries; and cer¬ tainly more than the peasants on the coffee plantations sharpening their machetes. The Communist Party plan disintegrated when top leaders Farabundo Marti, Alfonso Luna and Mario Zapata were arrested on 19 January (and all shot on 3 February).^' Supporters in the military abortively, and fruitlessly, revolted on 19 January, jumping the gun because of the cap¬ ture of Marti and the others. The incident did, however, serve as an excuse to declare a State of Siege oh 20 January in the western depart¬ ments and the department of San Salvador. Despite false starts and postponements the call to arms reached much of the Salvadorean countryside and by the night of 22 January the west was in open revolt. Initially, considerable ferocity, if little military precision marked the fighting. The revolutionaries achieved major significance in only a small group of towns within a radius of about 25 miles from a point roughly half way between the cities of Sonsonate, Ahuachapan and Tacuba. The city of Tacuba was captured and held by the rebels for somewhat more than one day. In Ahuachapan the departmental military headquarters was besieged, but never captured. In Sonsonate several public buildings were briefly captured but the city remained firmly under the control of the local garrisons. Machetes were no match for machine-guns and human wave tactics failed to breach stout garrison walls. In smaller, predominantly Indian towns, there was transitory success: plantation workers captured Izalco and Nahuizalco and held them for three days and nights, and were driven out only by aerial bombardment and machine-gun fire. Smaller towns briefly cap¬ tured included most of those where clashes had been reported between striking coffee workers and National Guardsmen in the week after the cancelled 3 January elections: Turin, Sonzacate, Salcoatitlan, Colon and San Julian.^^ The actual pattern of the uprisings and the rebels’ actions confirmed 110

Buying Time Against Revolution

Commander Brodeur’s opinion that the injustices on the coffee planta¬ tions - not international Communist plotting - had provoked the affair. In most towns and villages affected only the town halls had been des¬ troyed or ransacked ‘‘and no other damage caused except in residences of rich plantation owners who had already fled.”’^ The looting of planta¬ tion houses was selective and the churches left untouched: The residence of a rich planter... Francisco Alfaro-Duran (near Izalco) was left intact though properties on either side were completely destroyed, especially ... priceless old furniture and paintings, this was accounted [to be because Alfaro-Duran] treated his hands in a far more generous way. It was also and especially observed that in the buildings damaged the holy pictures were left absolutely intact though everything around them was cut to pieces ... the churches ... were not touched at any time. [These facts] tend to prove that the insurrection, though of a bloody nature, was not communistic.’^'

It is perhaps also pertinent to note that in Juayiia. the town where most Indian rebels’ atrocities were reported in some contemporary, progovernment accounts, the British Consul’s report describe the leader of the uprising there, Indian cacique Francisco Sanchez, as having exer¬ cised considerable restraint, and rigid control of his forces. But the accounts of the same Francisco Sanchez by Joaqui'h Mendez and Jorge Schlesinger,” depict him as a blood-thirsty, slightly deranged “villain”. Consul Rodgers reports that, “One of his first orders was that all the liquor in the bars should be poured out onto the ground, thereby pre¬ venting the intoxication of his followers.” Some gruesome killings did occur during the capture of the town - any killing by machete is gruesome - but it is apparent the Indians did not run riot, looting and raping.’^ Once the uprisings in the coffee lands began the government forces’ basic strategy was to go from town to town ousting rebel forces from each in turn. Thanks to machine-gun strafing by aircraft, occasional aerial bombardments and the systematic concentration of military force on one town at a time, the rebels never held out more than a few hours, perhaps because, even at the height of the uprising, they were armed almost exclusively with machetes. On 25 January the Executive was able to report defeat of the “Com¬ munists” of Izalco, Nahuizalco, Salcoatitlan, and Juayua, quelling of outbreaks in the department of La Libertad., and the dispersal of rebels in Ahuachapan {Diario Oficial, 25 January 1932) and, on 26 January, that the last of the Ahuachapan rebels had been crushed and the west was under “the absolute control of the Government” (Diario Oficial, 26 January 1932).

Ill

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

The Matanza While the December 1931 and January 1932 revolts departed little from the traditional pattern of Indian uprisings, the extent and brutality of subsequent reprisals far exceeded the “punishment” of burning villages sometimes meted out in response to 19th Century revolts. Apart from marking an end to Indian culture in El Salvador, the massacre virtually depopulated the villages that provided labour for coffee plantations.” Browning, in his study, El Salvador, Landscape and Society, cites a government memorandum from theDiario Oficial of24 December 1932, instructing governors of the eastern departments to organize the dis¬ patch of workers to the west where, in the first coffee harvest after the massacre, they were badly needed in the plantations around Sonsonate, Ahuachapan and Santa Ana.^* The repression of 1932 was the most total and all-encompassing in the coffee-growing areas of the west where the uprisings were concen¬ trated. Accounts from the period describe a barbarity that would seem fantastic if they were not from sources as widely diverse as Colonel Gregorio Bustamante Maceo in \\\sHistoria Militar deEl SalvadorJ'^ antiCommunist journalist Joaquin Mendez, or participants in the revolt such as Miguel Marmol. ... the machine-guns began to sow panic and death in the regions of Juayiia, Izalco, Nahuizalco, Colon. Santa Tecla, the volcanoes of Santa Ana, and all of the towns on the river from Jiquilisco to Acajutla, there were towns that were wiped from the face of the earth.**” ... moving into the peasant section of the town (of Tacuba], they flushed out the surviving rebels by the simple expedient of setting fire to their huts and shooting them as they came out. It is said that a large number of those killed by the troops were women and children .. .**' ... all of the hamlets in the highlands of the Department of Ahuachapan, absolutely all of them, were levelled by machine-gun fire. They didn’t even ask questions or take prisoners, fire and lead was their only argu¬ ment. If the houses were of straw they would fire first and then go in to see if there were people inside.**"

In Juayua anyone wearing Indian dress was considered a Communist and shot. According to British Consul A.J. Rodgers, the government forces have shot probably at least three hundred people, who doubtless included many innocent persons. On one plantation a group of twenty-two men were shot down without enquiry although there were among them several old and faithful employees.**^

He adds that the back of the church where executions by firing squad took

112

Buying Time Against Revolution

place was so perforated as to lead to the collapse of the wall. And accord¬ ing to Bustamante: ... in Juayua, they ordered all of the honourable men who were not com¬ munists to present themselves at the Muncipal building, to give them a safe conduct, and when the plaza was replete with men, women and children, they blocked the streets leading out of the plaza and machinegunned the innocent multitude, not even the poor dogs who always faithfully follow their Indian masters escaped.**"'

Izalco and the surrounding area was a particular target. Anderson describes the round-up of suspects and the subsequent killings as follows: As most of the rebels, e.xcept the leaders, were difficult to identify, arbitrary classifications were set up. All those ... carrying machetes were guilty. All those of a strongly Indian cast of features, or who dressed in a scruffy, campesino costume, were considered guilty... Tied by the thumbs to those before and behind them, in the customary Salvadorean manner, groups of fifty were led to the back wall of the church of Asuncion in Izalco and against that massive wall were cut down by firing squads."*’

Commander Brodeur's account is equally chilling: On Monday the 25th January, the troops on the Western Front attacked the village ofYzalco, which was known as a hotbed of disaffected Indians. The village is divided roughly into two parts; one contains about 5.000 natives, the other about 10,000 Indians. These latter were attacked and about 1.200 killed, and one of the leaders of the Communist Indians was captured and hanged to the nearest tree.“

This was the Indian leader Feliciano Ama and. according to Miguel Marmol, the school children were taken to witness his execution so they wouldn't forget what happens to communists who dare to rise against their employers and the established authorities."^ Colonel Julio C. Calderon, who conducted the drumhead court at the barracks in Ahuachapan. in a statement cited by Anderson, claimed to have presided over the sentencing, and presumably execution, of 250 "Communists"."" Other sources suggest many more died there, with or without the formality of a military trial. It was there that soldiers balked and refused to continue shooting prisoners. According to Miguel Marmol: From the barracks at Ahuachapan a stream of blood flowed, as if it were water, or the urine of horses. [Later] a lieutenant who was in service there would recall, crying, that the peasants who were being shot in groups in the patio would sing "Corazdn Santo. Tit Reinaras" ("Sacred Heart. You will Reign", a Catholic hymn) and that in the pools of blood he and the soldiers in

113

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s the firing squad had seen, clear as can be. the image of Christ and had refused to go on killing and protested to their superiors. The protest was made in such adamant terms that the Commander of the garrison ordered a temporary halt to the massacre. [That is how] Modesto Ramirez was saved..

Marmol’s description of the National Guard’s typical sweeps through the countryside is strongly reminiscent of contemporary accounts of counter-insurgency sweeps through the departments of Chalatenango, Morazan and Cuscatlan in the 1980s: ... on arriving at any little peasant ranch they would machine-gun it. Afterward the survivors, if any. were lined up outside the house. The males over 10 or 12 were shot, with or without prior torture, with or without interrogation ... When there were no survivors, they would put the cadavers in the fork of a tree, or on a stake, and hang signs on them warn¬ ing that this was the fate that awaited all communists ... or else that it was a family which had been raped and murdered by the communists.*^”

While the round-ups and mass executions in the western regions amounted to a generalized massacre of the Indian population, in the cities, where no mass revolts took place, killings were guided by both the racial and social criteria of the west - where to be an Indian was to be a Communist - and by the identification of specific individuals known or suspected of left-wing sympathies. These included supporters of both the Communist Party, and former President Araujo and his Labour Party,’' as well as members of the national trade union organization (FRTS). Since voters registering for the presidential elections of 1931 and the municipal elections for 1932 had been required to state their party preference the authorities had lists of tens of thousands of Labour and Communist Party supporters. In the cities, the National Police are generally reported to have systematically hunted down and killed them. Colonel Bustamante in his military history of El Salvador gives the following succinct description: “Every night trucks went full of victims from the Direction General de Polici'a to the banks of the Rio Acelhuate where the victims were shot out of hand and buried anonymously in great ditches.”’’ Sometimes the killings in the cities were entirely arbitrary. Several accounts tell the story of a group of about 100 anti-Communist craftsmen who presented themselves at the garrison in San Salvador to offer their services as volunteers. They were invited in and then shot dead in the courtyard of the barracks. The 1932 uprising played on two very potent fears of the Salvadorean elites: the fear of Indian hordes running amok in a race war orguerra de castas: and the fear of International Communism, organized, resourceful.

114

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godless, unscrupulous and quite capable of leading Indian hordes into upper-class bedrooms to rape wives and daughters and slit throats. The ancestral fear of the Indian majorities who hewed their wood, drew their water, served their tables, picked their coffee and had periodic uprisings became part of a “great fear” when superimposed on the ideological threat of Communism. Material published in 1932 illustrates the depth of feeling behind this great fear: The Indian has been, is and will be the enemy of the ladino ... there was not an Indian who was not afflicted with the devastating com¬ munism ... We committed a grave error in making them citizens.^^ We'd like to see this race of the plague to be exterminated ... The govern¬ ment must use a strong hand. They did it right in North America, having done with them by shooting them in the first place before they could impede the progress of the nation. They killed the Indians because they will never be pacified. Here we are, treating them like part of the family, and see the result! They have fierce instincts!^''

All Indians became suspected Communists, although all Communists were not necessarily Indians, and so, in the rural areas of the west where the uprisings had occurred any Indian was suspect, and suspects were shot without second thoughts. 1932 is generally considered as the year when El Salvador ceased to have a distinct “Indian” population; the uprising was limited almost exclusively to the primarily Indian areas of the coffee highlands, and those wearing Indian clothing or speaking Indian languages were sys¬ tematically detained and shot. Social scientist Alistair White writes that in the aftermath of the massacre surviving Indians were moved “to dis¬ card their traditional dress and outer signs of Indian identification” and even to cease to teach their native languages to their children. An approximation of genocide, the 1932 massacre did not wholly exter¬ minate the Indian people of El Salvador, but did so to the extent that vir¬ tually no Indian culture or identity remained. In the 1980s most of the population are considered campesinos, not Indians. Only a week after 22 January, when General Jose Tomas Calderon had led a punitive column of National Guard and army troops to Sonsonate to quell the rebellion in the west, he was able to assure the captains of four gunboats anchored off Acajutla (two US and two Canadian des¬ troyers that the Communists “had been totally beaten and dispersed” and would be “entirely exterminated”.®^ He had earlier estimated the “Com¬ munists” to number between 70,000 and 80,000;®^ on 29 January he reported that “already 4,800 of them have been killed”. Commander Brodeur went ashore to pay his respects to the General, and “to veri¬ fy... in a general way” the report of 4,800 killings. On shore he was enthusiastically embraced by General Calderon, invited to lunch in 115

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

Sonsonate the next day, and to “witness a few executions”. The com¬ manding officers of the Canadian ships Skeena and Vancouver accom¬ panied General Calderon and an aide to Sonsonate. and “given an exceedingly good lunch ... They were shown five Indians who were about to be shot, but did not witness the actual execution as this was thought to be inadvisable ..Commander Brodeur found his hosts “very well educated men, with a great sense of humour and very interest¬ ing to talk to.” He also observed that “they seemed to consider all lives, including their own, as of little importance.”’’ On 31 January the gunboat officers were invited to play golf in San Salvador, and a party of 50 men from the ships were taken to tour a sugar plantation several miles inland. The “Communist Revolt” of 1932 was well and truly over.

116

8. Controlling the Population: An Agrarian Police State The Civic Guard The Martinez regime began to reorient the security system to meet the threat of a major agrarian uprising even before the first outbreaks of revolt in January 1932. In a measure reminiscent of the times when elite groups manned civilian militias. Martinez and his staff organized civilian elites into ‘Civic Guards' for self defence and to assist the regular security forces against the Indian rebels. In December 1931. there were reports that the non-Indians of the towns in the Western, coffee¬ growing areas were being advised to form “Civic Guard'’units and to organize themselves along military lines.^* The outbreak of revolt precipitated the arming of “c/v/cos” throughout the West. In San Salvador itself, according to US military intelligence. General Martinez “armed all the citizens and foreigners that he could trust”, and these “better elements of the population stood squarely behind him and lent every assistance.”^^ The New York Times (26 January 1932) noted in particular the role of the civicos in San Salvador: Groups of upper class citizens of the capital were armed by the military to patrol the capital. On the suggestion of a prominent banker, these citizens were given carte blanche to shoot any “Communist” on sight. After the suffocation of the movement and normalization of the situation, other Departments have achieved the formation of groups analogous to those mentioned . .

Commander Brodeur also remarked that the civicos had provided the capital's chief protection when the majority of National Guard troops had marched to the West under General Calderon, but noted that they were “not exactly ‘the flower of Salvadorian aristocracy’ ” as some had maintained.*®' Only after the revolt was over were efforts — widely supported — led by General Jose Tomas Calderon made to create a permanent “Civic Guard”, on a model developed from European experiences, particularly the contemporary Fascist movement in Italy. An editorial in San 117

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

Salvador s leading daily,La Prensa Grafica urged the “honourable men” of each community to organize: into militias patterned after the Italian Fascio, the Spanish armed corps (somatenes), or the patriotic youth groups oiAction Frances for the defense at any time of our families and homes against the deadly and ferocious attacks of the gangs of villains that fill the ranks of the Red Army that hopes to drown in blood the free and generous nation left to us by our ancestors."^-

On his return from the campaign in the West, General Calderon plunged into the organization of a “National Patriotic League , intended, according to G-2 reports, “to combat the communistic activities in El Salvador, and to better organize the manhood ot the country".'0-^ jhe League’s statutes, drafted by General Calderon, declared its purpose: to keep alive the good will which has been opportunely and spontaneously demonstrated in the case of the recent uprising, in which the savagery of the communists intended the total overthrow of the republic, and the destruction of the family, the home, religion, property, our laws and institutions.'®'*

The League was also to be a fund-raising organization, with a monthly membership fee (thus eliminating the poor), and collection boxes — marked “For the Patria" — set up in public places. The League was eventually organized under a different name, the Asociacion Civica Salvadorena (Salvadorean Civic Association) although the statutes remained virtually unchanged from the original draft. Membership required written application, approval by vote of the board of the local branch committee, and payment of a monthly membership fee; on paper there were to be 2,094 local committees, each to include a unit of the “Civic Guard”, which was to serve as an auxiliary to the security forces.'®^ In practice the “Civic Association” remained a largely paper organization; the elimination of the threat of Indian risings removed the one motivation that sons of planters and the urban monied classes might have had to contribute time and money as General Calderon had envisaged and in the Association’s statutes. The conditions of member¬ ship, ensuring the exclusion of the poor, the illiterate, and the non-elites in general, prevented the creation of a mass organization on the Italian model, and reduced the Civic Association to a rich man’s club. Although like the Liga Roja, an ancestor of ORDEN {Organizacion Democratica Nacionalista) (National Democratic Organization) the paramilitary organization formed in the 1960s, the Civic Association (and the Civic Guards) differed both in concept and composition, at 118

Controlling the Population . . .

base a political club of the elite groups themselves; in contrast to ORDEN’s future, permanent and effective role as a to some extent mass-based auxiliary subordinate to the security forces, with regular paramilitary and intelligence duties. While of diminishing importance by the end of 1932, the Civic Guards were a key component of the security system during January 1932 — primarily beause the regular, conscript-based army played little part in putting down the rebellion. By mid-January fear of disaffection in the ranks, and indeed, in the office corps, had largely incapacitated the army. On 16 January, after plans to revolt were uncovered, officers moved to disarm, arrest and shoot many of the troopers of the Sixth Regiment of Machinegunners in San Salvador. Miguel Marmol recounts the detention and shooting by firing squad of an entire company of the First Cavalry Regiment in San Salvador at about the same time, and similar executions within the garrisons of the Air Force and the First Infantry Regiment. According to Commander Brodeur's report the army officers at Sonsonate, “fearing that a large number of their men were affected and might possibly turn against them, would not allow the soldiers to have their rifles or leave the Barracks, and themselves drove off the Communists . . .” Subsequently, the US legation reported estimates that nearly half the (about 4,500) soldiers then in the regular army were “dismissed” in January 1932.**^^ The US military attache stated that “Communists were discovered spreading propaganda in the army and these were imme¬ diately executed”.'®^ No concrete figure for the number of those shot has been put forward. According to Brodeur, the soldiers, “conscripted from the working class of Indians”, were treated very shabbily, and the army’s condition in general “was, in fact, deplorable . . . when some troops were sent to Acajutla, it was observed that a collection of money was made from the local inhabitants in order to purchase food for the troops who had come to protect them.”'*’* Brodeur mentions the figure of US $125,000 raised for this purpose “by the wealthy middle-class plantation owners”. General Martinez took advantage of the enthusiasm of the moment and made several appeals for patriotic contributions. Even before the massive uprisings began, on 21 January he set up a “Council on Public Order” which included representatives of the country’s five leading families to co-ordinate efforts to provide funding for the security measures planned and, particularly, to pay the troops. Within five days, the private fund-raisers had collected 400,000 colones (C) — over $100,000 — for the campaign against “the Indians”. As Commander Brodeur noted wryly, “Just how much of this sum eventually found its way into the soldiers’ pockets is a doubtful point.”"*’ By the time the rebellion took place the Civic Guards had grown to considerable numbers and. in the Western cities of Santa Ana, Sonsonate and Ahuachapan. were heavily subscribed by the sons of landowners. 119

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

shopkeepers, and, as Anderson puts it, included members from ^ class that had something to lose by the success of the rebellion . In Ahuachapan, fears that most of the Army's garrison of 200 men were unreliable led the commander to call in Civic Guard volunteers, having expelled from the garrison or locked in their barracks troopers whose loyalty was uncertain, “those who remained were chiefly the members of the regimental band ”.”^ Most of the Civic Guardsmen, however, appear to have seen action only in the slaughter that followed the rebels defeat Colonel Bustamante’s account of the massacre attributes to the Civic Guardsmen a viciousness unusual even for that time and calls them “perverse”. This opinion is confirmed in Miguel Marmol s account when he accuses the Civic Guards of committing innumerable acts of “murder, theft rape, torture, etc.” against the humbler classes and using their position to vent personal hatreds."^

The Security Network’s Strong Arm If the ranks of the army were thinned by dissaffection, or immobilized by suspicions of their loyalty, the National Guard — formed in 1912 during the regime of the first president Araujo' — served as a brutally efficient means of repressing the uprisings of 1932. Numbering somewhere between 800 and 1,000, composed entirely of volunteers who had served in the regular army. National Guard troops were recruited for two year renewable periods. That they were an elite force in comparison with the regular army is indicated by the pay differential; Guardsmen were paid around three times the army's base rate of 50 centavos."^ Commander Brodeur described the National Guard in relatively enthusiastic terms as: ... [consisting] ofa body of men from the better class of Indians and native Salvadorians; . . . well trained, better armed than the ordinary troops, absolutely fearless and good soldiers. They always accompany the Army, in the proportion of one National Guard to every ten soldiers. They form the backbone of the standing army, and without them matters would have been far more serious."^

In April 1932 General Martinez moved to strengthen his control over the whole security network. On 12 April he removed Colonel Osmin Aguirre Salinas — suspected of plotting against him — from the post of Director General of Police, replacing him with General Armando Llanos, until then head of the National Guard and “entirely loyal” to Martinez. On 13 April Llanos was replaced as head of the National Guard by Colonel Fidel Cristino Garay, “a staunch friend and supporter of General Martinez”. On the 15th Martinez:

120

Controlling the Population . . . removed from several important military posts, notably the command of the Zapote Fort which dominates the capital, members of the young element in the Army who have been suspected of disloyalty and replaced them with older and more dependable officers who were not connected with the coup d'etat of December 2nd.'’^

The pattern of the young officer's coup, followed by conservative purge or counter-coup, was to be regularly repeated. Whether or not the officers Martinez removed from positions of power were “disloyal” or alarmed him “by their threatening attitude”, as the US intelligence report then put it, the result was, that from April 1932 he was in complete control of the Army, the Police and the National Guard. It was 1944, 12 years later, before the next young officers' coup attempt. After the mass executions of January and February ended, Martinez increased his vigilance, enacting new measures and resurrecting old ones to keep the peasants and labourers under rigid control. US Legation reports during the following months express some surprise that nothing was done to attack the underlying causes of the January rebellion by improving the lot of the peasants, yet observe that everything is under control and “the socalled communism is practically nonexistent at the present time”, suggesting, furthermore, that “The de facto regime is undoubtedly keeping up the fear of communism for political reasons in order to make it appear that General Martinez is indispensable and cannot step aside at the present time.”"^

The National Police The National Police was the third major element in the national security system, meshing with the rural network of the National Guard and the regional commands of the regular army. In 1932 comprising about 1,200 officers and men, over half ot them were stationed permanently in the capital. Like the National Guard, it was an elite force in comparison with the regular army. After April 1932, under the command of Chilean General Llanos — who had been responsible for developing the National Guard into a highly efficient apparatus"*^ — the National Police received military training reportedly considerably more exacting than that provided by the army, while, like the National Guard, receiving considerably higher pay.'^° The National Police and the National Guard were to be the principal instruments to implement new security measures after January 1932. One of the first decrees, approved by the executive 21 July 1932, amended the Penal Code to include penalties: ... for a person who, ‘through himself, or in the name of another, makes 121

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s propaganda, in the country or in the cities, publicly or privately, by writing, printing, speeches, or in any manner, of anarchistic doctrines or those contrary to the political, social or economic order.’ Penalties are also set up for persons taking part in meetings concerned with any of the above objects, or who may be found to have on their persons papers or any other articles destined for the use of the propaganda referred to.

A law passed by the Legislative Assembly on 26 July 1932, effective from 30 September, required registration, within the next two months, of every individual over 18 years of age.'^^ This would be the basis for more sophisticated registers of both the urban and rural population,*^^ the control of movements between towns, and the issuing of mandatory identity cards. Regular systems of rural patrols supplemented the already efficient Police and National Guardsmen in order to ensure the implementation of these measures in the cities and remote areas of the countryside. The Registration Law of July 26 established an 18 point registration form for all inhabitants of each municipality, including details of occupation, place of residence, whether literate or illiterate, height, finger prints and photograph. Registry officials in each municipality issued identity cards, complete with photograph (to be provided by the applicant), to be carried at all times by everyone over 18, and presented on demand, on pain of imprisonment, at the request of any public -official.'-'^ The identity cards, the cedulas de vecindad were required for every official act; registry of a marriage, birth or death, voting, or ownership of property. Well-to-do citizens, who, under the terms of an executive decree of 14 July 1932 had donated more than 100 colones to a “Patriotic Subscription of National Cooperation” were exempt from the provisions of the identity card law. In exchange for the donation, these citizens received a “Patriotic Social Defense Certificate’’ that served as their identity card for conventional purposes, and also endowed the bearer with certain special rights. The US military intelligence report on the decree noted that it effectively “establishes a privileged class”, being limited to persons able to raise 100 colones (somewhat more than a farm worker’s monthly income) who, moreover, had been determined not to “entertain communistic ideas”.Again, citing US military intelligence, the Certificate served "as a passport both within and without the Republic without any additional charges [giving] holders the right to address all petitions on ordinary (i.e. not stamped) paper. In case of traffic or minor offenses, it grants immunity of arrest.”'-^ The identity papers system dovetailed neatly with the new measures to control travel within the country, with check points at the entrances of towns to check travellers’ and local peasants’ papers. Travel between towns required identity cards and special permission in the form of an internal passport. As the US Military Attache put it, the government “suffers from a ‘safety’ complex . . . carried out to the extent of being 122

Controlling the Population . . .

bothersome to native and foreigner alike.”'’^ Some months previously, the Assistant Military Attache had observed that the new measures; would seem to indicate that El Salvador is reverting to medieval times when a traveler needed a passport to travel from one city to another [...] if in practice these regulations function as well as they look on paper, they should prove a most effective means of holding communistic tendencies among the laboring elements in check.'^**

That the measures were, in fact, effectively enforced is corroborated by Miguel Marmol who, having fled the 1932 massacre returned from Guatemala in 1934, set up a shoe-making workshop, and began pulling together the remnants of the Communist Party, until he was caught in the security net in November 1934. Marmol describes his difficulty in evading check points outside the city of San Miguel, and the line of peasants waiting to have their papers examined by the police. He also refers to one of the first activities organized by his circle; a protest against the requirement to provide photographs for identity cards on the grounds that it was too expensive for the farm workers (besides being inconvenient for Marmofs political activities). The use to which photographs were put in the new security system was also illustrated by the hunt for Marmol himself; 700 copies of his photograph were distributed among National Guardsmen, local army commanders, bus drivers and rural patrols, when it was learned he was back in the country. He was arrested less than a year after his clandestine return. Although the National Police and the National Guard played the biggest part in implementing the new forms of population control, assisted in a minor way by the Civic Guards, a new and important element was added with the reactivation of the rural “canton patrols” (originated by President Manuel Araujo in 1912)‘3o drawing upon the army reserve in the rural areas. These patrols had operated in times of crisis during the Melendez Quinonez period but by 1932 they (and the reserves) were described as “a highly theoretical paper organization On 16 September 1932 a decree issuing new “Regulations for the Service of Military District and Cantonment Commanders” formalized a system of roving night watches in the rural districts to co-operate with the National Guard under the administration of the local military commanders. The canton patrols’ specialized intelligence and active functions were spelled out in detail in the Regulations; Art. 7. (0 maintain strict surveillance over all suspicious characters who are not making an honest living ... in case of their not carrying "identification card”, capture them as characters suspected of harboring ideas or tendencies preached by organizations of anarchistic, communistic or bolshevic character . . . 123

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s Art. 7. (g) Capture individuals who. notwithstanding the fact that they carry identification card . . . indulge in the propagation of disorderly ideas or who endeavor to hold meetings to incite disorder . .

After 1932 the canton patrols primarily comprised soldiers who had concluded their term of service in the regular conscript army, although men doing their year's term of “military service” and whose only duty was to “march" on Sundays were also incorporated into the patrols. Although relatively unimportant by the end of the Martinez regime, the canton patrols remained a component of the security system which could be activated during a crisis. Their potential to serve as the final piece in an apparatus for total control of the countryside was recognized very early in US military intelligence reports; It is the opinion of this office that they are directly aimed at establishing a still closer method of military control throughout the entire country which will even embrace the smallest hamlet. That is to say, place the entire country under control of the military without the necessity of martial law.'^"^

That security measures against “subversives” after the 1932 revolt were actually enforced is suggested by statistics on crime published by the Ministry of Government of El Salvador in the 1930s and relevant comments in US military intelligence files.'^^ According to the US military Attache, the 1932 statistics for the National Police indicated that they “were quite busy” during the year, having reported the arrest of “645 Communists” and 1,655 others detained “on the order of the authorities”, said by Major Harris to be a euphemism for political prisoners (a euphemism which continued in use up to the 1960s). There were also 1,032 detentions of “suspicious characters”. Overall statistics through November 1932 showed 34,627 arrests (excluding those made by National Guard and Army forces) almost half for “drunkenness” and 3,542 for “vagrancy”.In 1933 charges arising from the new population control measures included 1,126 arrests for not having travel permits and 89 for having no identity cards. Even bearing in mind that statistics are notoriously susceptible to invention, distortion and misinterpretation these ring true. The proportion of arrests for drunkenness, for example, is similar to those published under the Ubico regime in Guatemala for the same period. That any statistics at all were compiled and published in a glossy, illustrated police magazine, with technical articles and advertisements, illustrates the degree of seriousness which the Martinez military regime, and the elite civilian groups backing it, regarded internal security and law enforcement. The legislation that epitomized the orientation of the security system in post-1932 El Salvador already existed. This was the Agrarian Code 124

Controlling the Population . . .

{Ley Agraria) first decreed on 11 April 1907 and not revised until 28 August 1941, by Decree No. 60. The Agrarian Code relates the security system to a specific economic and social framework, and freezes the peasant into his subservient social niche by spelling out the relationship of the rich and poor to the land and instructing the National Guard and other security forces to preserve this relationship.'-"**^ The 1941 Decree No. 60 did not change the basic content of the Agrarian Code, but tended rather to regulate its more rigorous enforcement. The Agrarian Code's most striking characteristic is its predication of an “us" and “them” society of rich and poor — almost lord and peasant — with no attempt at disguise. The agricultural workers, the peasants, are the object of agrarian police regulations, and the hacienda owners the beneficiaries. In the Code’s explicit instructions to the National Guard, peasants (therein generally termed jomaleros, meaning agricultural workers paid by the day or Jornada) are described as virtually synonymous with criminals; jornalero becomes almost interchangeable with reo, or criminal. Guardsmen are instructed to capture any person “on the first request of any hacienda or farm owner ”. On the haciendas they were to “gather all information, news and instructions convenient for the efficient persecution of agricultural and other workers and evil-doers in general." They had jurisdiction throughout the country for “the persecution of day labourers or workers who have broken the agreements with the farm owners, and in the persecution of evildoers of all kinds." Guardsmen were to “keep a notebook that will contain the name and employment of the day labourers, workers and criminals they capture . . The Code also details the obligation of the labourers to labour. The obligations of landowners to their resident labourers were set out almost as an afterthought and were more or less what would be expected in a slave-holding society of the 19th Century: they were to be provided with a dwelling place “or the materials to build one”, with “healthy and sufficient food”; and paid on the basis of daily labour each week.*''" The principal requirement set down by law for the peasantry was that they engage in wage labour on the private farms. The National Guard: Will require the inhabitants of the countryside that pertain to the class of agricultural workers (jornalero.^) the presentation of their papers that give evidence of their working on some farm or property.''*'

Those without such proof were to be found — and obliged to accept employment on private farms or at public works . Article 73 states that those without work are liable to arrest; “No vagrant can make the excuse of not having found work to do, and they will be punished according to the law.”''*^ 125

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

The Agrarian Code, a cornerstone of Martinez’ security system, provided the framework within which the security services operated, with little modification, through to the 1980s. It prohibited the peasantry from forming labour organizations, and confirmed the powers of the landowners to set conditions for labourers on their property at their own discretion. The organisation of security forces was designed deliberately to keep the peasantry under tight control, at the service of the large estate owners, in a special, virtually criminal class without rights or protection under the law. The Agrarian Code, and the Martinez security apparatus, were the foundation of the tacit agreement by which the agrarian aristocracy yielded the reins of government to the military, confident that their position of privilege was ensured. By 1944, when Martinez was overthrown, the basic components of today’s security system were in place — the National Police, the National Guard, and the Army were organized for an internal security and law enforcement function much as they would be in the 1960s. In the decade after Martinez’ departure, however, young army officers were to challenge the correctness of the army’s involvement in policing, and fight what by 1944 had become the dominance of the National Police and National Guard over the army itself The subordination of the army to the security forces was a major factor in the overthrow of Martinez, and may again be a factor in the 1980s.

126

9. Coup and Counter-Coup: Reform and Reaction

Tensions and rivalries within the security system ultimately posed the greatest single threat to Martinez' long reign as President. In February 1932 he had removed Colonel Osmin Aguirre y Salinas from the powerful position of police director; one of the most senior and able army officers, Aguirre could well have supplanted Martinez. In 1934, the Minister of Government, responsible for police and internal security — General Salvador Castaneda Castro — was dismissed when, purportedly, a plot against Martinez had been revealed. Both Aguirre and Castaneda remained on the active army list, but without command of the key security services. Subsequently, by biding their time until other disgruntled officers ousted Martinez, both succeeded to the presidency, and then ruled on his model. Miguel Marmol, in Roque Dalton's account, mentions several failed coup attempts in the 1930s; by General Antonio Claramount, backed by Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico, in 1935; also in 1935, a Lieutenant Banos Ramirez led a brief revolt and was shot by firing squad; and the nextyear Colonel Ascencio Menendez, Minister ofWar, was summarily exiled to France for “conspiracy".''*^

The Military v. The Paramilitary In the latter years of his presidency, Martinez' grasp of power appeared increasingly to be held despite the army (which was hamstrung by budget cuts, and ambitious, capable officers being posted overseas or to the security services) and by building up the National Police, along with its political police division, and the National Guard. US military intelligence reported rumblings within the officers' corp over neglect of the army — a permanent feature after 1937. The army had not become Martinez' praetorian guard, but to a large extent the paramilitary security servicesand, after 1937, took a proportionally bigger slice o the budgetary pie than did the regular army.'"*'* A January 1940 US government report noted the regular army s dismay that both the National Police and the newly formed Air Force received larger budgets 127

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s than the army, while new equipment usually went to the National Guard.''*-'’ In addition to disquiet over the division of resources within the security system, the police and the National Guard under Martinez tended to develop their own institutional identity and

esprit de corp.

Security services were headed by serving army officers, but a split developed between officers who made their careers in the paramilitary services and those who pursued a more conventional military career. An indication of the security services proud

esprit de corp,

and of the

resources they were allocated, can be seen in the magazines published monthly by both the police and the National Guard at this time.'"^ Concern for the army’s unity and integrity,

vis-a-vis

the military-security

force split, was intensified by the division of responsibilities for security matters between the Ministry of War and the Minister of Government; the latter being responsible for controlling policing and matters of internal security. A further, clearly institutional concern of part of the army’s officer corps was that the pattern of promotions among army officers appeared to favour those serving in the security forces over those in the more prosaic occupations of the conventional army. The dominant position of the security services in the late 1930s may, in part, have been attributable to the long service of one of Martinez’ most trusted and capable officers — General Jose Tomas Calderon — at the helm of the Ministry of Government and Agriculture, and so in command of internal security. In 1937 Calderon was the highest ranking officer of the Salvadorean army; a Division General, outranking even Brigadier-General Martinez. As Minister of Government he held the key post for controlling the rural population, and was responsible in his term for the reissue of a revised Agrarian Code,

the Ley Agraria

of 28

August 1941, which elaborated on the meticulous regimentation of rural life

and guidelines

for

law

enforcement

established

in

the

1907'

Code. The major role of Calderon’s Ministry was regulation of the state’s internal political affairs, including appointments of municipal and departmental political authorities, and running the National Police. In the latter capacity. General Calderon, and his Director of National Police, Colonel Fidel Cristino Garay, were known to run perhaps the most efficient secret police apparatus in Central America. In one of the earliest references to the now common phenomenon of the “disappear¬ ance” of political prisoners, the iVcw

York Times

of 5 September 1937,

reported that “Malcontents had a way of simply ‘disappearing’, and every available jail in San Salvador was kept full.”''*^ Martinez had consolidated his political support in August 1934 by forming an official party —

the Partido Pro-Patria

(Pro-Patria Party) —

which included on its “Supreme Directorate" representatives of most of the countries leading families.'^* This was the only party to participate in

128

Coup and Counter-Coup. . . the March 1935 elections, with General Martinez as the only candidate. The fact of having held elections, however, sufficed to win Martinez the long delayed recognition by the United States and other states bound by the 1923 Treaty of Peace and Amity, which had blocked recognition of governments seizing power by force. In

1939 Martinez was again

“elected”, under the terms of a new constitution, for a six year term.

Military Revolt: President Martinez Resigns By 1941, when it began to appear that Martinez had begun manoeuvring to ensure yet another term in the presidency, both military and civilian sectors began to organize in opposition to the regime. In early 1943 the clandestine

Accion Democratica Salvadorena

was formed by middle-

sector civilians — largely San Salvador professionals — and dis¬ contented army officers; plotting against the regime took on new vigour. Perhaps the last straw in antagonizing the army’s officer corps prior to the 1944 revolt was

\\\q Pro-Patria

Party's creation, in September 1941,

of its own party militia, organized along the lines of the paramilitary forces of the German and Italian Fascist parties — even parading with arms and in black shirts. The Italian model was well known to the partly Italian-trained officer corps, as was the danger represented by the existence of armed political groups independent of army control. Already in 1937 US military intelligence reported its concern that General Calderon, as Minister of Government and godfather to thePra-

Patria

party was attempting to revive the “Civic Association

as a form of

Fascist party militia. According to G-2, Calderon wished to resurrect this “child of his conception”, in order to resist the country’s growing

Pro-Patria's

opposition to

“fascist tendencies’’.'^'^

In September 1941, black-shirted Pra-Pnma militia members took to the streets of San Salvador, particularly irritating to the British and United

States

Embassies,

and,

according to

US consular reports,

considered by the military to represent a challenge to its prerogatives quite unrelated to any ideological considerations ( the fact that this civilian militia remained small and poorly armed did not keep it from being a concern for all the military services”).'^'’ In January 1944 a constituent assembly, comprised entirely of Pra-

Patria

designates, was called to revise the constitution of 1939 in order to

appoint Martinez to another term in the presidency. The assembly duly voted to extend his term for another five years, with the next elections to take place in 1950. This brought the grievances of middle-class civilian groups

and

idealistic

officers

into

sharp

focus,

and,

on

2

April

precipitated a military revolt. The revolt was crushed within a day. The combined forces of the National Police and the National Guard garrisons in the capital proved

129

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s more than sufficient to the task, to some extent bearing out the fears that the army had become subordinate to the security forces. A 22truck convoy of army troops supporting the revolt heading for San Salvador from Santa Ana was ambushed by forces under police director General Fidel Cristino Garay, killing 53 and wounding 134. In the aftermath of the revolt there were mass arrests of disaffected officers and suspected civilian sympathizers. Then Martinez made what may have been his crucial error; he ordered the execution of the ten army officers charged as leaders of the revolt, a measure almost unheard of in Latin American military tradition, and which completed the process of alienation already far advanced in the army. Following courts martial, the ten, including General Alfonso Marroquin, Colonel Tito Calvo and Major Julio Sosa were shot by firing squad on 10 April; civilian Victor Marin was shot on 11 April and an army captain and a lieutenant on 24 April. Forty-three others were sentenced to death, some/n absentia. The executions, carried out in public in San Salvador, outraged the officer corps and the public and precipitated a general strike by students, bank employees, professionals and others, bringing the capital to a standstill, in demand of Martinez' resignation.'^' On 8 May Martinez responded to the public clamour, and a visit from the US ambassador, by announcing his resignation. General Andres Menendez. the First Designate to the presidency became interim president. A period then followed in which various factions within the military haggled over the position of president. One writer explained that as a result of the losses incurred in the democratic sector of the officers corps in crushing the April rebellion, no faction was a strong advocate of democracy and civilian involvement in government: “The failure of the April 2 rebellion had the effect of cleansing from the military all officers who might have shown a willingness to accept civilian government."'^- This purging of the idealists, as a reaction to a reformist coup, was another characteristic to be regularly repeated in the future.

Half a Step Forward, Two Steps Back General Menendez ran El Salvador for approximately five months. According to Thomas Anderson, he was not entirely averse to a progressive opening of the country to democratic freedoms, and allowed the opposition groups that had emerged in the course of Martinez' overthrow “to flourish", to the extent of permitting the left-wing labour Union Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT) to grow to some 50,000 members by October 1944, a phenomenon “watched with growing alarm" by the military.'-''^ As in the period before Martinez' December 1931 coup. 130

Coup and Counter-Coup. . . opposition and labour groups that had formerly led a largely clandestine existence emerged publicly to be counted; and they were. Doing the counting was Martinez' police director during the 1932 massacre, Colonel Osmin Aguirre y Salinas, appointed police supremo by General Menendez, his old colleague from the 1930s. On 20 October Jorge Ubico’s proxy in Guatemala, General Federico Ponce Vaides, was overthrown in a young officers’ coup which completed the destruction of the Ubico regime; all of Central America celebrated. On the night of 21 October thousands filled San Salvador’s Plaza de la Libertad to celebrate the Guatemalan victory. Simul¬ taneously, Colonel Osmin Guirre, with the apparent foreknowledge and consent of General Menendez, toppled the government, and launched the new regime with a massacre of the demonstrators in the Plaza de la Libertad. The victims were largely supporters of the UNT and the middle-class Partido Union Democrdtica (PUD) which had grown around Dr Arturo Romero, a mild-mannered progressive who had become the symbol of the April revolt, having cemented progressive middle sectors to those military groups unhappy at the prospect of five more years of General Martinez’ eccentricities. Colonel Osmin Aguirre y Salinas declared himself provisional president and immediately launched what has been described as a “reign of terror” against labour organizations — particularly the Union Nacionalde Trabajadores — the short-lived civilian political parties, and the student radicals who had supported the military move to oust Martinez. Aguirre, described by Thomas Anderson as the “personification of the coffee-grower interests” effectively turned back the clock to the darker years of Martinez’ regime. He did, however, arrange elections in 1945 and yielded up the presidency to his hand-picked successor, another figure from the Martinez regime. General Salvador Castaneda Castro, who, “continued the purge begun by the provisional govern¬ ment, driving most of the radicals out of the country for good”.’^^ After a brief glimpse of power the young military reformists were again out in the cold. General Casten,eda’s most telling contribution to the evolution of the security system was in response to one of the regular army s institutional grievances. The Ministry of War was given authority over all the security services, thus removing police powers from the hitherto all-powerful Ministry of Government. Henceforth less opportunity would exist for inter-ministerial manoeuvring enabling independent-minded police directors, or Ministers of Government to override the regular military hierarchy, which controlled the Ministry of War. The opportunity for an astute president to play off the security forces against the regular army — a technique Martinez had developed in his latter years of power would also be reduced. Civilian militias too, vanished with the fall of the Martinez regime, not to return until new concepts of counter-insurgency 131

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s and paramilitary organization — albeit of a wholly different model again became fashionable, in the 1960s. Despite some liberalization under the Castaneda regime, it was at bottom, like that of Aguirre y Salinas, an extension of Martinez long stewardship on behalf of the coffee barons. When General Castaneda gave signs of wishing to replicate Martinez' tenure in office, young army officers moved decisively to prevent it. In a military coup on 14 December 1948 — known now in Salvadorean army tradition as the ‘Revolution of 1948’ — the liberal, modern military impulses that had driven the officers involved in the failed April 1944 coup once more came to the fore.

The “Majors’ Coup”: 1948 and After The 1948 "Revolution", a young officers movement dominated by Majors, is sometimes called the ‘Majors' Coup'. It was, seemingly, the first coup in which a collegiate military movement took power with no wise old fox directing events, as had Martinez in December 1931, and Menendez and Aguirre in May 1944. Certain groups of army officers — distinguished by the years in which each graduated from the military academy, known as their promocion or tanda — tended to emerge in leadership positions in the wake of the coup, but no single officer appears to have been the predominant driving force, or beneficiary of the ‘Majors' Coup'. Their first move on attaining power was the forced retirement of all officers above the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, leaving the field largely clear for the Majors to control events. The highest ranking officer involved in the coup was Lieutenant-Colonel Manuel de Jesus Cordova. The young officers created a Revolutionary Council of Government comprising three officers and two civilians, the latter selected by the army from the university community. The Revolutionary Council declared a principal intent of the young officers’ movement was to restore the tarnished honour of the army by supporting urgent social reforms, moving it away from direct involvement in politics, and promising democratic elections in early 1950. In its 14 months in power the Council abrogated all Constitutional provisions judged “incom¬ patible with the historical moment’’ and ruled openly as a de facto, military government. Moderate social reforms (such as the introduction of a limited social security system) were implemented. Middle-class civilian professionals — who, in the 1960s would have been called ‘technocrats' — were brought into the Cabinet for the first time since 1931, with all except the Minister of Defense young civilians. The army also moved to curb the National Guard and National Police, and to move away from the Martinez regimes’ inclination to force the army into the position of a glorified police force. 132

Coup and Counter-Coup. . . The protagonists of the 1948 coup saw it as the army’s redemption, and the beginning of a newly constructive phase in its history. In this sense, the motivations and ideals of its supporters in the officers' corp were comparable to those underlying the October 1944 coup in Guatemala; the Salvadorean officers, like their Guatemalan brother officers, were hardly revolutionaries, but basically desired similar reforms, and a more respectable place for the army in society. In Guatemala the enthusiasm for real reform within the military persisted for almost ten years, but in El Salvador, the ideals of the 1948 movement hardly outlasted the 14 months of the Revolutionary Council. A modicum of real reform was introduced, however, and spelt a change in the army's own perception of its role in society. The significance of the 1948 coup can be exemplified in a passage from a speech, in 1951, by Colonel Jose Maria Lemus (then Minister of Defense, and to become president in 1956) in which the heritage of 1948 is interpreted as having been the army's acceptance of a new institutional, corporate identity, and destiny, in some unspecified way responding directly to “the popular wilf'; To lead the revolution of 1948, the army had to cast aside the pressure of the political climate and identify itself with the popular will, to form a new mentality, in order to respond to the imperative of the world democratic movement.. The army exists... not to enthrone tyrannies... but to observe the sacred institutional postulates of enforcing the law and safeguarding national sovereignty. The army is the force that represents the will of the people... It is an institution with conscience... the principal bastion for the defense of the popular rights for which it fought so valiantly in the revolution.'-''^ Colonel Lemus. for demagogic reasons, was perhaps overstating or distorting what he actually thought of the 1948 events and the army’s subsequent and future role. Nonetheless, after 1948, both military rhetoric and the substance of military rule changed qualitatively. A new breed of officer, still conservative and fiercely anti-communist, was in control, which saw the army’s role as the political guide of the nation; a role that could not be left to the free interpretation of individual officers who attained the presidency. After 1948, army officers continued in control of the presidency, but henceforth were not to enjoy the luxury of governing wholly without considering the views of their fellow officers — or would do so at their peril; nor would they claim a second term of office. The institutional army would subsequently rotate the presidency among its top officers; those at the top would never wield the power held by a Martinez or an Osmin Aguirre in the old order of dictatorship.

The New Military Role Colonel Oscar Osorio, one of the original members of the Revolutionary 133

Land. Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s Council, resigned in October 1949 to found, with the blessing of the new military hierarchy, a new ‘official’ party, the Revolutionary Party of Democratic Unity {Partido Revolucionario de Unijlcacion Democratica (PRUD)). President Osorio — who won the 1950 elections unopposed —is generally credited with having developed the model for institutional military rule that lasted until October 1979, characterized by backing from an official party, a modicum of reform, and a readiness to resort to oldfashioned repression in times of stress. Osorio’s six year term was carried out under the provisions of the new constitution of 1950, the first postMartinez constitution, which embodied many of the principles of the 1948 young officers’ movement. The principles of the 1950 constitution and the practices of the post-1950 military governments reflected a considerable rearrangement in the relationship of the military to the agrarian aristocracy; the military emerged from the 1948 coup considerably less of a subservient watch-dog of the traditional elites than previously. After 1948 the military would claim a direct role in virtually all aspects of government while broadening the concept of the role of government to permit a hitherto unthinkable kind of state intervention in the economy. (Although it was another kind of state intervention to implement the 19th Century expropriation and redistribution of community lands, to the profit of the then incipient coffee barons, that formed the basis of the economy in the first place.) Some economic, and social reforms were pushed through by the post1948 military governments despite elite opposition, but these were modest and rarely placed military governments in open conflict with traditional elites. If it seemed necessary, future military governments tended to renege, replacing overly moderate or reformist officers in power by more traditional rulers. Primarily, however, the military retained its role as a form of stewardship on behalf of the traditional elites, and only secondly ruled on behalf of the nation. The Osorio regime's reformist rhetoric, and an inclination toward state intervention in the economy, left the government’s basic orientation toward matters of security unchanged. Reds were continually found under beds (particularly in the trade unions) in the early 1950s and arrest and exile were frequent A state of siege was declared in March 1951 in order to “abort a subversive plot’’, and again in September 1952, when a campaign was unleashed to clean the Communists from the National University and the trade unions.'-'’^ The Ministry' of the Interior's (formerly the Ministry of Government) 1953 annual report described the “momentary disruption of public order” in September 1952; ... the Executive Power was obliged to denounce the actions carried out in the Republic by the clandestine Communist Party which, not satisfied with its intensive campaign of indoctrination among workers and intellectuals, resorted to the preparation of a plan of riot and sabotage ... seriously threatening our Democratic Institutions. 134

Coup and Counter-Coup. . . The evidence of this plan cited in the Ministry's report was that the Communist Party had “taken over trade union leadership”. The September 1952 red scare precipitated the decree of the Law for the Defense of the Democratic and Constitutional Order (on 27 November 1952), providing drastic punishment for a broad range of crimes related to “communist and anarchist doctrines.”'^®

President Lemus: A “harsh and dictatorial man” Osorio’s Minister of Defense. Colonel Jose Maria Lemus. was chosen as the official candidate in 1956 and took office for a six year term with a purported 93% of the vote; an absurd figure even considering the absence of any serious opposition candidate. Colonel Lemus rapidly gained a reputation as what Thomas Anderson described as a “harsh and dictatorial man” who was to be remembered particularly for his penchant for “political persecution”.'^' Lemus had begun on a moderating note, derogating Osorio’s Law for the Defense of the Democratic and Constitutional Order, inviting exiles to return, and lifting the total ban on trade union activity in urban areas — although strikes remained prohibited. The reason Lemus’ liberalizing tendencies ended is said to have been the sharp reduction in the price, and volume of sales of Salvadorean coffee to the United States between 1958 and 1960, and subsequent economic and social disruption in El Salvador : “By 1959 conditions had reached the point where Lemus was trying to cut production, wages were being sharply reduced, unemploy¬ ment rocketing and credit virtually unobtainable.”'^^ jhe economic crisis rippling down from the United States recession came, furthermore, at a time when urban labour organization, and middle-class political organizations provided a means whereby dissatisfaction could be expressed with Lemus’ internal policies. The triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959 sparked celebratory demonstrations in San Salvador; that the next country to experience revolution could be El Salvador was a source of anxiety to Lemus and the army. Lemus was particularly worried by the Communist Party-backed Confederacion General de Trabajadores de El Salvador (CGTS), founded in 1958 and rapidly gaining membership. This re-emergence of the Communist Party, combined with the unrest and anxiety then sweeping the Americas as a result of the Cuban revolution, prompted Lemus to resort to old-fashioned repression. Student, not labour demonstrations finally brought the Lemus government crisis to a head. On 17 August 1960 a student demonstration in San Salvador, protesting against government policies, was attacked by security forces who carried out a wave of arrests of university administrators as well as students; the National University was occupied by troops and a state of siege declared.'^^ This repression in turn prompted greater protests, and greater repression. 135

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

By October 1960 a large sector of the middle classes, organized labour, students and the University community, and the left in general, had been provoked to openly oppose the Lemus regime and called for its overthrow. The right too, fearful that Lemus clumsy handling of the rapidly mobilizing opposition indicated an incapacity to maintain order and the status quo, encouraged support for a similar remedy. Within the military, a consensus rapidly formed among the young officers that Lemus was dragging the army into disrepute, and betraying the principles of the 1948 officers’ movement On the military right even Colonel Oscar Osorio had become disgusted with his successor, and other senior officers were concerned that Lemus’ blind repression was creating a truly revolutionary situation.'^ Coup: 1960 — Counter-Coup: 1961 On 26 October 1960 senior and junior officers, each group for its own reasons, co-operated in the peaceful overthrow of Lemus; he was arrested and sent out of the country; a civil-military junta was established to rule in his place. In the course of ihtcoup d’etat, the young, reformist officers again came to the fore. They were to dominate the junta — comprising three of their number and three liberal, civilian university figures — and take steps and make promises that very soon frightened the right and alienated a large part of the officers’ corps. Guatemalan social scientist Mario Monteforte Toledo, has attributed the army’s decision to oust Lemus to the fact that officers were “very much aware of the limits to which the public would accept the use and abuse of authority”, and that Lemus had gone too far.'^^ A communique issued by the new junta declared that the army had acted because Lemus had “governed outside the law, trampled on the constitution and the rights of citizens, committed illegal acts, and created a climate of general discontenf’.'^^ From the first day following the midnight arrest of Lemus the popularity of the new junta was unparalleled. The first public appearance of the six junta members was cheered by a crowd of some 80,000. Salvadorean military affairs authority Robert Elam has concluded that, in the wake of the coup, “military prestige had never been higher”. An immediate step of the new government was to release all the previous regime’s political prisoners; including a group of 55 students, professionals and trade unionists released within hours of the fall of Lemus. In its rhetoric the junta largely echoed the reformist promises of the 1948 movement. Their promise that truly free elections would be held in 1962 was, however, apparently seen by senior officers as a threat, and has been cited as a principal motivation for the counter¬ coup that followed less than three months after the reformists took office. The counter-coup was widely expected shortly after the installation of 136

Notes to Part 2

the October junta. Measures to open political participation to middleclass based political parties, and to permit trade union organization were only partly responsible for the opposition the junta provoked from the right. This opposition and that of a growing sector of the officers' corps found sustenance in the United States’ barely veiled hostility toward the new government. A 30 November 1960 Acw York Times article noted that the US had not recognized the new government because “the State Department was not satisfied about the political orientation of the junta, particularly of its civilian members." The State Department, according to the same article believed “that the civilian members of the junta and most of the Cabinet were anti-United States, pro-Castro and possibly pro-communist.” On 25 January 1961 the reformist junta fell to a well co-ordinated military coup. The cycle of reformist coup and reactive counter-coup continued. The next successful reformist coup, again a movement of young officers, took place in October 1979; it too, led to a junta government lasting less than three months.

Notes to Part 2 Chapter 6 1.

2.

3.

4.

Kalman H. Silvert./l Study in Government: Guatemala, Middle America. Research Institute Publication No. 21, Tulane University, New Orleans (1954) provides a good summary. For an excellent analysis of the militia system before independence see Lyle N. MacAlister. Nie "Fuero Militar" in New Spain, 1764-1800, University of Florida Press. Gainesville, Florida, 1957. For up to and beyond independence see Raoul Gerard, "Heraldia. banderas y uniformes de la Captitania General de Guatemala en los siglos 16. 17. 18 y 19". in Anales de la Sociedad de Geograria e Historia de Guatemala, Ano 24. Tomo 24. No. 3-4. (September December 1949) pp. 226-42. For an excellent survey of Indian revolts in Central America see Severo Martinez Pelaez, "Los Motines de Indios en el Periodo Colonial Guatemalteco", in Estudios Sociales Centroamericanos (March-August 1973). Indian communities in El Salvador, particularly in the West, were not hesitant to revolt against injustice, but tended to revolt in isolation in a pattern of spontaneous flare-ups ignited by, for example, the arbitrary arrest or killing of local leaders, demands for labour or taxes beyond the community’s capabilities, or abuses by local officials. That such revolts were restricted to small regions, or even to a single village, and were often merely symbolic shows of resistance, made them easy for the well armed elites to quell. Official punishment might be imprisonment of community leaders only, or executions and firing of villages. The Indian communities' essentially democratic .system ol government at the time of Independence was a reform introduced by the Spanish crown in the mid-16th Century, modelled on the Spanish cabildo, the basis of municipal government at the time. Sefe Rolando H. Ebel, "Political Modernization in Three Guatemalan Indian Communities", in Richard Adams, (ed) Political Change in Guatemalan Indian Communities, Middle America Research Institute, Publication No. 21, New Orleans (1957) p. 144. In the same study Ebel provides a detailed description of the development and evolution of local government structure. 137

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s 5

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

138

Howard I. Blutstein et al. Area Handbook for El Salvador. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office (1971) pp. 194-5. See also Gregorio Bustamante. Historia Militar de El Salvador. San Salvador (1951). In this El Salvador eventually turned to Spain for a model, and developed a semi¬ military, or paramilitary police body imitating the Spanish Civil Guard, which, founded in 1844, had, in contemporary accounts, been designed to relieve the military of non-military public order responsibilities. See Enciclopedia Hispanoamericana. Madrid, 1880. Robert Varney Elam. “Appeal to Arms, the army and politics in El Salvador. 19311964''. PhD dissertation. University of New Mexico (1968) p. 7. For the most comprehensive account of El Salvador s changing agricultural economy see David Browning. El Salvador: Landscape and Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1971). For legislation see Isidro Menendez, Recopilacion de las Leyes de El Salvador. Guatemala, 1855; reprinted Guatemala; Imprenta Nacional (1956). All transla¬ tions of Spanish texts are by the author unless otherwise indicated. An earlier effort to create non-local rural police institutions was apparently through a decree of 24 February 1848 (“Gmc se nombren Inspectores de Policia y se persiga a los delincuentes") establishing a post of Police Inspector with powers to rove the countryside to make arrests, pursuing "the thieves and wrongdoers that infest the towns and countryside". This was to provide an alternative to calling out the militia for law enforcement problems beyond the powers of community law, but the law provided for no means of financing the new posts, and the rural police institution only became effective much later. (For text of decree, see Isidro Menendez, Reco/7/7ac/o« de las Leyes. San Salvador (1855); the decree of 24 February 1848 is labelled “Ley 3". Ibid. Browning, op cit., p. 180. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 272; Browning cites the Diario Oficial. 2 January 1880, as reporting this practice during the disturbances of 1898. Diario Oficial. 27 March 1888. Browning (op cit, p. 118) attributes the creation of the rural police “to the social unrest in western regions caused by land redistribution and the damage being done to coffee plantations by those who had been dispossessed by them". Diario Oficial. 19 March 1900. Browning, op cit p. 218 citing D/an'o Oficial 12 May 1895. P. Angel, “Some Historical Information about the National Police" (of El Salvador), (undated) manuscript Office of Public Safety, AID Reference Centre, p. 6. Browning, op cit p. 117 citing Diano Oficial 17 March 1881. Ibid, pp. 206-7 See Reglamento Organico de la Guardia Nacional. 1912. The Guard was to deal exclusively with the police function under the Ministry of Government and Development but its “organization, personnel, duties, discipline and materiaf to be administered by the Ministry of War! During President Araujo’s administration (Araujo created the Guard) it had apparently been intended to make the force quite distinct from the army; in the Memoria de Guerro y Marina (the Ministry of War's annual report) for 1913, the force was praised partly for easing the financial burden on the army to maintain rural garrisons by reducing the call for it to serve as a rural police force. After Araujo's murder in 1913, the National Guard’s charter was changed by a presidential decree(20 August 1914) amend'mgXheLey Organicadela Guardia Nacional to declare it “an integral part of the army, on active service". Araujo’s moves to bring law and order to El Salvador were generally praised. Communist leader, Miguel Marmol was an unexpected supporter of the National Guard in its early days. See Roque OaXton. Miguel Marmol. Costa Rica (1972) p. 60. Miguel Marmol. written in the first person, is based on long interviews and appears to accurately reflect Marmol’s own words.

Notes to Part 2 2\.

22.

Reglatnento Organico de la Guardia Nacional. article 278; the Guard was also responsible for licensing private hacienda guards ("Guardasparticulares o jurados") who were authorized to bear arms; 20 articles of the Reglamento detail this procedure. The Ley Agraria was decreed on 11 April 1907. P. Angel, "Some Historical Information..." pp. 11-13. c'\X\ng Decreto ejecutivo(s) 23 June 1905. and 17 June 1913.

Chapter 7 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

Major Oscar Nelson Bolanos. Revista de la Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor, El Salvador, No. 17, 1970(January-June). “El Presidente Martin Dr. Manuel Enrique Araujo". See also Blutstein, et al. op cit, pp. 194-5. Chilean officers established El Salvador's staff college, the Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor, and provided its directors until 1957. Chilean officers still serve as instructors in Salvadorean army establishments, as is occasionally revealed in the news media. Chilean army Lieutenant-Colonel Arturo Ureta Sire was decorated for his work since 1978 as a Professor of Geopolitics, Centro de Estudios de la Fuerza Armada de El Salvador. Diario Oficial. 3 May 1979. Bolanos. op cit. President Araujo seems to be one historical figure in El Salvador about whom nothing bad is ever said. He was murdered in 1913 while sitting in his usual chair, unguarded, listening to the weekly Sunday concert in the central plaza. His death was described as "by the hand of providence as it were” by an official of the US legation attacking Araujo's criticisms of US intervention in Nicaragua. See 4 March 1913 letterto Department of State from Legation official William Heinke. Legation files, file 714. National Archive Record Group 59, Washington D.C. Miguel Marmol. in Roque Dalton, Miguel Mdrmol. San Jose de Costa Rica; EDUCA (1972) p. 343. Citations are made on the premise IhaXMiguel Mdrmol is an accurate record of Marmol’s own oral history of his life and times. G-2 Report, 22 December 1931; "Degree of Economic Development" (file 2657-p434. report No. 14). began as follows; "About 400 BC Plato observed that when all the wealth of a country is gathered into the hands of a few individuals there will soon be a revolution in that country, and that the wealth will in that way become more evenly distributed. About the first thing that one observes [in] San Salvador is the number of expensive automobiles... There seems to be nothing but Packards and Pierce Arrows... [and] nothing between these high priced cars and the ox cart with its bare footed attendant. There is practically no middle class between the very rich and the very poor." See also citation of Patria. 17 December 1929 in Everett Alan Wilson, "The Crisis of National Integration in El Salvadour 1919-35”. PhD thesis. Stanford University (1970) p. 189. Dermot Keogh, in "The Politics of Hunger, Peasant Revolt and Massacre in El Salvador” (1932), manuscript University of Cork, quotes this cable from Mr Rodgers to Sir John Simon. 7 January 1932 (Foreign Office, Series FO 371, London). Professor Keogh is the only scholar to have drawn on British and Canadian archive material concerning the events of 1932; these include detailed reports from the Commander of the Canadian naval force that stood off Acajutla during the conflict and toured the plantation districts, and of the British Consul in San Salvador. Manuscript memorandum. March 1932, of Commander V. G. Brodeur of the Canadian naval ship Skeena. from Public Archives of Canada (Ottawa), Record Group 25, henceforth "Brodeur Report" supplied to the author by Professor Keogh, G-2 Report, Major A. J. Harris, 28 January 1932; Harris' report of 4 February 1932 also mentions the intelligence function of Pan American flyers at the time: One of the Pan American flyers told me that on the morning of January 27th. five days after the revolution had broken out, that he had counted 27 bodies laying along the side of the road between San Salvador and the flying field of Ilopango which is about 8 miles from the city”. G-2 Reports frequently cited Pan-American flyers as sources in the 1930s.

139

Land. Labour and Security: 1820.S to 1960s 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 3.3. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

140

Ibid. G-2 Report. 26 July 1927. file 2657-p. No. 277. Thomas P. Anderson. El Salvador's Communist Revolt of 1932. Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press (1971) p. 8; this remains the most authoritative and comprehensive account of this period of El Salvadors history. Robert Varney Elam. "Appeal to Arms: the Army and Politics in El Salvador. 19311964", PhD dissertation. University of New Mexico (1968) p. 12. Ibid. Dalton, op cit. p. 99. Anderson, op cit. p. 27. Ibid., pp. 25-6; SRI was based in New York and described as the “Red Cross of Communism" according to one of its leaflets cited by Anderson (p. 26). Its purpose was; "to defend all the workers . . . persecuted by imperialism, capitalist governments, and all other agencies of oppression . . . proportioning its legal aid and material and moral support to those workers and their families by ... agitation and publicity and organized demonstrations.” Anderson notes the leader and principal organizer of the SRI in El Salvador. Agustin Earabundo Marti, was also a principal leader of the Communist Party, but "the majority of members in the organization were probably not communists". The Communist Party appears to have remained a small, rather elite group, while the SRI had an authentic mass base: several commentators on the 1932 massacre remarked that many Indians executed had "SRI" tattooed on their wrists. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 27. Many “signatures" were probably simply the “marks'Vthumbprints of illiterate peasants; but the evidence is that the support for the petition was genuine. Anderson, op cit. pp. 25.27. President Pio Romero Bosque moved to brake the run¬ away organizing of the FRTS only after the peasants became involved; by then the economic pressures of the depression and intensive organizing in the first months of 1930 meant that it was too late. G-2 Report. 4 January 1919. No. 395. G-2 Report. 16 January 1919. No. 397. G-2 Report. No. 987. 4 December 1930. G-2 Report. 20 January 1931. No. 1056. Everett Alan Wilson, op cit. p. 9; harvest time in El Salvador generally begins in late November or December. Wilson provides the following figures for the percentage of foreign exchange earned from coffee exports: 1980. 56%; 1920.69%; 1931.96% (p. 187). Anderson, op cit. p. 54 La Prensa. 11 November 1931. in Anderson, op cit. p. 54. For the history of peasant and labour organization leading up to 1932. see Anderson’s Matanza', a more detailed description from a different political aspect is to be found in Aristides Augusto Larin. "Elistoria del Movimiento Sindical en El Salvador". Universidad. July-August 1971. San Salvador. G-2 Report. 30 April 1930. G-2 Report. 25 May 1931. No. 2657. In Dalton, op cit. p. 247. Miguel Marmol reports there were 10 to 12 dead in Sonsonate. Anderson, op cit. pp. 55-6. Miguel Marmol described the resistance within the Communist Party (which had abstained in the presidential elections) to participate in the local elections; Marmol himself held that it was the general public, who insisted that, having been permitted to elect Araujo, they could now elect their own local government. Dalton, op cit. p. 247. Marmol told Dalton that the Communists' main intention had been to organize a national farmworkers' strike for salary demands, and only after violent discussion at an October 1931 central committee meeting had they agreed to

Notes to Part 2

52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63.

64.

participate in the elections. As a compromise and to have something to fall back on if there were problems with the elections, they agreed to prepare both for elections and a national strike. Ibid., p. 249. Military Intelligence files, attachment to letter from William Renwick, representa¬ tive of Chatham Phoenix National Bank and Trust Co., 8 January 1932; received by the US Military Attache, 9 January 1932. Anderson, op cit, p, 31; General Martinez was technically under arrest for one day before the call came from the Military Directorate of 12 junior officers for him to lead the new government. He did not hesitate to accept but later denied any knowledge of the coup plan. G-2 Report, A. R. Harris, No. 1948, 24 February 1923. Anderson, op cit, p. 88. Jorge Schlesinger, in Revolucidn Comunista, Guatemala (1946) p. 4. notes that Martinez "expressly authorized communi.st propaganda and recognized the Communist Party as a political association"; he suggests no Machiavellian motivation for this, only that Martinez was trying to make his government more popular. Anderson, op cit, p. 85, citing Abel Cuenca, Democracia Cafetalera. p. 32, Dalton, op cit, p. 253. Diario Oficial. 2 de enero de 1932, Tomo 1 \2,Decreto ejecutivo delprimero deenero de 1932. in force on publication. No explanation is given in the decree. When the Communist Party subsequently claimed victory in the Sonsonate city elections, the results were thrown out. Anderson, op cit, p. 89. Anderson, op cit p. 88. Anderson fails to stress that these first outbreaks occured precisely in those areas where elections had been viewed with great expectation, only to have this opportunity of peaceful change whisked away. He writes that elections were suspended "in several towns in the western part ol the country", but affords little significance to the fact that the early outbreaks took place before any plans for a national uprising. The violence that broke out between 2 and 10 January seems to have been a spontaneous response to concrete provocations; the disappointed expectations over the twice suspended elections. It thus seems gratuitous to refer to those killed in the reprisal at Ahuachapan as "agitators” and “leading Reds”. Ibid., p. 91. citing National Archive Record Group 59. McCafferty to State Department, 20 January 1932. Dalton, op cit, p. 265. Dalton, op cit, p. 265. The decision to seek an audience with Martinez was taken at Marmol's suggestion. Marmol was one of the few Communist Party leaders of the time who could not be described as a middle- (or upper-) class intellectual. His descriptions of central committee meetings are punctuated by wry references to the revolution by numbers or textbook approach of some of his fellow comrades. When he proposed an audience with Martinez “all the comrades groaned and made faces at me", but Farabundo Marti “held a book in French.. . and read from it, and said ‘there, he's right', translating the pertinent paragraph”. Dalton, op cit, p. 267. The Spanish original is more eloquent; “s/ bien el ejercito tenia muchosfusilespara disparar, los trabajadoressalvadorenos tenian muchos machetes que desafdar".

65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

Dalton, op cit, p. 268; Marmol placed the meetingon the night of7 January. The same text places the “La Montanita" events on the 7th and the meeting at the palace on the 8th. apparently Marmol was confusing his dates. Legation file, MacCafferty, No. 57G, 5 February 1932. Dalton, op cit p. 262. Rodgers to Sir John Simon. 13 January 1932, in Keogh, op cit P- 11Dalton, op cit P- 272. j . . Ibid., p. 332. Marmol himself was captured four days later, and shot m a collective

141

Land, Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

80. 81.

142

mass execution, but lived to tell about it. He crawled out from among the bodies, borrowed a dead comrade's hat, and escaped to Guatemala. This account is taken primarily from Anderson’s Matonza. pp. 123-7, plus some details from US military intelligence reports, and Dalton's Miguel Mdrmol. The sources are complementary, there is no important discrepancy between them. Throughout the uprising surprisingly few people were killed by the rebels, despite the tales that spread at the time and quickly became part of the 1932 legend. Thomas P. Anderson researched the civilian deaths (including those of local policemen) at the hands of the rebels through interviews and documentary sources, and reports the largest figure he could confirm was 21, adding that he might have missed eight or ten cases, “but certainly the total number of those who fell to the machetes and guns of the rebels could not have been more than thirty-five”. After interviewing the former chief of police and others Anderson found that no more than 10 National Policemen died in the uprising, while five members of the Customs Police were killed in Sonsonate. The official list of National Guardsmen killed in the uprising included only ten names. Anderson concludes that no more than 20 to 40 regular soldiers were killed. According to his account, all told, the rebels were responsible for some 100 deaths. See ahoMemoria de Guerra Marina y Aviacion (Annual report of the Ministry of War of El Salvador) (1932) p. 12. which identifies the National Guard dead as Sub-lieutenant Cristobal Machado, one sergeant, one corporal and seven guardsmen. Brodeur, quoted in Keogh, op cit, p. 24. Ibid. Alfredo Schlesinger, a Guatemalan journalist commissioned by the Martinez government to write a pro-government account of the events of 1932. was entrusted with most of the government’s documentation indicating the Communist Party’s involvement. The story is that Schlesinger absconded with the documents when Martinez reneged on his promise of payment; Schlesinger’s book. La verdad sobre el comunismo (1932) was published in Guatemala. His son’s study, drawing on the same material is generally better known: Jorge Schlesinger, Revolucion comunista: Guatemala en peligro? Guatemala (1946); it shows surprising insight into the social and economic roots of the revolt. Joaquin Mendez, apparently the only journalist to travel with the troops at the time of the massacre, wrote a detailed account in Los sucesos comunistas en El Salvador, San Salvador (1932). Schlesinger’s and Mendez’s accounts are written from a markedly anti-communist point of view; and not always factually reliable. Rodgers, 12 February 1932, in Keogh, op cit, p. 22. Anderson cites a letter from a citizen of Juaytia to La Prensa.l February 1932, denying there were any rapes in the town. Anderson, in Matanza (pp. 130-7) discusses the range of estimated numbers given for the massacre by various sources; Keogh in The Politics of Hunger. . . provides several new sources and suggests that the 30,000 figure may be an under¬ estimate. David Browning. El Salvador. Landscape and Society. Oxford. Clarendon Press (1971) p. 273. Bustamante’s//wtona militar de El Salvador, largely a conventional account of 19th Century battles, in a short description of the atrocities in 1932 gives the only account ever to appear with governmental sanction. The edition referred to in the text is that published by the national printing office (Imprenta Nacional) in 1951 by order of the Minister of Interior; largely a reprint of the original 1935 edition, but including material apparently eliminated from the 1935 edition, which made no mention of 1932; the new material was perhaps slipped in without prior approval. This could explain the difficulty scholars how have in locating the 1951 edition. Bustamante, op cit p. 106. Anderson, op cit p. 127.

Notes to Part 2 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

95.

96. 97.

Dalton, op cit, p. 346. Rodgers to Sir John Simon, 12 February 1932. in Keogh, op cit, pp. 21-2. Bustamante, op cit, p. 106. Anderson, op cit, p. 131. “Brodeur Report", p. 7. Dalton, op cit, p. 344. Anderson, op cit, p. 133. Dalton, op cit, p. 345. Modesto Ramirez was spared at Ahuachapan and lived to be interviewed by Jorge Schlesinger for his Revolucidn Comunista, Guatemala en peligro? He was virtually the only Communist Party peasant leader captured but not killed. Dalton, op cit p. 347. The claim that the "Communist" revolt was used as a pretext to annihilate Araujo's supporters has been widely reported. The G-2 Report from Costa Rica, 30 June 1933. notes that many hold against Martinez that “under the guise of communism he ordered the execution of hundreds of people whose sole offense was that they were Araujo sympathizers." The author of the report did not accept this as wholly justified, nevertheless Araujo's electoral support was based almost entirely in the same areas where the uprisings occurred, the so-called "Communists" of the area having earlier been “Laboristas" who saw in Araujo their great hope. Even Jorge Schlesinger. generally sympathetic to the massacre as a necessary evil, reported that the militaiy took advantage of the uprisings to simultaneously "liquidate ex¬ president Ing. Arturo Araujo's party." Schlesinger, op cit, p. 4. Bustamante, op cit p. 106. La Prensa. San Salvador, 4 February 1932, in Anderson, op cit p. 17. From an interview with a ladino (Central American term for mestizos: mixed European and indigenous race) survivor, in Mendez, op cit. p. 105; and Anderson, op cit. p. 17. "General Resume of Proceedings of HMC Ships whilst at Acajutla, Republic of San Salvador. January 23rd-31st 1932", p. 8. General Calderon made his presence at the quay known through a telegram to the three ships captains which was to echo round the world the phrase “four thousand, eight hundred Bolsheviks have already been liquidated". After international press reports drawing upon the cable decried the "massacres" in El Salvador, Calderon, no doubt at the insistence of Martinez, hastened to claim that by "liquidated" he had not meant "killed" but that the Communists had been "taken to task", or "apprehended". Calderon's clumsy efforts to explain his statement were uncritically accepted in the pro-government book by Joaquin Mendez. Sucesos Comunistas, pp. 16-17. Canadian naval officers detailed reports indicate Calderon meant just what he appeared to mean by the term “liquidate"; Commander Brodeur was told when he met Calderon that 4,800 had been killed. An English translation of the actual cable reads; “The Chief of Operations on the western front of the Republic of El Salvador, General of Division Don J. T. Calderon, presents his compliments and greetings in the name of the government and General Martinez, and his own to Admiral Smith of the US Rochester. Commander V. G. Brodeur, HMCS5A:ee«a and Lieutenant Commander Hart HMCS Vancouver and has the pleasure in advising them that peace has been re-established in El Salvador, that the Communist offensive has been totally beaten and dispersed and will be entirely exterminated. Four thousand, eight hundred Bolsheviks have already been liquidated." Keogh, op cit "General Resume of Proceedings of HMC Ships. . op cit For biographical details of General Calderon see; Revista del Ateneo de El Salvador, January-June 1924, No. 92, pp. 1877-1880; the review Universidad, No. 1,1926, June-July 1926; US G-2 report Military Attache, Panama, Report No. 3936,20 July 1937; Keogh, op cit pp. 22-3.

143

Land. Labour and Security: 1820s to 1960s

Chapter 8 98

99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104.

105. 106

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124.

125. 126.

144

Anderson, op cit, p. 123, reports that by December units were being formed in Ahuachapan and Santa Ana, and that Colonel Jose Asencio Menendez was one of the officers sent to Santa Ana shortly before the outbreak to meet with coffee growers “in an attempt to organize them". File 2657-P-432, No. 38, 28 January 1932, A. R. Harris. Elam, op cit, p. 42. In Keogh, op cit: "The President had instituted 21.00 Curfew in thecity, and no one was allowed on the streets after that time. About 500 volunteers had been raised from the younger members of the middle-class landowners (not exactly ‘the flower of the aristocracy' as reported in the Press), and these formed the chief protection for San Salvador... Sporadic rifle-fire during the night of the delegations' stay in San Salvador was attributed to the 'civicos' having 'target practice at stray cats', although curfew breakers were shot on sight." Elam, op cit, p. 42. G-2 Report. 27 January 1932. The statutes are reproduced in G-2 Report. 24 February 1932. Statutes of the Civic Association were published in the official record, the Diario OficiaLll June 1932. Regulations ofthe association were published in Diario Oficial. 26 August 1935. Diario OJicial. 27 June 1932. Legation files, 15 March 1932. See also Keogh, op cit, p. 13, citing a 22 January 1932 cable from British Consul Rodgers reporting a government survey that found about half the army's troops “are communisf'! G-2 Report No. 38, 25 January 1932. “Brodeur Reporf', p. 1, in Keogh, op ciL Diario Oficial. 22 June 1932, p. 186; and Wilson, op cit, p. 230. “Brodeur Report”, in Keogh, op cit. Anderson, op cit, p. 123. Ibid., p. 114. Bustamante, op cit; Dalton, op cit, p. 342. See above. "The Politics of Land and Labour". Anderson, op cit, p. 58. “Brodeur Report", in Keogh, op cit. G-2 Report No. 1046. 18 May 1932. on events from 1 to 30 April 1932. G-2 Report No. 118G, 20 June 1932. G-2 Report No. 104G. 18 May 1932, for appointment and G-2 Report 38, 28 January 1932 for praise of General Llanos. G-2 Report No. 2069, 9 June 1933, Alex A, Cohen, Clerk in charge of office; G-2 Report No, 3013. 6 September 1932. G-2 Report No. 1715, 11 August 1932, M.A. from Costa Rica, “Public Order and Safety: Government Decrees Personal Identification Card for all Inhabitants"; rosters were to be kept by “mayors and secretaries of municipalities". G-2 Report No. 1715, 11 August 1932. Ibid. Ibid. Salvadorean author Alberto Pena Kampy described the benefits of the certificates, also known as “Cedulas Patrioticas". as twofold. “They identified the bearer as an honest trustworthy person ... and on acquiring it they were given the right to carry a conventional defensive weapon within or without the towns.” The same author notes the “surprising success" of the venture in finding subscribers, as an initiative “that came opportunely to somewhat relieve the calamitous and desperate situation that had come upon the Nation." [El General Martinez: Un patriarcal presidente dictador. Editorial ipografia Ramirez, San Salvador. 1972 p 59.) G-2 Report, 24 February 1933. G-2 Report No. 1715, 11 August 1932, A. R. Harris.

Notes to Part 2 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142.

G-2 Report 28 September 1932, Assistant Military Attache Alex A. Cohen. Dalton, op cit pp. 372 and 395-6. See above, “The Politics of Land and Labour”. G-2 Report No. 2038, 7 April 1924. G-2 Report No. 1788, 28 September 1932. Ibid. The report includes a translated text of the “Regulations for the Service of Military District and Cantonment Commanders in the Republic”. G-2 Report 28 September 1932. G-2 Report No. 1991,23 March 1933, Major A. R. Harris, and “Cuadro Estadistico de Arrestados por la Policia". in Boletin Oficial de la Policia. February 1932. G-2 Report No. 1991, 23 March 1933, Boletin Oficial de la Policia, March 1934. pp. 26-7. Ley Agraria, Decreto No. 60, Asamblea Nacional Legislativa, 26 August 1941. Ibid, see articles 76,78,79; Article 76 requires "la eficazpersecucion de losjomaleros u operarios-quebradores. y en general de todos los malhechores . Ibid.. Article 204. Ibid.. Article 72. Ibid.. Article 73. Ibid.

Chapter 9 143. 144. 145. 146.

147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

Roque Dalton, op cit. citing Marmot pp. 484-5. Elam, op cit p. 39, citing DfDs. 816.248/58, No. 4868, J, S. Pate to Department 19 January 1940. Ibid. The Boletin Oficial de la Policia. Organo mensual de la Direccion Nacional del Cuerpo began publication in July 1932; the Revista de la Guardia Nacional de El Salvador began publication shortly after the foundation of the Guard in 1912. Cited in Elam, op cit p. 55. Ibid., p. 52. G-2 Report 20 June 1937, “Militarized Societies: Internal Regulations of the Salvadorean Civic As.sociation and Civic Guard". Elam, op cit p. 60 citing Frazer to Department 20 October 1941. Alberto Pena Kampy. op cit p. 162. Elam, op cit pp. 63-4, Not all those shot were reformists: Colonel Tito Tomas Calvo. one of the officers shot was widely known for his direction of the massacre at Izalco in 1932. Calvo excited the San Salvador public's sympathies perhaps more than any of the others as he had sought asylum in the United States Embassy prior to his arrest but was forcibly expelled and handed over to the National Guard, a measure which generated much anti-US sentiment when Calvo was summarily

153. 154.

executed with the others. Anderson, op cit p. 152. Ibid., pp. 152-3.

156. 157. 158.

Jose Maria Lemu'^. Mensajes y discursos (Ministerio de Cultura. 1958). Memoria del Ministerio del Interior. 1950-51 (San Salvador). Memoria en el Ramo del Interior. 1952-53 (San Salvador).

159. 160. 161. 162. 163.

Ibid. Ibid. Anderson, op cit pp. 153-4. Dunkerley. op cit. Ibid.

165.

Matio Monteforte Toledo. Centro America: Suhdesarrollo y Dependencia. Mexico

166.

UNAM (1972). Ibid.

145

Part 3: Counter-Insurgency Emerges

t

I

I

10. From Reform to Repression: 1961-71

El Salvador's entry into the 1960s was marked by the overthrow of a short-lived government bent on a major programme of reforms. After several months of street demonstrations protesting against the regimes’ repressive policies, the reformists had come to power in October 1960 (in a virtual preview of the young officers’ coup of 15 October 1979) by removing Lieutenant-Colonel Jose Maria Lemus from the Presidency. The January 1961 coup took place after the announcement of sweeping plans to end arbitrary arrests, torture and killings by the security forces, and introduce major social — and political — reforms, the coup was achieved after a brief show of force at the cost of some 100 lives. Julio Adalberto Rivera assumed the leadership of a new militaiy junta which promptly declared its intention to retain power only until it could organize elections. In April 1962, in well organized elections, Rivera — the only candidate — was elected president. The military junta received the immediate and full support of the United States government. US Embassy cables stressed the strong anti¬ communist stance of the new junta and of the armed forces and, in keeping with theories of the Alliance for Progress period, rationalized acceptance of yet another military government as good for development: Total forces available for internal security number approximately 8,000... They are behind the present government, are strongly anti-Communist, and constitute major force for stability and orderly political and economic development.'

The cables further characterized the new junta as both “pro-US” and likely to bring about the kind of moderate social reforms first promised by the “reformist ” (but not pro-US) junta it had overthrown. political, economic and social conditions, lend themselves to exploitation by extremist elements. The anti-Communist pro-US CivilMilitary Directorate now in power has embarked on a program of social and economic reforms. .

? 149

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

On the one hand such a programme of reforms had undeniable potential for defusing some of the more explosive political contradic¬ tions of the country — particularly those originating from the pressures exerted on the system by the growing middle classes and even of ameliorating the most exploitably appalling social and economic conditions. On the other hand, those major changes that did take place under the successive military regimes of the 1960s were more directly concerned with reinforcing the internal security system than ameliora¬ ting poor social conditions. These changes, and the econornic and political developments that did go forward in the same period coincided with, and partly triggered the political awakening and mobilization of new sectors of the population which successive regimes were to prove powerless to halt or to control. The characteristic innovations of counter-insurgency doctrine — widespread networks of paramilitary auxiliaries, efficient communications and centralized intelligence agencies — proved incapable of preventing political mobilization, and may have promoted the very insurgency they were designed to pre-empt The military governments of the 1960s encouraged significant changes in the economic and political spheres which appeared, in all good faith, designed to improve the lot of the Salvadorean people. They were also intended to undercut the Communist threat while legitimizing the harsh, authoritarian aspect of military rule on which the war against subversion most heavily relied. The economic emphasis was primarily on the expansion of light industry and agro-industry, with economic diversification promoted that the theoretically, would result in more wealth trickling down to benefit the people as a whole. There would also be limited political reform which for the first time since the 1920s, would permit the formation of true opposition political parties, relevant in particular to the middle classes that had provided the push to oust Lemus in 1960, and which were the only major uncontained political force in the country at the time. The peasantry was to remain isolated at the margin of political participation.^ As the programme of political reform and economic development unfolded, other political changes went largely unperceived by the military governments. Among them a major element was the develop¬ ment within the Roman Catholic Church of a doctrine of social justice, ratified by the Second Vatican Council. The clergy, not the Cubans were decisive in the late 1960s organization of the peasants into self-help associations, the foremnners of the mass organizations of the 1970s. Also unforseen was full-scale war with Honduras in 1969, after several years of tension and border skirmishes; a conflict intimately related to the skewed distribution of El Salvador’s land. The Rivera government’s economic programme was described glowingly in a non-confidential AID report as emphasizing private enterprise: 150

From Reform to Repression: 1961-71 Under his policy of‘national conciliation’, based on the thesis that only a healthy, private enterprise economy can provide the economic basis for social reforms to which his government is committed. President Rivera has had considerable success in persuading the entrepreneurial classes, both domestic and foreign, to make investments in productive enterprise. Indicative of the restoration of confidence in this country's economic and political stability is the fact that the GNP increased by 8.2% during calendar year 1962.'^

The entrepreneurial energies thus stimulated were channelled within the regional framework provided by the newly organized Central American Common Market, bom of agreements within the Organization of Central American States, a regional body of the OAS. The “Central American Economic Integration” treaty, signed in December 1960, largely eliminated tariffs on goods moving within the region, to the considerable benefit of El Salvador’s light industry.^ At the same time the Central American Common Market countries signed an agreement establishing the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, an institution strongly supported by AID,^ its stated purpose being “to extend credits to projects promoting integration and balanced develop¬ ment in Central America.”^ Domestic legislation to encourage industrial development created the Instituto Salvadoreno de Fomento Industrial (INSAFI), which was to channel credits to burgeoning industry. There was also a revised 1961 Law for Industrial Promotion offering tax exemptions and freedom from import duties for capital goods and raw materials intended to attract foreign investment and domestic support for new industries.* By 1969 industrial production had doubled (amounting to some 20% of the Gross Domestic Product) with the new industrial activities including cement production, processing plants for coffee and vegetable oil, and textiles (textile production increased 300%).^ Just how much of the benefits went to the ordinary Salvadoreans is questionable: the new industries were largely in the hands of the same few families that traditionally dominated Salvadorean agriculture, in partnership with foreign corporations, or were wholly owned by foreign investors taking advantage of cheap labour and generous tax exemptions.'® While in 1966 the labour force working in manufacturing was estimated at 13.5% of the total, roughly 60% of the population remained dependent on labour on the land for their livelihood." aid’s 1964 programme outline included just one paragraph on the “ordinary Salvadorean”, that is, the poor: Always conscious of the needs of the poor people, the government has enacted various measures that benefit them, including a labor code and a law regulating the prices of pharmaceuticals. The government has also promised to undertake agrarian reform and to establish minimum wage rates.'^ 151

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

As for the labour code, it changed little. Only a fraction of the Salvadorean work force was organized into trade unions in the 1960s and the new labour code presented complex barriers to further organization or the pursuit of grievances by those organized.'^ Conditions legitimizing a strike or stoppage were such as to ensure that as late as the mid 1970s no industrial strike had conformed. In a September 1962 modification of the Penal Code, concerning “Anarchic Activities or Activities Contrary to Democracy”, unauthorized strike action or incitement to strike was made punishable with from three to five years imprisonment by placing it in the category of anarchic activities”.''* While these measures effectively blocked strike actions by urban workers organized in trade unions the labour law prohibited agricultural workers to organize themselves.'^ What was done for the rural workers in the effervescent 1960s? Promises of agrarian reform had been made since the 1930s. Even General Martinez made some basic reform gestures and Browning notes that in the 1950s the Osorio regime introduced “the concept of the 'social function of property’ ”, although the phrase was never clearly defined.'^ Subsequent regimes tended to support, in theory, the ideal of the “small rural property” — in contrast to the reality of the minifundio or minuscule subsistence plot and enormous estates with nothing between — yet none of these regimes openly challenged the political and economic power of the large commercial farms by trying to implement their ideal of the family farm.'^ The Rivera government is credited with distributing small plots of land — most already nationally owned — to some 3,500 petitioners by the end of his presidency in 1967.'^ In the 1960s, however, no land expropriations were made and a proposal for large-scale agrarian reform was not seriously advanced until the 1970s. The minor improvements in the lot of the poor heralded in the 1963 AID report were, in the main, carried out: “... minimum wage laws were enacted; paid Sundays off were decreed; rents on tenements were reduced. . Yet Anderson writes that even these reforms “backfired” to the detriment of the rural poor: Since the coup of 1961 a minimum wage law has been put into effect, but all that this has meant for the coffee workers is that the landholders pay slightly more and no longer give the customary two free meals of tortillas and beans each day. Thus the worker’s total wages have declined.^-^

It was a major change in agricultural production that made the greatest impact on the lives of a broad sector of the rural poor in the 1960s, a change brought about by that very entrepreneurial spirit encouraged by AID. In 1960, a paved coastal highway opened up lowland areas stretching along most of El Salvador’s Pacific coast — traditionally dedicated to cattle ranching and subsistence farming by 152

From Reform to Repression: 1961-71

colonos (peasants receiving the use of a parcel of land in exchange for estate labour) — to commercial farming. This, combined with high international cotton prices, produced a rapid conversion of much of this coastal region to capital-intensive export-agriculture.^^ Land dedicated to cotton — the principal crop in this agricultural expansion — grew from 106.300 acres in 1960 to 302,100 in 1965 (about the same acreage as for coffee). Falling cotton prices and rising cost of insecticides and fertilizers led to subsequent declines in the total cotton-growing acreage, but there was no return to the earlier pattern of colono farming: the coastal plain was to remain an area of industrialized export agriculture.^'^ Development of the coastal plain denied to the peasantry virtually the only available escape (short of emigration to Honduras) to those forced from their home areas to seek land to clear and work for subsistence. Those who traditionally had lived and farmed in the region were ousted from their land, with little prospect of employment on the new estates. Unlike the mass expulsions of peasants from their lands in the 1880s to make way for coffee cultivation, which required year-round intensive labour, this second major change in the land tenure system introduced a largely mechanized form of agriculture, creating an impoverished and dispossessed rural population: As the operation of a cotton plantation, apart from picking the fibre, is generally fully mechanized, the labour requirement is for a small semi¬ skilled resident work-force. The practice of allowing a colono to use a piece of land on the estate in part exchange for his labour was discontinued, and the tenant-farming of subsistence crops decreased as the value of land increased and the area of unused land diminished. Leases to peasant cultivators were not renewed and squatters were evicted. The majority of these dispossessed and landless families are unable either to continue their accustomed subsistence cultivation or to become cotton growers... for most, the only opportunity to earn a meagre income is during the short cotton¬ picking season. Those that remain in the area are obliged to settle where they can and form scattered groups of straw huts or caseros?^

According to David Browning, the leading expert on El Salvador’s agricultural development, “in commercial terms” the development of cotton-growing on the coastal plain was a resounding success, with cotton accounting for 24% of the country's total exports in 1964, but the social cost of this transformation was disastrous: ... as with coffee farming, in social terms the price paid for this commercial achievement has been high. The large, mechanized monocultural plantation has replaced the hacienda, with its associated cattle ranching and tenant farming, and has disrupted the traditional pattern of small-scale cultivation of food crops. A minority of the coastal population is able to work as resident 153

Counter-Insurgency Emerges labourers on the new plantations; the majority is obliged to settle where it can, to seek whatever form of precarious living it can find, and has become a poor and dispossessed section of the community.^^

Furthermore, closely paralleling the 19th Century situation, \vhen in order to ensure an abundant supply of workers for coffee cultivation vagrancy laws were enforced, the floating population of landless agricultural labourers in the 1960s and 1970s was seen, not as a social problem to be resolved, but as an economic advantage to be exploited: ... the seasonal nature of the labour requirements of the cotton plantations has caused the problems of these people to be neglected; it is considered that any attempt to provide them with a permanent occupation or income must necessarily reduce the numbers of workers available during the short and critical picking season.^^

A recent study on “Agribusiness in the Americas” cited El Salvador as among the most dramatic example of what is described as a continent¬ wide trend: the expulsion of resident agricultural workers (colonos) from “once-traditional estates” to make way for agro-industrial enterprise. El Salvador’s three-fold expansion of cotton production is partly attributed to the takeover of “land once used by colonos to grow subsistence crops”. According to the same source, land farmed by colonos decreased by 77% between 1961 and 1971 while the total number of plots they farmed fell by 70%.28 The expulsion of the colono combined with pressure on the land through the natural growth of the population produced tensions resembling those which led to the crisis of 1932 and which had incubated since the 1880s. In the 1960s, as before, a reorganization of the security system was required to ensure containment of rural despair and active resistance. But the abrupt worsening of the rural peoples’ lot in the 1960s coincided with a liberalization of political control in the urban areas and a rebirth of labour and political organizing in the countryside itself, with the peasantry finding an unexpected ally in a changed Roman Catholic Church.

War With Honduras: Land Crisis in El Salvador The most dramatic evidence of El Salvador’s land tenure crisis, a crisis that forced hundreds of thousands of landless peasants to seek a livelihood elsewhere in Central America, was the war with Honduras in the summer of 1969. For over a decade Salvadorean peasants had been streaming across the border into the sparsely populated hills of Honduras, which served as a catchment for the rural dispossessed, a 154

From Reform to Repression: 1961-71

kind of poor man's lebensraum. Peasants fleeing El Salvador left behind a population density of over 380 persons per square mile, with land ownership concentrated in the hands of a few hundred families; Honduras in contrast had a density of 57 persons per square mile and vast expanses in which immigrants could lose themselves and cultivate a patch of land as squatters.-^ By 1969 some 300,000 Salvadorean campesinos were living in Honduras, most of them illegally. In June 1969 anti-Salvadorean riots were sparked off in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa in the course of El SalvadorHonduras play-offs in the qualifying rounds for the Soccer World Cup matches. In the aftermath over 10,000 Salvadoreans were forcibly expelled or fled back to El Salvador. On 14 July, Salvadorean troops invaded Honduras, capturing several towns. They remained until late July, when OAS mediators and United States pressure successfully encouraged their withdrawal.^** In the course of the conflict the Salvadorean air force bombed Santa Rosa de Copan and Tegucigalpa’s Toncontin Airport. Honduras retaliated with air strikes on Ilopango airport and El Salvador's major oil storage installations at the port of Acajutla. There were between 3.000 and 4,000 military and civilian casualties and at least 500 dead.^' Salvadorean authorities called it the “Human Rights War", claiming it had been fought in defence of the rights of Salvadoreans in Honduras.^^ Although neither side can be said to have won. President Sanchez Hernandez, who directed military operations in the field, claimed a substantial victory on his return. Honduras, however, was no longer willing to receive landless Salva¬ dorean peasants and so ease what was to become El Salvador’s major political problem; and something had to be done to deal with the estimated 100.000 peasant refugees driven back into El Salvador from Honduras. It was the consequences of the 1969 war, coupled with the recent legitimation of the theology of liberation at the Latin American Conference of Bishops held at Medellin, Colombia, in September 1968, that prompted El Salvador’s Roman Catholic hierarchy to take an unprecedented stand in defence of the peasantry, and make a first plea for a moderate land reform. In a pastoral letter, the six bishops of the Salvadorean Episcopal Conference called on large landowners to support a more equitable distribution of the land and declared that the diocese of San Vicente had donated church-owned land for an initial private agrarian reform project The bishops limited their proposal to the suggestion that landowners voluntarily sell some of their land to the campesinos working it and sell their unused land to the landless.^^ The implications of even this mild pursuit of agrarian reform by the Church were enormous, however, since it was a first significant expression of the new post-concilium social doctrine of the Church. Even before the war with Honduras, Catholic groups had been working with the peasants in self-help community development 155

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

projects and encouraging community and labour organization as an effective means for the rural population to improve their lot. As early as 1965, long before the Medellin conference of Bishops, the church s “Caritas” clubs and the growing Christian Democratic Party had supported training courses for local community leaders which initially, were backed by US AID.^^ The first “Communal Unions”, which were community associations rather than trade unions, were set up in early 1968 with backing both from the Roman Catholic Church and AID. By mid 1968 there were 20 “Communal Unions” with a membership of some 4,000 rural small-holders (not agricultural labourers) which merged to form the Union Comunal Salvadorena (UCS). As model “Alliance for Progress” projects they were, for a time, backed by the church, by AID (through the American Institute for Free Labour Development, AIFLD), and even by the Salvadorean government, and support for them was boosted in the aftermath of the Honduran war.^^ The negative impact of the Honduran-Salvadoran war of 1969 convinced some members of the military and oligarchy that it was in their best interest to carry out these rural training programs as “life insurance”. On March 3, 1970, AIFLD signed a contract with US AID for $136,000 and entered into an agreement with the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare... to train Salvadorean campesino leaders.^^

Further AID grants for the UCS, through AIFLD, were approved in April 1971 ($53,800); June 1971 ($113,979); and May 1972 ($135,000) and the UCS continued to receive extensive US government funds throughout the \910s?^ Although the UCS was a state supported organization its legal status — until the late 1970s — was merely that of a mutual-help society of small landholders.^* In any case its benefits were not available to the majority of peasants: the landless or nearly landless. The mid 1960s opening {ox official programmes of rural organization, limited to small-holders and backed by the US AID, was paralleled by the first steps toward organization taken by peasants at the bottom of the economic ladder. The first organization to rise independently was the Federacion Campesina Cristiana de El Salvador or FECCAS (Christian Peasant Federation of El Salvador) which brought together agricultural day-labourers, subsistence farmers and others, with the support of both the church and Christian Democratic Party activists. Created in the late 1960s, FECCAS drew upon the pastoral work of El Salvador’s clergy and the initiative of the rural people themselves. The role of the clergy is perhaps best illustrated by quoting the testimony of one of El Salvador’s priests in the United States congressional hearings on El Salvador in 1977:

156

From Reform to Repression: 1961-71 My work, like that of many of my fellow priests, has had as its goal to present the vision of Christian faith through questioning the real situation in which the people, especially the peasants, live without either land or work ... the most pressing problem in El Salvador is the problem of land distribution. In the face of this situation we have struggled to make possible agrarian reform... To make agrarian reform a reality, we have organized at both the local and the national levels, courses of information on agrarian reform . . . and we have come to see the need of peasant organizations. I personally founded a school of agriculture where, besides teaching agricultural techniques, we informed the students about agrarian reform and how to organize themselves to achieve its ends.^^

Such unauthorized incitement to organization (the organization of agricultural labourers was illegal) was not carried out without interfer¬ ence. The priest who gave the above testimony, P. Jose Inocencio Alas, described this interference in his own case as having included his repeated arrest and torture, the burning of the parish house, a near fatal bombing, and a steady flow of death threats."*® Although every effort was made to prevent rural organization among the day labourers and sharecroppers — short of the killing of the priests that was to begin in 1977 — a groundswell of support for Christianbased peasant groups moved through the countryside, boosted by the increased pressures on the land after the war against Honduras. In addition to FECCAS, the early and middle 1970s saw the emergence of other independent organizations of peasant labourers: the Association of Salvadorean Farm Workers and Peasants (ATACES), linked to the Salvadorean Communist Party; the Revolutionary Peasant Movement (MRC) and the Union of Agricultural Workers (UTC). In 1975 the UTC merged with FECCAS in what was to become the Federation of Agricultural Workers (FTC), both also members of the Popular Revolutionary Block (BPR), a coalition of labour, student and slumdweller organizations set up in 1975. While the growth of agro-industry and the expulsion of campesinos from the land, the reduced real wage of the agricultural day labourer, and the Honduran war all combined to significantly worsen the peasant’s lot in the 1960s, the advance of peasant organization offered an alternative to an otherwise bleak and desperate future, and means whereby to press for change.

Political Reform — With Reservations If, ironically, the peasants were the victims of developments associated with the “Alliance for Progress” in the 1960s, the middle sectors were, for a time, the beneficiaries of some real reforms. In its immediate aftermath, however, it seemed that the January 1961 coup would turn 157

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

back the clock, entirely rejecting the reform programme of the short¬ lived civil-military junta of October 1960. In 1961 a constituent assembly comprised entirely of representatives of the “official” party, the Party of National Conciliation, drafted a new constitution, and as already noted, in April 1962 Lieutenant Colonel Rivera, unopposed, was elected to the presidency for a five year term. The new constitution differed little from the old and it appeared that in the future political participation outside the official party would be as limited as it had been in the past. In 1963, however, a major reform went through, providing for proportional representation in the legislature, and combined with new tolerance for the organizational activities of the moderate, largely middle-class, opposition parties. The elections for municipal and legislative posts in 1964 were an unprecedented success for these new parties, particularly the Christian Democrats.'*' Control of 24 of the 52 seats in the legislature passed to the opposition in 1964, a remarkable development considering that no members of opposition parties had sat in the legislature since 1931.'*^ The political opening continued throughout the decade, with opposition parties winning 25 of the 52 legislative seats in 1968 and 21 in 1970. While in 1970 opposition parties won in only five of the 260 municipalities (in contrast to the 80 won in 1968) the Christian Democrats, for the second time, obtained the key post of mayor of San Salvador for their leader, Jose Napoleon Duarte.'*^ The extent of political reform, however, stopped short of jeopardizing the military’s control of the presidency in the 1960s and, no doubt, if the opposition had seriously threatened to do so it would have been outlawed. Though Colonel Fidel Sanchez Hernandez’ election to the presidency in 1967 was not uncontested — the first since 1931 with more than one candidate — the Party of National Conciliation, according to the official figure, still won 57% of a vote strongly contested by Christian Democrat candidates and the Party of Renovating Action (PAR) (the oldest post-Martinez party, formed in 1944 from civilian groups that had called for his ousting). Immediately after the election the PAR was declared illegal, on the grounds that its platform had supported principles “contrary to the Constitution”. According to a PAR spokesman the “principle” involved was support for agrarian reform.'*'* The government option to veto a party’s registration on ideological grounds was one of the very clear limits laid down from the beginning. Under the terms of the 1962 law on “Anarchic Activities Contrary to Democracy” political organizations guilty of “anti-democratic” doctrines were subject to banning. Interpretation of what precisely was “anti-democratic” was, of course, a prerogative of the government'*^ While the ideological strictures defining the legitimacy and legality of political parties, and their sometimes arbitrary application, set limits of one kind on the political process, the greatest barriers imposed followed 158

From Refonn to Repression: 1961-71

both social and geographical criteria. Even “appioved" opposition parties were denied access to rural labourers. The political opening did not. in truth, extend much beyond the limits of the major towns. Alistair White, in his 1973 study, attributed the rural population’s isolation from the opposition parties to their total vulnerability to reprisals assumed to be forthcoming, however little they stepped out of line, thus limiting liberalization to the capital and the larger towns. In rural areas... a totally different standard applies, with what is virtually a separate legal code (the Ley Agraria) and a separate militarized police force (the Guardia Nacional as opposed to the urban Policia Nacional), harshly to enforce it. Any person who shows himself discontented with rates of pay. whether on a private estate or in a government work group — building roads, tor instance — is liable to be immediately dismissed from his job and likely to be refused employment by any other employer in the neighborhood, since he will be considered a ‘subversive’. Co-operation exists between the landowners and the Guardia Nacional in the identification and intimidation of ‘subversives’.'*^

Recruitment of activists and organizers from the rural populace itself was virtually impossible; the rural security apparatus was explicitly geared to prevent it. For a time, however, until the mid 1970s. middleclass party leaders working out of the capital enjoyed some immunity from the physical danger facing provincial party members engaged in open political activity. Even the PDC (Christian Democratic Party) finds it difficult to persuade local supporters in many parts of the country to undertake any form of propaganda work, for fear of losing their jobs or being arrested, and the fear is clearly well grounded. It is easier for party representatives to travel from the capital to gain supporters, since they do not fear for their jobs and their connections in the capital are likely to ensure their safety from arbitrary arrest and especially from the torture and even police murder which are widely thought to await those agitators who do not have such connections. Those with middle-class status are undoubtedly treated with greater latitude and consideration, quite apart from connections.'*^

In 1963 the US AID described the Salvadorean government’s “main political problem” just before the 1964 elections as “the continuing opposi¬ tion of many of the liberal intellectuals, professional people, university professors and students.” These groups, it said, “in which extremist elements have considerable influence”, were unfairly sceptical of the impending electoral reforms and claimed the government would rig elections through its control of the peasantry. AID’s rejoinder to the sceptics was a bald statement that the peasantry as a whole would support the government, as it always had, and that talk of control was merely sour grapes; 159

Counter-Insurgency Emerges The government... has publicly promised that the election will be free and fair. The left-wing intellectuals know that the government will receive, as it did in 1961, the overwhelming support of the peasants. Their real — but unvoiced — complaint is that the vote of a poor unschooled campesino should carry the same weight as that of a prosperous, educated lawyer.'^*^

Alistair White gives both a long and a short answer to the question “Why is the rural vote overwhelmingly in favour of the official party” in Salvadorean elections. His short answer is that “in regions where educational levels are low, elections are won by the people who organize them, even if ballotting is secret and there is no recourse to direct fraud.His long answer requires consideration of more complex concepts: What political scientists call ‘political socialization': the general environ¬ ment of information and ideas by which the uneducated and most of those with only a little education are surrounded; the prohibition of any form of unionization or left-wing proselytization in the country-side; and the mixture of paternalism and intimidation at election time.^®

Until the late 1960s the peasantry was largely insulated from the political affairs of the nation, encapsulated in the virtually closed world of large estates and peasant communities which existed to serve them, but in the mid 1960s the new, middle-class parties, particularly the Christian Democrats, began to penetrate the peasants’ isolation. Previously, peasant participation in voting had attained a certain ritual quality. The official party of the moment (the Purt/r/o pro-Patria, 1932-44, XhtPartido Revolucionario de Unificacion Democrdtica, 1949-60, and the Partido de Concdiacidn NacionaU the present ruling party, formed in 1961) was the only option in the countryside and peasants simply went through the motions of voting. (In the 1961 voting for a Constituent Assembly, for instance, all the candidates were PCN.)-'^' Even after part of the rural population became aware that parties other than the PCN existed, the opposition faced a double handicap. All the powers and resources of the state were ranged in support of the PCN, The official party has more funds than other parties could hope to have for giving away footballs to villages, or more obviously, vests by the thousands marked with the blue sign of the PCN. Such gifts do buy votes ^2

and into actively the PCN’s challengers by means of beatings, temporary arrest of activists, poll-watchers or even candidates, as well as more subtle intimidation of voters at the polls: When the campesino arrives at the polling booth, he finds persons of 160

From Reform to Repression: 1961-71

authority there, and very likely soldiers or guardias standing around ... the ballot boxes are made of transparent plastic. As the ballot papers are thin and the voter marks the party symbol with a thick black cross, another person can stand on the opposite side of the box from the voter, watch his ballot paper come down through the slit into the transparent box, and see through the thin, once-folded paper which party he has voted for.^^

According to White the use of the transparent boxes was “justified" by authorities on the grounds that it made ballot stuffing more difficult. Other means of inducing support for the PCN included the trans¬ formation of Ministry of Health clinics at election time into “PCN health clinics, conspicuously marked with the party insignia” and the use of state resources to collect signatures on the party’s membership rolls: A party activist, not paid but hoping for a job through his oficialista connections, is instructed to visit each dwelling in his area and enter its adult inhabitants as members of the party in a little book, telling them when they have to go and vote, and giving them a ticket for a free meal afterwards.-'’*’

The tidy packaging of the peasant vote began to break down by 1970, not so much due to the overt campaigning efforts of the political opposition as to the inroads of church teachings encouraging peasant self-help through organization and participation in the political process. The information barrier was the first to be broken. Peasants learned that there was more to the world than the local estate and their daily tasks or tareas and that the government need not be merely a static presence to be passively endured. The political system reached a critical juncture with the 1972 presidential elections. Middle-class parties joined in backing a single slate of candidates, and the peasantry as a whole was no longer a “safe” constituency of the official party. The government had to choose between continuing the process of political opening up, perhaps even accepting the replacement of an army officer with a civilian in the presidency, or beginning to reverse the process. The 1969 war with Honduras marked an interlude in which the Salvadorean opposition parties momentarily threw their support behind the government: a calculated sop to the war fever of the moment much criticized by some sectors of the left. The return of the Salvadorean settlers from Honduras and the elimination of El Salvador’s access to Honduran lebensraum drew attention to the land crisis and alerted the military to the danger facing the system from the rural areas, but not to the urgency of agrarian reform. The Sanchez Hernandez government and its party, the PCN, attempted to defuse the situation by offering several reformist measures which raised expectations but ultimately failed to produce any significant change in the status quo. 161

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

In the 1970 campaign for the legislature the PCN — and the government — promised significant changes in the economic sphere based on showcase reform bills on banking and irrigation, and even a new Labour Code which would eliminate certain restrictive provisions regarding collective bargaining which made strikes virtually impossible. A much vaunted Law of Drainage and Irrigation {Ley de Avenamiento y Riego) was billed in the electoral campaign as a serious effort to correct some of the inequities of the land tenure system. As noted in an article published in Estudios Centroamericanos (the magazine of the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana) the draft did contain some provisions for “the limitation of the extension of private property in irrigated districts”,a first real threat to private property. The concerted opposition of the growers and cattle ranchers associations indicated just how seriously the threat was taken. The proposed irrigation law posed no real threat to existing landholdings, but to sectors of the agrarian elite it represented the thin end of the wedge of government controls over agriculture, and this was sufficient to provoke their breakaway from support for the PCN and the founding of a party even further to the right: the Frente Unido Democrdtico Independiente (FUDI) (United Democratic Independent Front). This party served primarily as the vehicle of former National Guard and ORDEN chief. General Jose Alberto Medrano.56 This violent rejection of the proposed law indicated the degree of resistance to any kind of reform by the great families, rather than a reflection of the law’s real potential for change. According to one author, it was “designed to improve irrigation and yields on the lands of small and medium owners”,5^ and considered by the Sanchez Hernandez regime only on the insistence of the United States and the Christian Democrats. Yet interference with traditional water rights, and provisions for the expropriation (with abundant compensation) of access routes for drainage and irrigation purposes (a principle of eminent domain) challenged the great landowners’ unrestricted control too seriously to permit passage of the Law. The landowners’ association and FUDfs campaign against the law previewed campaigns to stop future agrarian reforms. While the discontent and disillusionment generated by the failure of the proposed reforms were strongest in the middle sectors represented by the Christian Democrats, peasant and urban labour organizations were more disgusted by Sanchez Hernandez unkept pledges to improve the lot of the labourer. Promises of more equitable treatment for organized labour, and an indication that agricultural workers might be allowed to organize under a new Labour Code, made during the 1967 presidential election period, were unfulfilled. The [Labour Code] in force had proved deficient and led the unions to a series of strikes at the end of the presidential period of Col. Julio Adalberto 162

From Reform to Repression: 1961-71 Rivera [1962-1967], The workers felt defrauded when by mid-1971 they became aware that the approval of the new code was deliberately moving forward very slowly and that pressures from the organizations of business owners were readily accepted. The only section that was approved was that referring to individual labor contracts, while the section correspond¬ ing to the right of collective contracts was postponed indefinitely. The problem of peasant labor organization was also left to one side. These developments caused an understandable discontent in the workers' centers and among those small groups of conscious peasants. The government by failing to adopt a positive decision [concerning agricultural workers], encouraged a suspicion among the labourers and peasants that there was an intent to keep the peasantry in a state of oppression, and marginalized from the social and political process.^^

Government’s refusal to recognize thedefacto peasant organizations already proliferating in the countryside, and the growing demand for real economic and political reforms, led to the radicalization of further sectors of organized labour and, by 1970 provoked the first breaking away from the Christian Democratic Party and the stolid, though clandestine. Communist Party, of the young militants who were to form the nucleus of subsequent guerrilla movements.^^ (The first guerrilla activity was reported in 1971.) Radicalization of the labour movement was also evident in one of the oldest organized sectors, that of the teachers. Salvadorean school¬ teachers had been in the forefront of organized groups demanding social reform since their national strike in 1968 when they protested not only at their own meagre salaries but the poor facilities, poor teaching materials and, all in all poor education available to their charges. From then on teachers, particularly rural school-teachers, with the clergy inspired by the new liberation theology, gave the peasants a window on developments outside their own community and provided the main means for their concientizacion (consciousness raising) and, in some cases, their organization. Consequently the teachers, and, later, the clergy, became a main target of government violence. The 1968 teachers’ strike was notable as one of the first cases in which the paramilitary organization ORDEN intervened, attacking and killing strikers and their supporters. When the national teachers’ union struck nationwide in July 1971 they received widespread support in both town and countryside and were met with an even wider campaign of violence and a more systematic deployment of ORDEN goon-squads assisting the police and National Guard forces at local level. The strike also found unprecedented support from other organizations and the population at large, and culminated in massive street demonstrations in San Salvador with middle classes, peasants, students and urban poor joining in support of the teachers and taking the opportunity to express their opposition to an increasingly unpopular regime. Some of the 163

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

demonstrations in July and August 1971 culminated in stone-throwing attacks on public buildings — a foretaste of the street demonstrations to come in 1977 and after. One most significant aspect of the disturbances associated with the 1971 teachers’ strike was how the urban poor, and particularly the people of San Salvador’s proliferating shanty towns, mobilized and took to the streets, as much to protest against a callous government as in support of the teachers’ special demands. The expansion of commercial agriculture on the coastal plain in the 1960s, the inexorable population growth throughout the country and the closing of the Honduran escape valve by the 1969 war, generated a permanent flood of peasant immigrants seeking gainful occupation in the cities. The expansion of tight industry in the 1960s could absorb only a tiny fraction of the displaced peasants and the majority barely managed to survive on their wits and grit by hawking everything from chewing gum to kleenex tissues and the myriad innovative means by which rock bottom urban poor throughout Latin America spin a meagre income virtually out of thin air. According to one source, during the greatest period of industrial expansion, 1960-69, the Salvadorean industrial force grew from 21,268 to 50,278 workers.^® Unlike most Latin American countries, however, the relatively small sector of the working class employed in industry failed to develop into an elite set apart from the rest of the urban working class, or even the peasants. El Salvador has possibly been unique in the way, in the early 1970s, industrial workers — usually organized by industry, and often by individual factory — coalesced to form mass political organizations with other sectors of the urban poor, newly arrived migrants from the country and peasant organizations. The 1971 teachers’ strike was just one occasion which brought these sectors together in a community of interests which cohered into a new form of political organization. The new mass organizations springing up in the Salvadorean countryside and shantytowns throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s fell largely outside the framework of traditional labour unions and political parties. Peasant unions sprang up in large part from the stimulus of the church and remained legal only as mutual interest associations, and not as traditional trade unions oriented towards collective bargaining or other labour related activities. The small independent unions were in competition with the government’s CGS or General Federation of Unions^' which faithfully supported the government and was not known to have carried out strikes or other expressions of union militancy. The major opposition to the CGS was the Communist Party backed CGTS (Confederacidn General de Trabajadores Salvadorenos) and the FUSS {Federacion Unitaria Sindical Salvadorea), a federation which united railway, soft-drink, beer and water workers and allied itself with the CGTS in 1965.“ 164

From Reform to Repression: 1961-71

The 1971 teachers' strike marked a point at which the government could not fail to recognize the burgeoning strength of non-traditional opposition organizations (less the teachers than their supporters who poured out into the streets). This was met by the government’s extralegal violence, both from members of ORDEN and from the regular security forces. The old system of control which combined promises of reform with ever-present repression broke down just as political concessions to the middle classes were withdrawn. Already in 1970 steps were taken to change the legislation on elections and disenfranchise the clientele of the middle-class, moderate reformist parties. The revised law altered the composition of the Central Electoral Commission {Consejo Central de Elecciones) which ran elections and determined results, ensuring its control by the PCN for future elections.^^ The law also revised the terms under which new parties could be registered or coalitions formed and placed new restrictions on campaigning. The new provisions established heavy fines for public meetings or demonstrations held without express permission from the government.^ Altogether the changes in electoral legislation were sufficient to ensure the results of future elections would be satisfactory to the ruling party; results that at a pinch could be changed.

Foreclosed Political Process: Escalation of Terror The 20 February 1972 presidential elections brought political passions to a boil, provoked junior officers to attempt a coup, and marked the end of the military’s decade-long experiment in cautious but steady opening up of the political arena to selected opposition parties. It was in the wake of these elections and the failed coup that the full potential of El Salvador’s elaborate apparatus for counter-insurgency was gradually revealed. The 1972 elections marked a significant change in the electoral strategy of the lawful opposition parties which responded to the 1971 electoral law’s imposition of constraints by creating a coalition party — the Union Nacional Opositora (UNO) — which fielded a single slate of candidates drawn from the member parties. Though UNO was formed by the Christian Democrats, the social-democraticMov/m/cntoAado«a/ Revolucionario and the Union Democrdtica Nacionalista (to some extent a front party for the proscribed Partido Comunista Salvadoreno), the Christian Democrats set the terms for the coalition, insisting that their leader Jose Napoleon Duarte, be the president-al candidate, with MNR leader Guillermo Ungo in the vice-presidential slot. The presidential elections, and the elections for the legislature and municipal government on 12 March, followed a period of electioneering marred by a massive government campaign to label UNO — and the 165

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

Christian Democrats and Duarte in particular — as “Communists” and “terrorists”, and by violence against UNO candidates and campaigners. Full page advertisements appeared in the major newspapers with slogans such as “UNO — Communism; Communism — Terrorism”, or “UNO = Public Enemy Number One” (the acronym UNO means one in Spanish).'’^ The shrill tone of the government’s campaign attacks, the far-right backers of the PCN and the further right FUDI on the united front opposition was influenced by the previous year's events which had raised anti-Communist passions to new heights, even among these passionate anti-Communists. Some sectors of the landholding elite — notably the supporters of FUDI — were already dismayed by Sanchez Hernandez’ end of term flirtation with reformism. Full-fledged anti-Communist hysteria was to crystallize in the course of 1971. In February the murder of Ernesto Regalado-Duenas — the first attack on a member of El Salvador’s ruling families — was interpreted as evidence that guerrilla warfare had finally begun. Later, in July, the teachers’ union, ANDES, triggered nation-wide demonstrations with a strike similar to that in 1968, proving that supporters of its cause represented an increasingly coherent and powerful political force on the left. Both events introduced a trend toward increasing governmental violence which was to continue in a rising curve throughout the 1970s. Industrialist Ernesto Regalado Duenas was a scion of two of the country’s most powerful landowning families, the Regalados and the Duenas. In the 1960s the two families had expanded into finance, gaining controlling interests in the powerful Banco de Comercio; and into industry, acquiring important interests in the light manufacturing sector that took-off in the course of the decade; besides developing new cotton and sugar estates on the coast.^^ Regalado Duenas himself, one of the up and coming young men of El Salvador’s agrarian elite, was best known for his effective management of industrial investment, and considered representative of the entrepreneurs who welcomed the modernizing economic policies of Sanchez Hernandez’ government; policies of limited state intervention in the economic and social sphere considered anathema by the traditional landowning families. Regalado Duenas was kidnapped on 11 February 1971 and his body found on 19 February. A ransom was offered but never collected and no group claimed responsibility for the action. The government wasted no time, however, in attributing the killing to “groups of the extreme left”. President Sanchez, in a speech on 24 February, denounced as responsible “those organized groups that imitate everything evil, without the least love of country^ those groups of the extreme left and their shameless allies” and promised “The noble effort of the Security Forces will be strengthened.”^^ Where responsibility for the Duenas killing lay was in question from 166

From Reform to Repression: 1961-71

the Start, despite President Sanchez’ protestations. In March, the prestigious London-based Latin America Weekly Report reported the then widely held opinion that he was killed not by some unknown leftwing group but by a faction within the President’s own National Conciliation Party; Although no direct link has been established between the PCN and the unknown kidnappers, it is widely believed in San Salvador that the murder was a desperate attempt by the right-wing of the party to arouse the country to the dangers of left-wing terrorism and to stampede the party into choosing a hardline candidate — preferably General Alberto Medrano, former head of the National Guard and until recently the government’s strong man. The accusation that the Left was responsible lacked credibility even among those who would have liked to believe it. Observers argue that a left-wing group would have claimed responsibility for such an action as a victory, and would anyway have collected the ransom money.^^

That the kidnapping and murder were the work of the far right, specifically of agents of the landed elites who had most vigorously resisted the reformist irrigation law and had close links to General Jose Alberto Medrano, was suggested by circumstances implicating General Medrano himself On the night the kidnapping took place a police detective engaged in the dragnet put out for Regalado Duenas and his kidnappers challenged General Medrano in San Salvador’s fashionable Colonia Escalon and was shot dead on the spot. General Medrano briefly went into hiding and then surrendered to a National Guard garrison. In his formal statement after arrest Medrano reportedly indicated some knowledge of the case, although later he denied any recollection of this aspect of his statement.In the aftermath of the kidnapping several other leading rightists were also detained, notably a member of the Salaverria family, one of the traditional landowning families of the department of Ahuachapan; but only Medrano was kept in custody, charged with the murder of the police detective. First denying the charge, then changing his plea to homicide in selfdefence, Medrano was acquitted in June 1971 and immediately left the country for the United States, where he remained for several months.™ In July the recently formed FUDI, backed by the landed families of Ahuachapan, applied for legal recognition. It stood for resistance both to the agrarian reformist tendencies represented by Sanchez’ irrigation law, and against the official party’s increasing solicitude for the interests of the landed families which had diversified into finance and industrial development, and required new degrees of state intervention in investment, planning and international marketing.^' When Medrano returned from the United States in October 1971 he was acclaimed FUDI’s leader and presidential candidate for 1972.™ 167

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

The most convincing evidence that Regalado Duehas was killed by agents or ex-agents of the security forces and not by some new left-wing group, which has to date remained anonymous, may have been the modus operandi of the crime itself According to some accounts Regalado Duenas’ body was found tied to a chair, with a cord binding his thumbs together behind his back in the method of restraint characteristic of the Salvadorean security forces. He had been tortured, his finger-nails torn out, his fingertips mutilated, and his eyes destroyed before being shot twice in the head. These practices are entirely consistent with those of the Salvadorean political police. Whoever the real culprits were, the kidnapping and subsequent killing of Regalado Duenas was used to raise the political temperature with a Red scare and justify a hard-line crack-down on the left which sent even the establishment reformists into the political wilderness. In May 1971 the government publicized the purported unravelling of a plot involving the national university (long considered a hot-bed of Communists) and the Christian Democratic Party (the government party's main political contender) in Regalado Duenas murder. The crime was attributed to an ambiguous political group — called simply El Grupo (The Group) — organized by disgruntled members of the Christian Democratic Youth at the university. The members oiEl Grupo who were detained were eventually acquitted and released, but the furore over the supposed conspiracy served to deflect continuing suspicions of right-wing involvement. The government, and political groupings and parties of the right, presented the murder as evidence that, after long preparation, guerrilla warfare had begun in El Salvador and that previously tolerated organizations of the left should be seen in a new light and dealt with accordingly. Identification of the united opposition party UNO with the guerrilla threat was a constant theme of right-wing electoral propaganda.^^ The actual election proved one of the best documented examples of electoral fraud to emerge in recent Latin America history.^"* Evidence was produced of a wide range of measures to interfere with the actual voting process, including the issuing of extra identity papers to PCN voters; the destruction of ballots marked in favour of UNO; ballot boxes open at the back (making the votes cast visible); the expulsion of observers from the opposition, etc. Despite these efforts UNO appears to have won the election by a shade less than 10,000 votes.^^ On 25 Eebruary the Central Election Board refuted UNO’s claims of electoral fraud and announced Molina’s victory by 9,844 votes. In the uproar that followed, with Duarte threatening a general strike if the election results were not anulled. President Sanchez hastened the legislature’s ratification of the official results, and designation of Colonel Molina as president elect. The threatened general strike never materialized. If the presidential election was a blow to the hopes of the united 168

From Reform to Repression: 1961-71

opposition, the local and legislative elections on 12 March were a coup de grace. The final results gave the official PCN 242 of the 261 mayoral posts, allowing UNO only 18, and seats in the legislature for UNO’s member parties fell from their peak of 21 in 1968 (19 for the Christian Democrats and 2 for the MNR) to eight2^ At 1:30 am on Saturday 25 March, army officers of El Zapote and San Carlos forts in San Salvador launched a coup against the Sanchez Hernandez government. Led by Colonel Benjamin Mejia, com¬ mander of El Zapote, who promptly named himself president of a three man revolutionary junta, the rebels rapidly dominated army installa¬ tions in the capital, including the military academy and the headquarters of the general staff (but not the general staff), and the critical national communications centre ANTEL across from the National Palace. They also made a successful raid on the president's house, where they captured the president himself, and the chief of his general staff (Colonel Carlos Humberto Romero, a future president).^^ In spite of these successes the rebels failed to capture or neutralize the army’s high command; a failure which enabled a co-ordinated counter¬ offensive to be directed by Defense Minister General Eidel Torres, Colonel Luis Alonso Reyes, commander of the fort of San Carlos, and Colonel Vicente Sanchez Hernandez, brother of the president and chief of ANTEL. With the leadership still at large expected support for the coup by provinciaf garrisons was nipped in the bud. Loyal forces, including all the Air Eorce, were mobilized against the San Salvador garrisons; loyal aircraft began limited bombing raids on rebel strongholds as early as 9 or even 5 am on Saturday.^* The critical factor in this, as in most other 20th Century Salvadorean coups, was the support given the regime by the security forces, notably the National Guard and the National Police. Both the National Guard and the National Police headquarters in San Salvador successfully resisted prolonged attacks by rebel army units, and it was largely the provincial National Guard forces who, with the National Police, proved decisive in counter-attacking the rebel garrisons on Saturday afternoon. Loyalist troops brought in from provincial garrisons were placed under General Azmitia. head of the National Police.™ Coup-leader Colonel Mejia was subsequently quoted in the capital’s press as stating that “the only ones who were not with us were the Chiefs of the Security Lorces, in fear that too many things would be brought out into the open’’ (if the rebels were successful).^® By 5 pm that Saturday, the coup was over. National Guard forces from the North and East of the country together with National Police and provincial army units had sealed off El Zapote and San Carlos with San Carlos surrendering shortly afterwards. At about the same time National Guard troops took the ANTEL building by assault. Between 4:15 pm and 5:00 pm Colonel Mejia surrendered at El Zapote. Some 100 people died in the fighting, including several 169

From Reform to Repression: 1961-1971

civilians killed in the cross-fire and in bombing raids.*' What then was the coup attempt all about? The proclamation issued by the rebel triumvirate on the morning of the coup, its first and last pronouncement, presented it as an attempt to defend constitutional order, and declared the Sanchez Hernandez regime to be a cover for the rule of . .a clique of traitors to the nation and enemies of the people.. It would seem, on the face of it, that the electoral fraud of the previous month had precipitated the coup, although there were probably other factors involved.*^ There was never any indication, however, that the coup leaders intended to offer redress to the losing party in the elections by handing Duarte the presidency, although he seems to have thought this a possibility. Jose Napoleon Duarte and the other leaders of UNO seem to have been as surprised as anyone by the coup and, indeed, the coup’s participants denied that civilians had been even remotely involved. But once the coup was in progress, they did call on Duarte for support and, apparently without consulting other leading UNO members, Duarte rashly complied; shortly after noon on the Saturday he surprised radio listeners with a broadcast calling on the people's whole-hearted support for the coup. He also called on the National Guard to lay down their arms.*5 When, some hours later, the rising came to a halt, Duarte was just one of many civilians who raced for foreign embassies in search of asylum. Duarte, however, reached only the private residence of the Venezuelan Embassy’s First Secretary, where security men tracked him down, dragged him out of a rear bedroom, and administered a systematic beating in the presence of First Secretary Gonzalo Espina and his small children.*^ The uproar raised by the Venezuelan Ambassador, who rapidly mobilized the diplomatic community and threatened to break diplomatic relations if Duarte was not freed (Venezuela then had a Christian Democratic president) probably saved him from prolonged detention or worse, and discouraged Sanchez Hernandez from carrying out his original intention of executing captured rebel leaders. Duarte himself was put on a plane to Guatemala on 28 March and became an exile in Caracas, until 1980.*^ The failed coup, as had the kidnapping and murder of Regalado Duenas, became the pretext for a new escalation of repression. A foretaste of the day to day official violence of the later 1970s was seen in the weeks immediately following the 25 March coup attempt. Martial Law was declared on the afternoon of the 25th — in force only until 10 April — and widespread killings carried out as security forces enforced a curfew, shooting violators on sight in the major cities..** On 3 April constitutional guarantees were formally suspended by the legislature and remained so until 3 June 1972. On 1 July 1972 Colonel Arturo Armando Molina was sworn in as president for a five year term. 170

11. State Terror: 1972-77

Molina set the tone of his government on 14 July 1972, two weeks after his inauguration, by ordering troops into the National University, which he denounced as a hot-bed of subversion; 800 members of the university community were arrested. Dr Rafael Menjivar, the rector, and 14 others (teachers, students and administrators) were put on an airplane, in chains, and flown to Nicaragua. The University was shut down for over a year.*^ The move against the University did not satisfy the far right which called for a campaign of “sanitation” to eliminate “Communists” in public life and even pressed for the expulsion of Mary knoll and Jesuit priests, already seen as subversives."^’ The scene was being set for the “death-squad” killings which began in the last years of Molina’s regime. With middle-class opposition parties hamstrung, and the University closed, as a forum for political expression, violent opposition groups might have been expected to become more active. Already on 2 March 1972 an unidentified armed group attacked and killed two National Guardsmen on patrol in San Salvador, and made off with their weapons. No group claimed responsibility but apparently they were authentic “guerrillas”.'” In September 1972 the National Guard post in Pandinales was attacked by 11 guerrillas, several of whom were killed.'’Shortly afterwards the Fuerzas Populares de Liberacion Farabundo Marti (FPL) (Popular Liberation Forces Farabundo Marti) announced their existence and claimed credit for the Pandinales operation.^^ A series of bombings followed and, in early 1973, police posts and multinational firms were attacked. By the end of 1973 both the FPL and the fledgling Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo, ERP (People’s Revolutionary Army) were engaging in sporadic bombings and armed attacks. In February 1973, after a series of bombings at the Salvadorean International Trade Fair, the Pan American Airways office and the San Salvador Coca-Cola plant. Defense Minister Carlos Humberto Romero announced the discovery of a terrorist plan “directed by the Salvadorean Communist Party, and by sympathizers with that movement, and affiliates of other parties”,'’'* the latter a transparent allusion to the Christian Democrats. In the dragnet that followed most of the hundred 171

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

or so people arrested were not guerrillas, but leading members of the Christian Democratic Party and trade union leaders. Twenty-two of the prisoners, blindfolded, with their thumbs bound behind their backs, were flown out of the country, this time to Guatemala.^^ Undeterred, in mid-March the guerrillas attacked a National Guard post in Cuscatancingo, killing at least one Guardsman and, in San Salvador, a policeman who stopped a guerrilla’s car loaded with propaganda.In late April bombs destroyed the office of the ViceMinister of Labour and the IBM headquarters in San Salvador.*^^ In August the ERP killed a bank guard in what was apparently the guerrilla’s first bank raid — and left a communique announcing its existence.*^^ Throughout the rest of the Molina period this sporadic guerrilla activity continued to feature in Salvadorean political life. But although the guerrillas actions helped reinforce the repressive trend already apparent towards the end of the Sanchez Hernandez regime, they were little more than an embarrassment to the military establishment until after 1977. The government move against the guerrillas gradually brought into full operation the paramilitary and intelligence apparatus built up since the early 1960s. The traditional style of repression — prolonged imprisonment and exile — was gradually transformed, until, by 1977, “disappearance” and extra-judicial executions became the accepted way of dealing with the opposition. This gradual transformation was punctuated by dramatic incidents of governmental violence, and innovations both in the style of execution and the choice of victims, drawn from ever widening sectors of society. Neither the middle classes, prominent professionals nor even the clergy were to be exempted when, in 1977, the killings began in earnest — ten years after Guatemala’s first “counter-terror” campaign was launched in Zacapa. In Molina’s first year of office, scattered press reports appeared of peasants arrested by the various police bodies and subsequently found dead in unexplained circumstances. On 18 November 1972, for example. La Prensa Grdfica reported the finding of campesino Jose Vasquez Perez’ headless body in the hamlet of Copinolito, Santa Ana, after his arrest the previous week by three men “who identified themselves as members of the Treasury Police”. In May 1974 National Guard troops raided the village of Chinamequita, killed several villagers and took others away who were never seen again.^^ Generally cited as the turning point in rural repression was the incident on 29 November 1974 when some 60 National Guard and ORDEN members attacked the hamlet of La Cayetana in San Vicente department, where most families were affiliated to the peasant union EECCAS. Six peasant farmers were shot dead on the spot and 13 others detained, “disappeared”, and presumed dead. The operation took place in the context of a land dispute between villagers and a neighbouring estate owner.'**^ 172

State Terror: 1972-77

Opposition calls in the legislature for an inquiry into the incident were ruled out of order. A Catholic priest led a march of some 10,000 peasants to protest against the massacre before the Casa Presidencial."" This was one of the first instances of the new, independent peasant organizations (FECCAS and UTC) calling their members out on to the streets of San Salvador to demand justice. The massacre of La Cayetana was one incident that became a rallying cry for peasant organizations and opposition groups in the 1970s. On 21 June 1975, at the hamlet ofTres Calles in Usulutan department, members of the National Guard and of ORDEN went to community leader Jose Alberto Astorga's house. He and three sons were shot dead and a fourth was injured but survived. Government forces then detained and shot peasant Santos Morales and his two sons.''’^ La Cayetana and Tres Calles, interpreted as the government's declaration of war against the peasant organizations, stimulated them to greater militancy. Independent peasant unions merged with other non-establishment organizations, representing different social sectors, into a broad political opposition movement fuelled as much by the sheer brutality of repression as by a specific political vision. In July 1975 the bloody crushing of a student demonstration provided another landmark in repression, and further mobilized opposition to the government. On 30 July 1975 some 2,000 university and secondary school students demonstrated in San Salvador in protest at the breaking up of a student demonstration, the previous week in Santa Ana, against government expenditure to host the Miss Universe Contest. The San Salvador demonstrators were cut off by troops and armoured cars on a high bridge over a sunken roadway, on their way from the university’s main campus to the city centre. The security forces opened fire with automatic weapons, killing at least 37 students on the spot and taking off in National Guard ambulances an unknown number of those wounded who were never seen alive again.'®^ Compounding the horrors for the families of the dead and “disappeared”, the government refused to acknowledge the deaths; their bodies were never found, the “dis¬ appeared” never accounted for. The particular significance of the 30 July 1975 massacre was that the students, many from middle-class families, had received the same summary and ruthless treatment as that meted out to the peasantry. Despite government efforts to deny the massacre had ever occurred the killings provoked a much greater sense of outrage among large sectors of the capital’s population than had earlier massacres of relatively far away peasant farmers. The Roman Catholic church hierarchy con¬ demned the killings, and a demonstration of some 50,000 protesters marched through San Salvador on 1 August in tribute to the dead and defiance of the govern me nt."^’^ The massacre of students clearly indicated that conditions in El 173

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

Salvador had, indeed, changed, and that new means of response were necessary for effective opposition to the government. For five days after the incident a group of student leaders, teachers, trade unionists and representatives of other urban and rural mass organizations occupied San Salvador's cathedral demanding that the whereabouts of the “disappeared” students of 30 July be established. Their appeal failed,'®^ but their joint protest helped weld the disparate organizations into a broad front of unconventional opposition to the regime. The first of what would be known as the “popular” or mass organizations had been formed in San Salvador more than a year before, in June 1974, under the name of Frente de Accion Popular Unificada, FAPU (United Front of Popular Action). FAPU was a loose coalition uniting the teachers’ union, ANDES; the two nation-wide peasant unions, FECCAS and UTC (a smaller organization based in San Vicente province formed some months before); and the main federations of urban trade unions FUSS and FENASTRAS.'®^ In 1975 both FECCAS and ANDES withdrew from EAPU, reducing it to a primarily urban organization based on FUSS and FENASTRAS. Shortly after the 30 July massacre the second major popular organization was born. The Bloque Popular Revolucionario 30 de Julio (30 July Popular Revolutionary Block) joined the peasant FECCAS and UTC, the teachers’ ANDES, organizations of newly radicalized university and secondary school students, and a new organization in the shantytowns in and around San Salvador, the Union de Pobladores de Tugurios, UPT (Union of Slum Dwellers). As the new opposition consolidated the Molina regime intensified its actions against the increasingly radicalized peasant unions in the countryside, and turned to a new approach for disposing of trouble-makers in the urban areas. On 26 September 1975 FUSS Secretary General Rafael Aguinada Carranza, who had been elected to the legislature in 1974 as a candidate of the National Democratic Union, was riddled by machine-gun fire in broad daylight, in downtown San Salvador, from two or more vehicles as he drove through the city with another UDN legislator who escaped alive.'®’ Aguinada’s murder was the first to be attributed to a mysterious, anti-Communist, Guatemalan-style death-squad. Aguinada and other UDN leaders, trade unionists, journalists, priests, and others were declared to have been “sentenced to death” by FALANGE, an acronym for Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Anticomunista (Anti-Communist Liberation Armed Forces), in a communique distributed to the press on 2 August (two days after Molina told a press conference of yet another Communist plot). Molina reported the detection of infiltrators in several opposition parties, student organiza¬ tions and trade union federations and declared the student demon¬ strations of 25 and 30 July had been instigated by professional agitators of the Communist Party.*®* 174

State Terror; 1972-77

The FALANGE communique took much the same line as Molina, holding the Communist Party responsible for infiltrating almost every non-government group, for the recent demonstrations, and for the continuing guerrilla violence. It warned the nation’s teachers that “The Communist leaders of ANDES are already sentenced to death” and, in keeping with Molina’s later record of persecution of the church, FALANGE made special reference to Archbishop Luis Chavez y Gonzalez ("Monsignor, what side are you on? Are you a priest or a politician? Do you defend Communism. . ?”)Tw At the time, public opinion on the provenance of the communique was divided. Local speculation linked FALANGE variously to rightist elements in the military, to powerful handholding families, and even to multinational corporate interests.Ostensibly a clandestine organiza¬ tion of the far right FALANGE was probably a creature of the top security agency, ANSESAL and may have existed only as a unit of ANSESAL’s specialized forces. On the other hand special funding was widely believed to have been made available to ANSESAL for special assassination squads operating under its wing by the principal associations of Salvadorean landowners.'*' Calling for a return to the methods of the late General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez “who stopped the Communists in their tracks” with the 1932 massacre, the FALANGE communique warned of the imminent liquidation not only of Communists, but of those who collaborated or had dealings with them; FALANGE is an organization that will begin to function from today... We have lists, addresses. We know the places the cowardly communist leaders can be found... from this moment they are sentenced to death— We will also bring to justice all of those who collaborate with them, be they journalists, communist priests, congressmen, sell-out lawyers, communists who are in government through the stupidity of those who govern, and even those military men who contemporize with them."^

Like the communiques of Guatemala’s numerous apocryphal “death squads”, prepared by the army and security services, the FALANGE text emphasized the threat of insurgency to security personnel themselves, with particular attention to recent killing of policemen: The security corps and the armed forces should collaborate, killing every communist that falls in their hands, because they run the risk themselves of being eliminated. If not, look at the case of the policeman vilely murdered in cold blood on 1 August, remember all of your companions murdered, like those of the Bloom hospital, those of Santa Ana, those of San Miguel, those of the Planes de Renderos, Santiago Diaz Rivas, etc."^

Clearly the writers of the text had both a particular concern with and a 175

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

detailed knowledge of the losses suffered by the security services in the previous months, as well as lists of names and addresses of proposed targets. Most striking for comparative purposes, not only with Guatemalan death-squad communiques but with the Salvadorean military s own doctrinal writing on irregular forces and counter-insurgency tactics, was FALANGE's classic exposition of the rationale of “counter-terror” in counter-insurgency. Communists were beyond the law and could be dealt with only by using lawless tactics: we will have the advantage of acting outside the law like the Communists. This is the only way to destroy the Communist beast We will support the security forces by killing the judges, the law clerks or the cormpt lawyers that want to prosecute them for the deaths of communists or useful fools.... The people must understand that this organization will act outside the limits of the law for the good of the population itself, and for its freedom. .

In the weeks following the revelation of FALANGE’s supposed existence a number of “disappearances” and murders were credited to it, among others that of Feliciano Sanchez, head of the Furniture Workers’ Union, a FENASTRAS affiliate. Sanchez, detained on 14 November, was found dead some days later, his body mutilated by torture."^ Similar assassinations coincided with a surge of bomb attacks on the offices of opposition parties, left-wing trade unions and, on 26 September (like in Guatemala in 1966, when the “death-squads” took off) the offices of a small daily newspaper critical of government policies — La CrdnicadelPueblo — were machine-gunned and damaged by bombing."^ In November, bombs exploded at the offices of the Christian Democratic party, the National Democratic Union party, and the FUSS labour federation. The Christian Democrats issued a communique blaming the government for the attacks.''^ The selective assassination of leaders of labour and political organizations and attacks on non-violent peasant organizations and peaceful urban demonstrations continued uninterrupted to the end of the Molina regime.

Agrarian Reform and Persecution of the Church Towards the end of Sanchez Hernandez’ regime, a press statement by Enrique Alvarez Cordova, the Minister of Agriculture was the first indication that significant agrarian reform was being considered for El Salvador. A member of a great landed family himself, Alvarez Cordova told the press that an extensive study of the agrarian situation, completed during the previous two years, would provide the basis for 176

State Terror: 1972-77

legislation in the coming government. Alvarez Cordova continued as Minister of Agriculture under the Molina government, and was largely responsible for an agrarian reform bill published in mid-1976, but amended beyond all recognition in subsequent months."* Alvarez Cordova returned to prominence after the 1979 coup, again to serve as Minister of Agriculture, and again to see an agrarian reform project in which he believed betrayed by the military (at the time of his arrest and summary execution in November 1980 he had served as the president of the combined opposition front for about eight months). Molina's first step towards agrarian reform was the creation of the Salvadorean Institute of Agrarian Transformation in June 1975. In July 1976 Molina presented the “Agrarian Transformation’’ bill to the legislature, providing for an area of cattle ranches and cotton plantations in the departments of San Miguel and Usulutan, to be designated a “transformation’’ zone. In its original form the law provided for government purchase of the land at market value and its distribution to small-holding peasants. The 150,000 hectares marked out for distribution might have provided holdings for some 12,000 peasant families."'^ Although the law was forced through, the ensuing massive campaign to block its implementation proved successful. In October 1976 President Molina agreed to fundamental changes in the law which, in fact meant there would be no agrarian reform; land would be neither compulsorily purchased nor expropriated. The campaign to reverse or emasculate the agrarian transformation law forced new alignments between top army officers and the agrarian elites, leaving Colonel Molina’s proposed reform without highranking military backers. Nomination of the next PCN presidential candidate would to some extent depend upon the performance of the eligible members of the high command vis-a-vis the agrarian reform. Already in June 1976 five top colonels were publicly discussed as possible candidates.'2° Two were to be dropped for their presumed loyalty to Molina’s reform proposals. The remaining three were: Colonels, Carlos Humberto Romero, Minister of Defense; Jose Guillermo Garcia, President of ANTEL (a top intelligence post); and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, President of the state finance corporation INSAFI (Instituto Salvadoreno de Firtanciamiento Industrial) and ex-president of ANTEL.'-' Neither Garcia nor Vides Casanova, who were to rise to power after the October 1979 coup, jeopardized their careers by pressing for agrarian reform under Molina. Romero, second only to Molina in the military hierarchy, opted openly for the counter-reformists and assured himself nomination as next president.'22 The months of acrid conflict and debate over the proposed agrarian reform in 1976 brought to the fore the latent hostility of the agrarian elites — and of the security services’ directors’ towards the progressive clergy. While the clergy had previously expressed support for agrarian 177

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

reform in general terms, the Molina government's initiatives found some sectors of the church ready to champion very specific reform measures. Temporarily, the clergy’s pro-reform advocacy was in line with governmental policy; but with the capitulation of Molina s government they were left as visible, and vulnerable advocates of reform without allies in positions of power. In July 1977 US congressional hearings on “Religious Persecution in El Salvador” ex-American Ambassador Ignacio E. Lozano Jr., placed the beginnings of the “persecution of the church’! with the 1976 confrontation over the agrarian reform law: On the one hand, we had young, socially conscious priests seeking on behalf of the campesinos a better way of life and a bigger slice of the economic pie brought on by booming coffee and cotton prices, and on the other hand the landowners, seeking to protect their own economic interests and reluctant to share their bonanza with their workers. . . During this period of great social unrest, numerous right wing groups, including FARO, mounted a shrill campaign in the Salvadorean press against the Catholic Church. . . this campaign of vilification apparently had the tacit approval of the government, which in its turn was mounting a campaign of harassment and intimidation of Salvadorean priests, and the expulsion of foreign priests, including Americans.'^^

After October 1976, abandoning all pretence of reform for the rural sector, the military government turned its attention to brutally putting down the mobilization of the peasantry the agrarian reform had been intended to appease. The clergy who actively defended the peasants' right to organize themselves were seen as one of the main obstacles to maintaining the status quo. Violence against church sectors involved in the defence of agrarian reform and peasant organizations began in October 1976 with six bombing attacks on the campus of the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana. The authorities attributed the last of these attacks to a previously unheard-of “death-squad”, the “White Warriors Union” [Union Guerrero Blanca. UGB). FALANGE was not heard of again, but attacks on church property and the assassination of clergymen and lay workers that followed in 1977 although usually carried out by uniformed members of the regular security services, were regularly blamed on the UGB. Moves against the church coincided with a series of incidents involving peasant organizations in strikes and protests of unpre¬ cedented militancy. In the forefront was the peasant union FECCAS, closely associated with the clergy, and part of the Popular Revolutionary Block. On 14 November 1976, in four provincial capitals simultaneously, FECCAS-BPR demonstrated against changes in the agrarian law and repression in the countryside. In Quetzaltepeque several demonstrators 178

State Terror: 1972-77

were dragged off to police cells when the demonstration was broken up. To prevent their possible “disappearance” the carnpesinos stormed the municipal building and freed them, at the cost of one dead and several wounded among their number. On 29 November peasant labourers protesting against low wages on the “La Paz” plantation in Tecoluca clashed with the landowner's guards, killing one of them. On 5 December, in perhaps the most significant incident landowner Eduardo “Guayo” Orellana, proprietor of the Hacienda Colima in the district of Aguilares, was killed in still unknown circumstances during a demonstration by tenant farmers protesting against their imminent expulsion from the land.'^** Both the government and landowners’ associations blamed the rash of peasant direct action on the clergy whom they maintained had organized and advised them. Among the first targets of the ensuing wave of arrests, torture and assassination in 1977 were parish priests and lay religious workers (including former priests) working in Tecoluca, Quetzaltepeque and Aguilares, all areas in which peasant mobilization had occurred.'^^ While bombings of church buildings and priests’ houses, and later, murders of clergymen, were routinely ascribed by the government to the phantom “White Warriors Union” most actions against the church were carried out quite openly by the uniformed security services. Foreign priests and former priests were among the first arrested and expelled; some were tortured. On 1 February Father Guillermo Denaux, a Belgian working in the slum areas of San Salvador, was arrested by the national Guard, blindfolded and shackled to a metal bed frame during a 20 hour interrogation.'^^ Foreign priests received death threats and suffered harsh interrogations before being expelled, but the worst treatment was reserved for Salvadorean clergymen or church workers who could not so easily be got rid of Father Rafael Barahona, diocesan parish priest of Tecoluca, was detained on 21 February, systematically tortured by the National Guard for two days, and lived to be released with a fractured skull. His ordeal was described in the course of US Congressional hearings in July 1977: He was handcuffed, placed faced down and received numerous kicks to the head, side and legs from noon until 10 p.m. At 10 p.m. he was stripped and placed on an iron cot. For nine hours electric shocks were applied to his feet and his hands as he was doused with ice water. From 7 a.m. the next morning until 2 p.m. he remained handcuffed hand and foot to the iron cot and every fifteen minutes received two blows to the chest with a wooden club.*^^

Despite severe injuries, and threats that he would be killed if he did not leave the country. Father Barahona returned to his parish church of Tecoluca. On 11 March his brother Manuel was ambushed and shot 179

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

dead in what was apparently an attempt to assassinate Father Barahona, whose car he was driving.’^* The following day, Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande was ambushed and killed, together with two parishioners, on his way from the town of Aguilares to the parish church of El Paisnal where he was to celebrate mass.'^^ Father Grande had been singled out as a “Communist” priest since the late 1976 anti-church campaign, and in January 1977 the Aguilares parish house had been damaged by a fire¬ bomb. His sermon in Quetzaltepeque on 13 February, and distribution of a mimeographed analysis of the persecution of the church probably sealed his fate. Father Rutilio Grande’s murder provoked an unexpected response from the church establishment, and stimulated the still predominantly conservative hierarchy to come out boldly and positively as the nation’s main advocates of human rights, a position previously adopted by only the minority within the clergy which Rutilio Grande came to symbolize. On 22 February, just three weeks before the murder of Father Rutilio Grande, 75 year old Archbishop Chavez y Gonzalez was replaced by Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero. On 5 March, at the Salvadorean Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Romero, previously considered a conservative, issued a strong pastoral letter condemning the torture, killings and “disappearances” taking place throughout the country, decrying the expulsion of priests, and protesting at a slander campaign by ANEP and FARO against former Archbishop Chavez y Gonzalez.'-’" Rutilio Grande’s murder prompted Archbishop Romero to lead the church in unprecedented action: he demanded of President Molina an investigation of the crime and announced that he would take no part in official ceremonies until those responsible were brought to account. (On 1 July he refused to attend the inauguration of Molina's successor.) On 14 March, despite a state of siege banning all gatherings, the Archbishop led a massive procession through the streets of San Salvador to a memorial service for Father Grande; similar processions took place in Aguilares and El Paisnal. All Catholic schools were closed for three days, the church issued daily press releases, and YSAX, the church radio station, broadcast continuous programmes on human rights. Perhaps the most lasting memorial to Rutilio Grande was Archbishop Romero’s creation of a permanent office for monitoring human rights, to be known later as the Socorro Juridico (Legal Aid), which would provide day by day documentation of the arrests, torture, murders and “disappearances” in the coming years. On Sunday 20 March all Catholic churches in the country were closed except the San Salvador cathedral. An estimated 100,000 people gathered in the plaza in front of the Cathedral as Archbishop Romero celebrated mass. The church’s radio station transmitted his sermon simultaneously throughout the country. For the next three years, until his assassination. Monsignor Romero’s weekly broadcast sermon was a major factor in the nation’s spiritual and political life. Although the church had made it clear that it would resist coercion. 180

State Terror: 1972-77

the government’s purge of progessive clergy and lay workers in the countryside continued uninterrupted after Father Rutilio Grande’s murder. The lay religious who worked with suspect clergy, particularly catechists to whom much of the religious instruction was delegated in the countryside, took the brunt of the repression. Many were detained and tortured, and warned to abandon their church work; others were simply killed.

Electoral Fraud and Repression: 1974-77 In the March 1974 municipal and legislative elections the trend to squeeze the middle-class opposition parties out of the running continued, with a considerably expanded use of the security services, and in particular the rural forces of ORDEN, to ensure victory for the PCN candidates. According to the official count, the UNO coalition won 15 legislative seats against 36 for the PCN and one for the far-right landowners’ FUDI. UNO spokesmen claimed the true victors in the elections were the government’s paramilitary irregulars: ... the paramilitary forces that now govern with the complacent complicity of the security forces are really the ones that have imposed their will. Canton patrols, local authorities. ORDEN members, all of them armed, dislodged the poll watchers and proceeded to carry out their own elections. The expression of the will of the people has been reduced to an operation in which ballots are marked in a closed room.*^'

In the lead up to the 1976 municipal and legislative elections the omnipresence of ORDEN strong-arm squads and the regime’s “death-squads” played a major role in excluding the respectable, legal opposition from electoral politics. The 1978 Inter-American Com¬ mission on Human Rights report on El Salvador details numerous cases in which prospective opposition candidates were frightened out of running for office or prevented from even registering candidates in many areas. With party officials frequently ejected from registry offices, or candidacies withdrawn under threats of violence, the opposition coalition UNO ultimately withdrew from the 1976 election. This proved an embarrassment to the regime, but was hardly unexpected. The military government must have weighed the benefits of retaining a gentlemen’s agreement with the moderate opposition parties and their continued minority share in local government posts and legislative seats, and concluded that a change in the rules of the game was necessarily in order. The realization that the 1960s situation could not be maintained without some real move towards redistri¬ bution of the country’s agrarian wealth, may have influenced the decision. 181

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

The stirring of the peasant movements and the offensive against peasant organizations and the clergy identified with them formed the backdrop to the 1977 presidential elections. The parties of the UNO coalition decided to take part, but rather than present one of their leaders as a presidential candidate, nominated a retired army colonel, Ernesto Claramount Rozeville, who had distinguished himself in the Honduran war, had diplomatic experience, and was considered relatively progressive.'^^ If, by nominating a respected military man, they hoped to prevent victory being snatched from their grasp as in 1972 they were mistaken. As in 1976. the pre-election period was dominated by the governing PCN's vicious campaigning centred on the Communist proclivities of the Christian Democrats, with the anti-agrarian reform campaign serving as a springboard from which to begin the attack. The death of Roberto Poma, a wealthy industrialist kidnapped by ERP guerrillas on 27 January, only weeks before the presidential elections, intensified the already acute pre-election tension and polarization. It was widely rumoured at the time that Poma had been kidnapped and murdered by a right-wing organization as a provocation, but the kidnappers’ demand for the release of two ERP members — Ana Guadalupe Martinez and Rodolfo Mariano Jimenez Vega — held in secret cells for more than six months with authorities denying their arrest, confirmed that the kidnappers were ERP guerrillas. They secured the release of their two imprisoned members, at the insistence of the Poma family, but Roberto Poma died as a result of wounds received during his abduction.'^"' On 9 February the kidnappers issued a communique reporting the death of Poma and the location of his body. Martinez and Jimenez Vega had already been flown to Algeria: had they not been rescued, they would probably have been murdered in custody; no other prisoners who “disappeared” for more than a few days have surfaced alive since the 1950s. This incident, however, served to inflame substantial sectors of public opinion against “the left” in general. Apparently to pre-empt a repeat of the 1972 progressive officers’ revolt, some 200 officers were summarily “retired” in mid-January, and a press campaign of character assassination was directed against several officers who had dared express their support for Claramount’s candidacy. At the same time the popular organizations called for a boycott of the election and by end of December 1976, had already initiated a series of political demonstrations in the capital and strike action in industrial enterprises in San Salvador. On 20 February Salvadoreans voted. In the process more than 80% of the UNO’s poll-watchers were either physically ejected from the polls, arrested or kidnapped before voting began, or received beatings and death threats. Only 920 of the 3,540 ballot boxes used were opened for counting in the presence of UNO observers. Although the government announced victory on 21 February the 182

State Terror: 1972-77

official verdict was held for five days. Only then did the election board declare General Carlos Humberto Romero the winner by 812,281 votes to 394,661.135 The UNO coalition was even better prepared to document fraud than it had been in 1972, having ensured the presence of international observers during the voting, and monitored short-wave radio com¬ munications between polling stations in which adulteration of the vote, arrest of poll watchers, and mobilization of ORDEN thugs were discussed. An UNO document submitted to US congressional hearings in March 1977 outlined details of six hours of tapes which included instructions from the ORDEN co-ordinator. Colonel Benedicto Rodriguez, call signal “Angel 1”, transmitted from ORDEN head¬ quarters in the Presidential House.'^^ Orders to local ORDEN commanders included calls for reinforcement of security services in specific municipalities; instructions for ORDEN to deal with local authorities that were not “collaborating"; and orders to intimidate or physically remove UNO observers. Despite evidence of intimidation, ballot-stuffing, and imaginative counting, the 920 ballot boxes opened in the presence of UNO representatives suggest that UNO may actually have won the election: Claramount had 157,574 of the votes from these boxes, to Romero's 120.972.'3^ As in 1972 UNO did not accept defeat philosophically. Colonel Claramount himself led a demonstration of some 40,000 UNO supporters to San Salvador’s central Plaza Libertad on 21 February, protesting against electoral fraud and declaring that he would stay in the Plaza until the electoral results were anulled. With numbers at times rising to some 60,000, the demonstration continued for a week. On 28 February, at 1 am, the government forces attacked the several thousand demonstrators who intended to remain during the night. As in the student massacre of July 1975 the object was not dispersal but bloodshed. Army, National Guard, Treasury, Immigration and Customs Police units sealed off all but one exit. Colonel Claramount, who later described the massacre in an open letter, called for the approximately 4,000 demonstrators to gather around him near the church of El Rosario and sing the national anthem. As they did so the troops surrounding the Plaza began to fire and Claramount urged the crowd to seek shelter inside the church. “Meanwhile bursts of machine-gun fire were heard again and wounded people continued to fall.”'^* An American churchman who testified in the March concessional hearings described the single street left open out of the Plaza as a ‘gauntlet lined with troops and police who beat and slashed at demonstrators forced to pass between them. One group of some 500 forced through this “gauntlet” was loaded on to National Guard trucks and taken to National Guard headquarters. Another group was taken to a place surrounded by high walls near the railway terminal where many were shot: 183

Counter-Insurgency Emerges ... in a scene of great confusion they were released in groups of five, only to be shot down by other troops farther up the road. We have two eyewitnesses who saw at least 15 persons shot in this manner. One second hand informant claims a relative working at Rosales Hospital counted over 100 dead and many wounded brought in before dawn.’^^

The same source cites a lawyer who was detained after escaping from Plaza Libertad and taken by car to the headquarters of the Treasury Police (Policia de Hacienda)-. On the way he saw many bodies on the side of the road. At one point they passed three teenagers who were walking on the side of the road. The Hacienda policeman who was travelling in the car with him pulled out his pistol and shot all three of them at almost point-blank range.'"*®

The last of the demonstrators who had taken refuge inside the church were evacuated under Red Cross escort, after Colonel Claramount had agreed to terms with a three man delegation of top army officers.'"*' By 5 am the Plaza Libertad had been cleared of all but the dead, and fire-hydrants were opened to sluice away the blood.''*^ The killing continued when fresh demonstrators, unaware of the previous nighf s massacre, again converged on Plaza Libertad, and security services launched indiscriminate attacks on the crowds in the streets, firing on them with automatic weapons. Altogether witnesses estimated more than two hundred dead and described the use of army trucks to remove the bodies: Five Americans saw a government truck with ten to fifteen bodies pass under their apartment balcony on Ninth Street. Other eye witnesses reported seeing three large Army trucks with an estimated 40-50 bodies each leaving the downtown area.'"*"*

The official government admission was that four persons were killed in the early morning of 28 February. When a reporter at the press conference said he had photographs of five separate bodies, the government spokesman changed the number to five.'"*^ The 28 February 1977 bloodbath brought to an end the first Salvadorean experiment in broader political representation which extended to moderate middle-class parties.'"*^ If electoral fraud had not sufficed, the massacre in Plaza Libertad and subsequent wave of killings clearly indicated the governmenfs unwillingness to continue the charade. The top leaders of UNO were exiled and their followers became liable to arrest, torture, and — in the countryside — annihila¬ tion. The main thrust of the wave of repression after the elections was at the peasant organizations, and the murder of priests and lay religious teachers, perceived as the peasants’ organizers and advisers, became the main objective. 184

State Terror: 1972-77

On 17 May 1977 some 2,000 National Guard and army troops moved into the township of Aguilares to evict striking tenant farmers and arrest or kill local leaders and activists. On 18 May troops with armoured cars and riot tanks sealed off the town of Aguilares and carried out house-tohouse searches; at least 50 people are reported to have been shot on the spot as troops moved in. One, the sacristan of the parish church, was machine-gunned as he rang the church hells to gather the people. Several hundreds were detained, beaten and loaded on army trucks. They were never seen again. Possession of photographs of Aguilares’ martyred priest. Father Rutilio Grande — distributed in their thousands by the church — was taken as evidence of subversion and motive for arrest, torture, killing or "disappearance". Father Grande’s three Jesuit colleagues were detained, systematically beaten, then expelled to Guatemala, and accused in a government communique of "a long history of subversive activities in the area through the peasant organizations FECCAS and UTC”. The Aguilares district remained under military occupation for over a month, and movements throughout the area were strictly controlled.’"*^ On 20 May Archbishop Romero issued a bulletin condemning the beatings and expulsion of priests and declared the church found President Molina’s expression of condolence for Rutilio Grande’s murder inconsistent “with the government’s orders to security forces to attack priests who had worked closely with Father Grande.’’’"** Arrests, torture and expulsions of clergy continued, and a public campaign against the church, and peasant organizations, produced, almost daily, articles, communiques and paid advertisements openly sponsored by landowners’ organizations or government agencies. At the same time death threats went out in the name of the UGB “death squad” against Salvadorean priests who remained in the country despite prior intimidation; but the church did not submit. When Suchitoto parish priests Higinio and Inocencio Alas (previously detained and tortured) received convincing death threats and left the country on 25 May, former Archbishop Chavez y Gonzalez expressed his solidarity by asking to be assigned as parish priest in Suchitoto to replace them.’"*^ On 21 June 1977 a communique in the name of the UGB “deathsquad” attracted world attention and brought on an unprecedented scrutiny of human rights violations in El Salvador. In “War Order No. 6”, a flysheet sent to Salvadorean newspapers and clergymen, the UGB declared that: All Jesuits without exception must leave the country forever within 30 days of this date ... the immediate and systematic execution of all Jesuits who remain in the country will proceed until we have finished with all of them.

185

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

The authors of the flysheet reserved the right to begin operations before the 30 days were up, but established the deadline for departure or death as 20 July 1977.'5o The immediate effect of this ultimatum was that the Jesuits closed ranks and refused to move. In this they received the support of the Vatican and of the diplomatic representatives of the Western countries in El Salvador. Jesuit Provincial for Central America, the Salvadorean Cesar Jerez, declared that: “The Jesuits will stay in El Salvador. The members of our order will not leave El Salvador unless they are expelled or physically eliminated.”'^' Later, the head of the Jesuit order Pedro Arrupe, stated that: “[Jesuit] priests will not leave El Salvador because they are with the people. .. It could be that they are martyred, but the Jesuits will not leave that country.”'^^ The deadline came and went without incident, perhaps because US congressional hearings on “Religious Persecution in El Salvador” were scheduled to begin the following day. The newly elected government responded to the sudden attention from abroad by avoiding spectacular acts of repression in the cities for several months, although military operations against organized peasants continued in rural areas.'^^ With the political parties no longer seen as an alternative, the urban trade unions, and the organized peasants showed a new militancy and channelled their energies through the popular organizations. Strike action in the cities, and land invasions, sit-ins and demonstrations in rural areas began from the first days of General Romero’s regime. The ranks of FAPU and BPR swelled, stimulating the formation of a third popular organization, the 28th of February Popular Leagues (LP-28), named in commemoration of the post-election massacre. To com¬ memorate the 1975 student massacre. Revolutionary Block (BPR) held its first street demonstration on 30 July, and marched unmolested through the capital. By 15 November the BPR held at least 10 more demonstrations, in San Salvador, Santa Ana, Aguilares and San Martin, calling for the release of political prisoners, an end to repression, and to commemorate past political killings, or to support local labour claims.'^'* From mid-August to November a rash of strikes in San Salvador were backed by the BPR and FAPU. In October, as the coffee harvest approached, those peasant unions affiliated to the mass organizations launched nationwide campaigns for a fair minimum wage for agricultural workers.'^^ In November, the peasant unions’ campaign for a rise in the rural minimum wage culminated in a twoday sit-in in the Ministry of Labour, backed by an enormous crowd of peasants gathered outside; the occupation ended without bloodshed when the government agreed to talk with union leaders.'^^ In the countryside, however, no such restraint was shown or concessions made. Military occupations, involving combined army. National Guard and ORDEN forces, repeated the May experience of 186

State Terror: 1972-77

the Aguilares district in several areas of Chalatenango, Morazan, San Vicente and Cabanas departments. Reports of detentions, “disappear¬ ances , and killings followed these operations. On several occasions small landowners’ harvests were destroyed or crops stolen by members of the security forces or ORDEN. Sometimes security forces went into the peasant communities, grabbed suspects pointed out by ORDEN, took them away and killed them. By 1978, however, guerrilla forces were coming to the assistance of rural communities attacked by government forces, as. for instance, in San Pedro Perulapan in Holy Week 1978, when the FPL killed five ORDEN members after the beheading of one FECCAS leader and the “disappearance” of others.'^* Guerrilla actions steadily increased after the February 1977 electoral fraud and ensuing massacre. During the first months of General Romero’s rule the guerrillas carried out a series of high profile operations against leading figures from the financial and industrial classes and. on 12 July, settled a very old score by killing one of the perpetrators of the 1932 massacre, 82 year old ex-National Police chief (1932) Osmin Aguirre y Salinas. Other guerrilla actions resulted in the killing of two local army commanders in Chalatenango on 29 July, and on 16 September, the murder of Dr Carlos Alfaro Castillo, a wealthy landowner chosen to replace the exiled Dr Menjivar as Rector of the National University.General Romero’s counter-violence claimed its victims primarily from the quite visible membership of the popular organizations, leaving the guerrillas themselves untouched. Guerrilla activity continued to increase: In the first two weeks of November the FPL killed six policemen, attacked the US Embassy, destroyed the San Miguel plant of the Bayer pharma¬ ceutical company and blew up an electricity plant; the ERP planted at least 40 bombs on San Salvador and destroyed PCN offices in three towns; RN made its presence known with four spectacular kidnappings early in December, capturing Japanese, Dutch and British businessmen, netting an immediate SI million from Philips alone. . Yet not the guerrillas, but the mass organizations capable of putting 50,000 to 100,000 people on the streets posed the greatest threat to Romero’s regime. By 1979 the BPR, FAPU and LP-28 were backing industrial strikes with mass street demonstrations and fighting for the release of arrested leaders by occupying embassies, government ministries, and public buildings.

US Human Rights Policy: Spotlight on El Salvador General Romero’s relative restraint in the first months of his presidency was not unrelated to the United States’ infant human rights policy 187

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

launched with President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in January 1977, just as El Salvador was entering one of its bloodiest phases. The international attention focused on the electoral fraud and the persecu¬ tion of the church ensured that El Salvador would feature prominently in the spotlight of the new American human rights advocates, even though, according to Ambassador Lozano, “The United States really has no vital interest in the country.”'^' The state of human rights in El Salvador had already caused friction between the American Embassy and the Salvadorean government in 1976, under Molina, when several American citizens were arrested, ill treated and one “disappeared” or, was probably murdered. The case of Black American Ronald James Richardson, and his arrest and “disappearance” in September 1976 is particularly revealing of the convolutions of US human rights policy.'^ It is notable for having stimulated the first threat of economic sanctions of the period, due to the extraordinary pressure exerted on the US government by Ambassador Lozano, who forced the issue by taking the story to the newspapers. Richardson, whose reasons for being in El Salvador remain a matter for speculation, was arrested in September 1976. The American Embassy had reason to believe that he was not subsequently deported as the government claimed — but that he had been killed while in the Salvadorean security forces’ custody, some time after his arrest. Ambassador Lozano took the case very seriously and made every effort to force the Salvadorean government into a bona fide clarification of Richardson’s fate. He did not. however, get the wholehearted co¬ operation of the US government. In the July 1977 hearings of the Fraser Committee, Lozano, then no longer ambassador to El Salvador, was questioned about his efforts on human rights: Mr. Fraser. For those actions that you took or proposed to take, in relation to human rights and related issues in El Salvador, what kind of support did you get out of Washington? Mr. Lozano. Well, Mr. Chairman, little to none. . . We operated pretty much on our own in this area. The most important case to us involved the disappearance of an American citizen while in the custody of Salvadorean authorities, and we felt that we had a great difficulty in getting Washington to focus on this particular case which we considered to be of extreme seriousness. I feel that it did not get the attention it deserved here until after we went public on it down there. .

Once the Richardson story broke in the press. Ambassador Lozano was able to push the matter further . . . but it still took a good deal of effort. A3 May 1977 cable from Lozano to the State Department was still protesting at Washington’s failure to act on the Richardson case: 188

State-Terror: 1972-77 I deeply believe that if the USG [United States government] cannot convey the points it has tried to communicate in such a clear and absolute case of the violation of a US citizen’s ultimate human right, his life, then it had better withdraw from its announced pursuit of the improvement of human rights throughout the world.'^

The immediate response to Lozano’s strong words was authorization to raise the ante in his dealings with President Molina on the Richardson case by informing him that the fate of a planned $90 million Inter American Development loan for a hydroelectric project depended upon a positive response on the Richardson case. In his cable Lozano had also demanded a strong letter from either Carter or Vance be delivered to Molina by a suitably high-level emissary. In a 21 May memorandum to Secretary of State Vance (and special adviser Philip Habib) the Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs, Terence A Todman, reported Lozano's ’’strong recommendation” that a letter go from the Secretary of State to Molina, with a draft attached for signature. Todman’s opinion was that the letter would be particularly effective as a follow-up to threats of economic sanctions tendered shortly before, both by Lozano and himself in a visit to El Salvador the previous week, and added: Several factors, including the shakiness of his internal support, make us believe he [Molina] will try to avoid a confrontation with us. A demarche two weeks ago to induce El Salvador to avoid confrontation with the IDE by postponing its request for a $90 million loan was successful.'^^

On 24 May, Vance sent the requested letter, expressing his hope that the findings of the inquiry on the Richardson case would soon be available, and that the two governments would shortly resume their “traditional cooperative relations within a spirit of common dedication to shared principles of individual human rights.”'^ After Lozano’s public criticism of Washington’s feeble support for his human rights efforts in the Fraser hearings Todman defended the State Department’s role: The Richardson case is one which has overshadowed our bilateral relations with El Salvador during the past eight months. In the Richardson case, there was disagreement between Ambassador Lozano and ARA [American Republics Area] over the most effective tactics vis-avis the Government of El Salvador.

He pointed out the positive action taken — such as the threatened withdrawal of support for the $90 million IDE loan, and his own trip to El Salvador. Additionally, that the US had “reduced our Military Group in El Salvador to impress the Government with our dissatisfaction” 189

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

(something the US government had planned to do anyway) and “presented several protest notes to the Salvadoreans regarding consular access to and treatment of detained Americans.”'^* Todman also noted other human rights concerns in El Salvador; ... charges of substantial fraud in its presidential election, allegations of brutality by its military against dissidents, a four month state of siege suspending certain constitutional rights, a marked increase in both rightist and leftist terrorism, and a growing estrangement between Church and State.*^^ Although the fact that all the measures enumerated by Todman were taken after Ambassador Lozano had given the story to the press should be noted, this does not detract from their importance. The Molina government’s response to US pressures was minimal; the Attorney General was assigned responsibility to investigate and report on the Richardson case; the report was not available until Molina left office. When it was it added nothing, only reiterating El Salvador’s governmenfs previous stance. Molina had already responded to US concern about human rights in April 1977 by “renouncing’’ US military assistance, a relatively unimportant gesture, since the level of assistance was low and the continued presence of US military group advisers would not be affected.'™ Two emissaries from the Carter government, with specific human rights concerns, visited General Romero in the early days of his presidency. By then the Richardson case had been eclipsed by the death threat against the Jesuits. A July visit by Arellano, of the Bureau of InterAmerican Affairs, was followed on 2 August by a two hour meeting between President Romero and Carter’s Assistant Secretary of State for Humanitarian Affairs Patricia Derian, in which Romero reportedly stated that in El Salvador “human rights are respected’’.'^' The Department of State saw in the change of government an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and drop talk of sanctions. By late July, Terence Todman informed Secretary of State Vance that he believed outstanding human rights questions were nearing resolution; Romero has instructed his military to improve their conduct and is trying to improve relations with the Church. He is protecting the Jesuits, has denounced both rightist and leftist violence, and has reportedly ordered a forthcoming report on the Richardson case.'^^ The promised report was duly handed over the US Embassy on 27 July, but failed to clarify the fate of Richardson. It concluded that Richardson had been deported, that no crime had been committed against him and that they considered the matter closed.'™ The only 190

State Terror: 1972-77

concession was to apologize for what was maintained had not happened and say it would not happen again: I ask you to accept our apologies for this incident and to be assured that the new government is taking all possible measures and precautions to avoid situations which might affect the good relations which traditionally have existed between our peoples and governments. .

The US government also appeared to have decided to call it a day on the Richardson case. On 29 July. Deputy Assistant Secretary Arellano told congressional hearings on “Religious Persecution in El Salvador” (the Fraser Hearings) that the Salvadorean Attorney General's report on the case had been received, and suggested it was entirely satisfactory. Although information from former members of the Salvadorean security services became available in 1978, confirming Ambassador Lozano’s well-founded suspicions of foul play, nothing more was heard of the Richardson case in public hearings or the press. Declassified cables detailing Richardson's torture and murder (by ANSESAL, the Presidential intelligence agency) were released to the author in 1982. By mid-1977, the State Department’s career establishment (excluding such Carter political appointees as Patricia Derian, who fought untiringly for a hard-hitting human rights policy) was struggling to smooth relations with Latin American countries which had clashed with the Carter administration over human rights issues. In the Salvadorean case a main argument for a fresh start was that a new regime was in place, and above all that foreign relations policies had to be realistic; We would like to be constmctive in our approach. The advent of a new regime in that country may present us with new opportunities for coopera¬ tion. .. However, we must bear in mind that the complexities of engendering meaningful change in society are immense. As Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher has said: ‘If we are to do justice to our goals, we must act always with concern to achieve practical results’.'^^

Just one month after the congressional hearings on religious persecution in El Salvador General Romero was invited to Washington with most of the other heads of state of the region to witness the signing of the Panama Canal treaty. After a meeting with him President Carter declared, on 7 September, that the United States had observed “great progress in the last two months” in El Salvador’s human rights situation.”^ No doubt he had. There was, in fact, a lull or truce in El Salvador, at least in the cities, where demonstrations were taking place without being fired on and the Jesuits overstayed their “death-squad” deadline without being collectively eliminated. While in Washington Romero earned further US praise for inviting the Inter American 191

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

Commission on Human Rights of the OAS to visit El Salvador;'^^ a decision he was to rue later. The US appears to have made no effort to encourage General Romero to disown his predecessor’s rejection of US military assistance; but there were other channels for such assistance — the economic sanctions discussed above never materialized. In September the Salvadoreans were advised to resubmit the Inter-American Development Bank loan request they had withdrawn earlier in the year, and on 3 November the lADB announced it had approved the $90 million loan as requested.'^* At the same time the US AID budget for El Salvador was raised from $5.5 million in grants and loans for FY (Einancial Year) 1977 to $11.26 million for FY 1978. The large AID staff present in El Salvador — 29 American personnel — remained.'^^

General Romero: State Terror and Social Mobilization General Romero, from his background, could have been expected to be amenable to co-operation with the United States, particularly its military representatives. Throughout his military career he had worked closely with the US military group in El Salvador, and had been abroad for training or participation in conferences of Latin American army officers organized by the United States. His first overseas training was a three month “Counter-insurgency Course” at the US Army School of the Americas in the Canal Zone (January to March 1962).'*'’ In 1966, he served as Salvadorean delegate to both the VII Conference of American Armies and the II Conference of CONDECA; in 1973 he was elected president of CONDECA.'*' Before becoming Minister of Defense and Public Security in 1972 his most important posts had included those of Chief Military Aide to President Sanchez Hernandez, Chief of Personnel of the Armed Forces General Staff, and Deputy Commander of the key First Infantry Regiment in San Salvador.'*^ As an intelligence officer in the 1960s, he had worked with both the US MilGroup (Military Group) and Public Safety advisers on the restructuring of El Salvador’s intelligence apparatus; in 1967, he attended the VI Conference of Intelligence Officers of the Americas. General Romero’s speciality in the 1960s had been counter-insurgency in general and intelligence in particular, but as Minister of Defense and Public Security after July 1972 he was responsible for all police, paramilitary and military activities under Molina (including the increased deployment of ORDEN) and was the key link between the Molina government and the Public Safety advisory team (until 1974), and the US MilGroup.'*^ In his last months as Minister of Defense, and before his nomination as the PCN presidential candidate in September 1977, Romero was invited for an extensive visit to the United States, including calls on the 192

State Terror: 1972-77

Department of State, the Pentagon, and the Inter-American Defense Board and College at Fort McNair.'*'* His close ties to the US military establishment remained after he became president; when he com¬ municated with the American Embassy on the Richardson case he did so via the Defense Attache.'*^ By November 1977, the noticeable hiatus in the more visible aspects of repression in El Salvador during the first months of the Romero regime, was over. Once the immediate threat of economic sanctions was lifted Romero moved with increasing brutality to crush the rising tide of organized opposition. The first Catholic priest to run foul of the security services since the UGB death-squad threat against the Jesuits, Father Miguel Ventura, was detained and severely tortured by the National Guard on the day El Salvador’s loan was ratified by the Inter-American Development Bank: 3 November 1977.'*^ This occurred in what by then was a typical combined security forces operation against the town of Osicala, in the department of San Miguel, a stronghold of the FECCAS peasant union. National Guard troops burst into the church during mass and arrested Father Ventura, who was subsequently strung up by his wrists and beaten. He was released shortly afterwards but three of his “catechists” were beaten and dragged off, and never seen again.'*^ In December 1977 Archbishop Romero and the Bishop of Santiago de Maria issued a joint statement describing the situation: We are passing through the blackest period of our history. It is a truly painful reality: the disappearance of persons, murders, military encircle¬ ment of communities, arrests, expulsions. The victims pertain to all of the social classes but the greatest number of victims are from among the poorest and most oppressed.'**

This was not an exaggerated picture. From November 1977, when the harvest period coincided with co-ordinated demonstrations demanding higher wages for agricultural workers, the security services stepped up their operations in rural areas. Villages were occupied by troops while house to house searches were carried out and residents screened against lists or forced to file past hooded informants. Those identified as local leaders were dragged off and executed without trial. As often as not their bodies were later found, multilated or showing marks qf torture. A wave of strikes in San Salvador and demonstrations there and in provincial cities were countered by the selective assassination of union leaders and raids on the shanty town membership of the urban popular organizations. On 25 November 1977, the Romero government enacted a Draconian Law for the Defense and Guarantee of Public Order, aimed at legalizing the violent repression of opposition groups. Amnesty International said that it seemed: 193

Counter-Insurgency Emerges ... specifically designed to restrict the actions of trade unions, the political

opposition, and human rights monitors, including members of the clergy who report human rights problems or advise members of the peasant trade unions.'*^

The law was severely criticized by Amnesty International, the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, the International Commis¬ sion of Jurists, and in 1979 even the US State Department described it as “severely abridging civil liberties”. Indeed, the law took account of human rights only by making it a crime to denounce, or report human rights violations either inside or outside the country.'^® With this Public Order law established the “counter-terror” process already begun, gained momentum. By the end of 1978 torture, killings and “disappearances” were common. Most victims were still found among the peasantry, but a steadily increasing number of students, teachers, trade unionists and local organizers for the Christian Democratic and other opposition parties fell victim to night raids and execution. Clergymen also continued to pay a high price for their support of organized peasants, workers and slum dwellers. On 28 November 1978, some 150 National Police arrested Father Ernesto Barrera, known as “the workers’ priest”, in his home, along with two trade unionists. All three were tortured and shot.'^' In a similar incident National Guard, Police and Army troops raided a religious retreat centre in San Salvador as 40 teenage participants were sleeping. They dragged off Father Octavio Ortiz Luna, head of the centre, and killed him with submachinegun fire. Four boys, between 12 and 15 years old, who came to his aid were also murdered. The next day the authorities informed the press that the deaths had occurred after the priest had fired on passing troops and that the “retreat centre” was a guerrilla training camp; Father Barrera and the two trade unionists, too, were accused of being guerrillas, and reported officially to have died in a “shoot-out”.''^Detailed accounts of individual cases indicate that by early 1979 killing had become routine whenever a detainee (with very few exceptions arrested without legal formalities) fell within certain broad categories, such as trade unionist member of a peasant organization, party organizer, or catechist By October 1979 Romero's human rights record was as bloody as any contemporary ruler had achieved in a comparable time-span. It was not however, his human rights record that brought about his overthrow, but his loss of control over the opposition, in spite, or because of the violent repression wielded against it His option for unlimited slaughter had not only provoked an outcry from international human rights organizations, including a remarkably frank and revealing report from the OAS InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, but also massive opposition within the country where, undeterred by the killings and torture, hundreds of thousands were mobilized in demonstrations. 194

State Terror: 1972-77

A typical scenario from Romero’s last year in office found a large crowd of demonstrators supporting a March 1979 brewery workers’ strike, attacked by helicopters sent in to strafe them, killing seven; in May 1979 a demonstration in front of San Salvador’s Cathedral broken up by police gunfire, killing 23; crowds outside the Venezuelan Embassy, supporting a sit-in demanding the release of political prisoners, fired on by police, killing 14. The new grass-roots organizations were not simply bent on ousting a particular general, but determined to end a status quo traditionally defended by the military. They wanted real change and nothing less; neither, as they soon proved, would they be fooled by substitutes.

195

12. The New Security System: US Model

The 1972 presidential elections marked the beginning of the end of the political system's opening up to the participation of new social sectors. It also marked a change in the traditional pattern of political control and repression and the beginning of new forms of opposition to military hegemony; the first faltering strikes of newly organized guerrilla groups and the germination of mass popular organizations outside the pre¬ vious tradition of political parties and trade unions. The latter were to seek political objectives through the direct action of strikes and demonstrations and would grow to enormous proportions. Several years were to elapse before El Salvador experienced the massive governmental violence characteristic of “counter-terror” in Guatemala, but the counter-insurgency apparatus responsible for state terrorism in the 1980s was already largely complete by 1972. In the 1960s, as in Guatemala, an unprecedented paramilitary organization had been superimposed on the traditional security system, vastly expanding the security services' numerical strength and extend¬ ing the security system's intelligence collection and operations capability at the local level. It was a classic exercise in "counter-organization” for counter-insurgency: the creation of security structures imitating the per¬ ceived structures of guerrilla organizations, and paralleled by other radical innovations. The intelligence system was reorganized to take advantage of new intelligence assets provided by “counter-organization”, to co-ordinate and control the new paramilitary recruits and ensure their loyalty. This regearing of the Salvadorean security system was carried out at the prompting of the United States, with the assistance of US security advisers and in accordance with a model provided by the United States. Minor US military and police assistance programmes were already operating in El Salvador by the late 1950s, but not until 1960 were the first explicit plans for new counter-insurgency programmes recorded, and only in 1961 did they begin to be implemented. In response to the massive street demonstrations in summer 1960, and other indications of the Lemus regime's loss of control of public order, the US Embassy, in a cable on 26 July 1960, requested the State 196

The New Security System: US Model

Department to urgently consider raising the level of assistance to Salvadorean security services.''^’ As a result a two man team, headed by chief of the Latin American branch of the Public Safety Division of the International Co-operation Administration (ICA) Herbert O. Hardin, visited San Salvador to carry out "an over-all internal security survey”. Hardin's final report on 24 August 1960. proposing increased assistance, summarized “The Problem”: the growing threat to internal security as a result of infiltration of the country's borders by subversive persons; the smuggling of subversive materials, firearms, and commercial contraband into the country; the growing seriousness and frequency of civil disturbances (one of which is in progress as this memorandum is being written); and the incidence of ordinary crime in the country.'*^'’

While the security situation was not yet regarded as “critical” the report concluded that "now is the time to lend attention, before the point of acute danger is reached”. Unlike disparaging comments in ICA specialists' reports on Guatemala around the same time, in assessing El Salvador's existing security system, Hardin's report concluded that “the internal security forces in El Salvador, by Eatin American standards have excellent basic potential for development into very efficient organizations'':'^^ The report described the National Guard as “the most important internal security organization in the country” and probably unequalled in the Americas: While it is organized and disciplined along military lines, it renders to the civilian population in the rural areas, by means of comprehensive foot patrol coverage, the most complete and beneficial civil police services ever observed by us in Latin America ... much of the stability in the country is probably owable to the services of the National Guard.’’’*

Despite massive population growth in the previous decades, and the advance in organizing opposition groups and parties, the countryside seemingly remained wholly under control of the Guard, as in the 1930s, like a large orderly plantation. This did not last, but appears to have been an accurate assessment at the time. Recommendations accompanying the report were designed to meet the possibility of rural organization and opposition becoming a threat in the future. The Hardin report's outline and assessment of the rest of the security system - excluding the army - indicates little or no structural change since the fall of the Martinez regime in 1944, except the post-1944 exclusion of any form of civilian militia or autonomous paramilitary organization. Urban police services remained the province of the National Police, its force of 800 men distributed between Central Headquarters in San Salvador and 20 provincial headquarters in the larger towns and the cities. The assessment ratifies the findings of a 1956 ICA survey on the semi-military nature of the police: 197

Counter-Insurgency Emerges it possesses numerous military characteristics beyond those normally found in police departments. This is evidenced in the training program which consists of military and police subjects in equal parts. The person¬ nel consists primarily of ex-military men.'^'^

The senior officer corps then, as now, consisted of active duty army officers; lower ranks, generally selected from among former servicemen of “proven aptitude”, were described as excellent police personnel: “The average policemen are young, personable and intelligent”*^ again in contrast to Guatemala at the same period. The 500 men of the Policia de Hacienda or Treasury Police were respon¬ sible for carrying out “some border control work, and to suppress traf¬ ficking in contraband, including that produced internally”;^”' they were particularly concerned with suppressing illegal alcohol production. Two more national police forces rounded out the security system and dealt with matters related to customs procedures and to immigration. In 1960, the 379 Customs Police (Policia deAduana), were primarily respon¬ sible for inspecting “all freight and baggage entering and leaving the country to ensure that proper tariff levies had been made”."”^ The Immigration Police (Policia de Inmigracidn). the smallest of the specialized forces, was, in 1960, the only wholly plain-clothes security force organized along civilian lines, although its officers, too, were drawn from the military."® Its main responsibilities were “processing persons for entry and exit through established ports, and control of aliens in the country”."® The Hardin report recommended an urgent programme of security assistance and proposed that contingency funds be tapped “in view of the need for immediate action”."® The proposed programme was to include reinforcing and reorientating El Salvador’s existing Public Safety Program, adding a generalist Chief Adviser, a Training Adviser and an Investigations Adviser “qualified in general criminal investiga¬ tions, security investigations, contraband investigations, and records operations”;"® also, an increase in the training of local personnel in the United States and third countries; and extensive commodity grants."® Finally, the Hardin report extolled the Salvadorean governmenfs receptivity to United States assistance, and emphasized the danger of El Salvador becoming a target of subversion: We believe that nowhere in Latin America could the US make a more worthwhile investment in the form of internal security assistance. The potential of the recipient organizations, coupled with their objectives, is such that maximum use will be made of all assistance offered... the internal security situation in El Salvador may soon develop into one of extreme urgency.

On 7 September 1960, the US Embassy cabled the Department of State requesting immediate implementation of the proposed assistance 198

The New Security System: US Model

programme in response to the escalating street demonstrations and dis¬ order then pressing the Lemus regime and provoking increasingly harsh and ineffective repressive measures: While it can be argued, of course, that the supplying of equipment which might be used against Salvadorean citizens as during last week’s disorders will subject us to criticism, this is clearly far more bearable than permit¬ ting a constitutionally based and democratically oriented government demonstrably friendly to us to be subverted and overthrown if means are at our disposal to help prevent it."'”

It was, however, too late to save the Lemus regime, but implementation of an expanded security assistance programme was delayed only until January 1961. The lesson of Lemus' overthrow and the ensuing short-lived refor¬ mist regime stimulated the rapid implementation of the Hardin pro¬ posals and prompted an increase in the assistance to the regular military establishment. In the wake of the January 1961 coup a US Embassy “threat assess¬ ment” outlined three interlocking concerns: 1) that “hard-core Com¬ munists" and “sympathizers” were still in El Salvador; 2) the potential for exiled junta leaders to carry out subversive plans from outside El Salvador; and 3) the need to contain “Sino-Soviet controlled Cuba”. In each of these three areas the perception of the security threat facing El Salvador in 1961 is reflected in United States security assistance policy in the 1980s. The geopolitical circumstances of the October 1960 coup and 1961 counter-coup in El Salvador were determining factors in the surge of security assistance that followed. Cuban revolutionary subversion was blamed for Lemus' overthrow and for the civil-military junta experi¬ ment, and labelled as the major threat of the future: .. . in the face ofthe continuing threat to the stability ofthe area posed by a Sino-Soviet controlled Cuba, El Salvador’s current capability to ensure its internal security requires strengthening on an urgent basis ... Under¬ ground propaganda and other types of subversive anti-government activities continue to be carried out and reports of clandestine movements of personnel and arms across El Salvador’s frontiers and coastline con¬ tinue to be received.”^"*

In fact, it was some 15 years later before El Salvador faced a serious threat of subversion; in 1961, the idea of Cubans landing arms on El Salvador's Pacific beaches was ludicrous. The real problem, of course, was the threat that a “Sino-Soviet controlled Cuba” would serve as a model or catalyst to encourage the spread of insurgency in the region as did the US itself at the time of the American revolution. 199

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

One solution offered was to seal off El Salvador from the contagious Cuban example, including the efforts of Castroite Salvadoreans by then in exile. Classified US Embassy reports after the January 1961 coup stressed the urgency of neutralizing the threat still presented by participants in the earlier reformist junta government to stir things up from abroad. The same cables characterized the earlier junta govern¬ ment as a triumph of “infiltration” by subversive forces into the highest levels of government. Under their direction, “a Castro/Commuaist takeover... loomed large”.*" Even exile did not eliminate the threat: ... reports indicate that exiled Castro/Communist elements are main¬ taining contact with one another outside of the country, and with ele¬ ments inside El Salvador... Thus, while temporarily neutralized, within El Salvador. Castro/Communist elements continue to present a real threat to the political stability of the country ... If. as appears likely, a part or all of the some 125 individuals now expelled from the country are per¬ mitted to return, they will reunite with the 500 hard-core Communists and the 5-6.000 active Communist sympathizers .. .*'*

Apart from the dangers posed by Cubans and exiles, the perceived threat centred on “hard-core Communists” and “active sympathizers” still in the country, as well as members of some labour federations who were automatically considered to be Communists: Threat stems from existence of some 500 hard-core Communists with 5 to 6,000 active Castro/Communist sympathizers including 2,800 laborers from Communist-dominated Confederation Salvadorean Workers and leaders provided by elements former junta government.*'^ These forces have potential for: terrorism and sabotage, demonstrations, strikes and mob violence which if protracted might turn into successful general strike and, internal revolution.^''*

The assumed inevitability of strikes and demonstrations - normally acceptable means of protest - culminating in insurgency and revolution, with mob violence, sabotage and terrorism, is of particular interest here. The US Embassy’s “threat assessments” in early 1961 implied that El Salvador was perilously close to succumbing to Castro-Communism and that powerful medicine was necessary to arrest the process. The overthrow of the civil-military reformist government in the January counter-coup was only the beginning. Lemus' overthrow in October 1960 tended to confirm the August 1960 Hardin report’s assessment of the security system. The United States moved rapidly to ensure subsequent military governments would not face the mass oposition, demonstrations, strikes and divided military that precipitated Lemus’ overthrow. The United States Embassy team's first step in San Salvador was ratification of the assistance proposals made in August 1960, plus some further recommendations and urging 200

The New Security System: US Model

the package be assigned “Priority The requested up-grading of the Public Safety Program was being implemented within months, with the arrival of an Investigations Adviser and a series of short-term specialists on temporary assignment (TDY = Temporary Duty). By 1964 there were five full-time Public Safety advisers (Chief, Immigration. Investigations. Training, and Records Advisers). The pace of training Salvadoreans outside El Salvador also accelerated, peaking in the three years from 1963 to 1966 with an average of 40 Salvadoreans each year attending the InterAmerican Police Academy in the Canal Zone, its successor, the Inter¬ national Police Academy in Washington, and other training centres outside El Salvador."'*’ The Hardin report's proposals for commodities grants were imple¬ mented between 1961 and 1963, when more than half the total disburse¬ ment of commodities in the life of the Public Safety Program were released with over a half million dollars-worth of arms and equipment turned over to the National Police and National Guard."'^ As the Har¬ din report recommended, commodities grants in this period were largely concentrated on transport (30 sedans, 41 jeeps) and communica¬ tions equipment (115 mobile radios, 6 base stations). Grants, not pro¬ grammed before the January 1961 coup, for the 1961-63 period included the provision of 2,008 carbines with 425,000 rounds of ammunition."'® US militaiy' assistance focused on implementing organizational changes rather than on delivering commodities. As in its proposals for the Public Safety Program, the US Embassy’s May 1961 “Recommenda¬ tions for an Assistance Program to the Public Security Forces of El Salvador" advised the concentration of military assistance funds in the development of the military forces’ communications and intelligence capability.-'^ El Salvador’s military and law-enforcement apparatus’ relatively high competence, combined with virtual non-existence of organized opposition (let alone insurgency) after the restoration of traditional military rule in 1961, reduced the need for security assistance to a level that could be met by small specialist advisory teams; needs could be satisfied by the Public Safety Program and the military mis¬ sion. without large and costly grants of hardware. In the area of communications, military assistance was to create a “Signal Support Company’’ comprising a headquarters section and 17man teams based in each of the 16 regional garrisons to provide com¬ munications services for field operations."^” More noteworthy was US military assistance’s special focus, after 1961. on developing the Salvadorean military intelligence system. The embassy reported that “The present government is extremely interested in reorganizing its intelligence machinery and some months ago requested US assistance in accomplishing this .. and recommended the immediate detailing of a “mobile intelligence training team, which could be attached to the US Army Mission in a TDY status’’.""^ Assignment 201

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

of a permanent intelligence adviser to the military mission was to be considered “after the mobile team has completed its mission . While documents revealing the precise nature of subsequent US Army intelligence assistance (prior to the escalation of US intervention in El Salvador after 1979) remain classified, advances in the intelligence field attributable to Public Safety advisers are well documented. Declassified documentation indicates that Public Safety’s intelligence (or “investigations”) advisers worked closely with both the military and civilian components of the intelligence apparatus - a distinction largely academic in El Salvador. As noted earlier, these advisers worked indepen¬ dently of the rest of the Public Safety Program personnel stationed in El Salvador, were responsible to “another agency” - neither the ICA nor AID - and worked from the “CAS ” (CIA) office in San Salvador. Whatever their parent agency, they appear to have master-minded the building of today’s intelligence apparatus practically from scratch. Already in 1960, Public Safety’s classified proposals for security assis¬ tance to El Salvador called for a major adjustment in the security system in order to create a modern intelligence and command structure. The for¬ mation of a top-level counter-insurgency group directly responsible to the President was considered the first priority; its task was the centralization and co-ordination of internal security policy planning and operations. It is our belief that GOES [Government of El Salvador] can effect the best co-ordination of its various internal security forces through the over-all guidance of an internal security board composed of members of minis¬ terial or sub-ministerial level from the following ministries; Defense. Hacienda, Interior. Justice. A representative of the President should also sit on the board. The board should, subject to Presidential approval, for¬ mulate national internal security policy, and review and recommend to the President on internal security co-ordinating operational plans ..

Such a planning and co-ordinating body, created in 1961, was required to ensure the pursuit of counter-insurgency as an integrated effort by all ministries and security agencies and to guarantee that the enhanced security capabilities remained under the Presidenf s firm control. Consolidation of the command structure for counter-insurgency was a logical corollary to parallel proposals for reorganizing and up-grading the nation’s intelligence apparatus. These called for the development of the National Guard’s “information section” into the core of a more effec¬ tive intelligence apparatus, with specialized functions devolved to other agencies but it tied into the Guard’s information nexus. The 1960 Hardin report, describing the National Guard as “the most importanf’ security force, recommended that it be given assistance to develop its existing intelligence system into a high-level agency reporting to the nation’s top security officers. As the core of the Guard’s information network Public Safety was to assist in the creation of a highly specialized intelligence unit capable of collecting, assembly.

202

The New Security System: US Model evaluating, interpreting and disemination to proper authorities the wealth of information made available through basic guard operations.'^^

The Immigration Police was also to be accorded a new, intensive intelligence role known as “the political police” by oppositionists in the 1970s. US assistance in the 1960s was programmed with the object of; improving its investigative and records operations to enable rapid iden¬ tification and exclusion of undesirable aliens, and more effective control over all foreign nationals in the country.”*

From 21 men in 1961, by 1974 there were 350 plain-clothes Immigration Police.”’ By 1963 the Public Safety Program provided training in “investiga¬ tions" to "all major security forces”; US advisers were imparting skills for “identifying criminal or subversive activities” and providing “daily advice and guidance in operational procedures and techniques”.”* In addition to an Investigations Adviser, a specialist in security records systems w as to be appointed to finalize development of a “centralized records system ... [to be] located at the National Police but [to] serve all GOES police/security forces”.’^'’ In 1963, recruitment was also in progress for an “immigration” adviser (who began work in early 1964), to respond to “the present hemispheric emphasis on tighter and more uniform controls on travel, contraband and illegal arms traffic”."” Under Public Safety guidance, El Salvador’s immigration control function was linked to the domestic intelligence apparatus, and served the key role of maintaining records of Salvadoreans and others outside the country who were considered threats to internal security: monitor¬ ing and controlling the entry and exit of suspects,and keeping watch on foreigners within the country from the moment they entered it. The immigration adviser was also to have regional responsibility for the development and operation of a common system enabling each Central American country to check “the illegal entry of aliens and sub¬ versives”."^' Advisory assistance in immigration control was com¬ plemented by regional communications links between top security/ intelligence agencies in each Central American country and with the US Canal Zone facilities. This network, established by 1964, strongly em¬ phasized the control of movement between the Central American countries. More prosaic assistance in the field of communications after 1961 provided the essential infrastructure for the efficient functioning of the intelligence apparatus as a whole and the more specialized immigration and records areas. By September 1963 an AID report was able to state that “PSD [Public Safety Division] has provided GOES internal security forces with a modern police communications network and stressed the necessity of further extensive communications assistance “since an adequate communications system plays an important role in 203

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

civil disorders and emergencies, as well as normal everyday law enforce¬ ment activities .. The changes were important. By 1967, instead of communicating by public telegraph, permanent detachments of the National Police, National Guard, and Immigration Police each maintained countrywide radio networks connected to a central security network based at the National Police building and linked into the regional Central America and Panama Telecommunications Security Network.^^’ United States security assistance in investigations, immigration and communications contributed towards building an intelligence apparatus fully responsive to the prescriptions of counter-insurgency doctrine. This, in turn, complemented the second major innovation in the Salvadorean security system of the 1960s: the organization of a vast net¬ work of paramilitary irregulars feeding information into the intelligence apparatus, providing manpower for counter-insurgency's dirty work, and serving as a back-up army of irregular auxiliaries to be activated for large-scale security operations whenever the need arose. This was the Democratic Nationalist Organization {Organizacion Nacionalista Democrdtica) whose Spanish acronym, ORDEN, means ORDER. Develop¬ ment of today's intelligence system and setting up ORDEN were part of a single process.

Counter-Organization for Counter-Insurgency: ORDEN In January 1961, one of Colonel Julio A. Rivera's military junta's first appointments restored Colonel Jose Alberto Medrano to a position of power. Medrano had been under a shadow since 1954 when he was transferred from the Department of Criminal Investigations of the National Police after a series of public scandals over the wholesale mur¬ der of hundreds of jailed common criminals. In January 1961 he was given command of the key Eirst Infantry Regiment of the Salvadorean army, quartered at the capital's main army base, the Cuartel San Carlos , and an additional mandate to set up and run a top-level presidential security agency, which was to formulate intelligence policy, co-ordinate all intelligence operations and pool information gathered by the dif¬ ferent intelligence agencies. This elite body, reporting directly to the President and the general staff, was developed between 1961 and 1964. Known simply as the “Security Service'' (Servicio de Seguridad) in the early 1960s, and with a small staff, which, in 1967 still numbered only 15 men,'^'* it co-ordinated and drew on the intelligence resources of each separate security service and of the army itself Apparently the Servicio de Seguridad did not run independent investigations or carry out operations directly but relied for such special tasks primarily upon an expanded and upgraded National Guard intelligence unit. Not engaged in the day to day work of intelligence gathering or operations, it was the equivalent of Guatemala's 204

The New Securin’ System: US Model

Agenda de Seguridad, set up by the Peralta Azurdia government in the same period. In the absence of any serious threat from opposition groups. theiServicio de Seguridad's main achievement under Medrano was the building of ORDEN. a nation-wide paramilitary network of informants. ORDEN extended the intelligence services’ reach to grass-roots level, first for intelligence gathering and later to perform the irregular opera¬ tions of dirty warfare. Members of ORDEN were recruited from the pool traditionally tapped by Salvador's security forces; the military reserves. At the age of 18. young Salvadorean men could be called up for a period of active military duty, followed by one year of army reserve service in their original communities.■’’’ Most 18-year-olds, however, were required to ser\'e for only a year in the reserves, their duties limited to weekend drill¬ ing. elementary military instruction, listening to patriotic lectures, and participating in periodic patrols (usually on Sundays or holidays) under the canton patrol system. On return to their communities, soldiers could be co-opted into ORDEN: the weekly drills, instruction, and patrol ser¬ vice. provided ample opportunity for political indoctrination and vet¬ ting of reservists who could then be selected for recruitment into ORDEN. In practice the development of this paramilitary network required the active co-operation of the army’s local commanders, who served as co-ordinators of the military reserve system. These officers, working closely with (army officer) commanders of National Guard detach¬ ments throughout the rural areas were the key organizational link bet¬ ween Medrano’s Servicio de Seguridad and the ORDEN recruits at the local level. By 1964 the Servicio de Seguridad was fully established as the co¬ ordinating centre of the Salvadorean intelligence system and provided the link-up with other Central American presidential intelligence agen¬ cies and the regional Telecommunications Security Network. It had developed into the core of an expanding intelligence system linking the political intelligence sections of the National Police and National Guard {Secciones de Investigaciones Especiales) and the then largely politically oriented Immigration Bureau.*" By that time, too, X\\q Servicio de Seguridad had incorporated thousands of army reservists throughout the country into a grass-roots intelligence service. Medrano’s Security Service, renamed Salvadorean InXdWgtncc Agency {Agenda deInteligenda de El Salvador) continued to draw largely on existing command structures of the Army and the National Guard in operating the net¬ work, but only his 15-man staff and the Presidency had full access to the intelligence resources.*^’ the investigations adviser works in the CAS office and does not keep the ChiefPublicSafetyAdviser aware of [his] activities ... CAS is lending

205

Counter-Insurgency Emerges aid to an intelligence unit of 15 persons headed by Colonel Medrano directly responsible to the Presidential Palace. Colonel Medrano claims to have a 30,000 man military reservist informant network that channels intelligence to his group."^*

Development of the presidential security agency, of ORDEN, of the special investigations divisions of the National Police and National Guard, and of the Immigration Police, was assisted by US agencies under cover of the Public Safety Program. Public Safety's Investigations Adviser in El Salvador, like his counter¬ part in Guatemala, was engaged primarily with “intelligence units". He worked “with the Security Service, the intelligence units of the National Police and National Guard and Immigration Service".^''" By 1967 the name ORDEN (the acronym for Organizacion Democrdtica Nacionalista) was in the public domain in El Salvador and the Security Service's formerly covert “informant network" had become a political organization with a public face and an ideology. Its stated political mission was to promote an ill-defined patriotism and a message of anti-Communism. Its previous security functions underlay an overt political role as support group for the military government's Party of National Conciliation.^'*' With the inauguration of. President Eidel Sanchez Hernandez in 1967, Colonel Jose Alberto Medrano exchanged his army command for the Directorship of the National Guard, arguably the most powerful command within the security system. He retained his intelligence post, however, and worked closely with the new President to strengthen both ORDEN and the institutional intelligence apparatus. Under the Sanchez administration ORDEN evolved from a covert intelligence¬ gathering network into an overt political organization charged with dis¬ semination of “the democratic ideology" and maintenance of public order. ORDEN was given full respectability in 1967 when President Sanchez Hernandez himself became its “Supreme Chief', with the post becoming a permanent prerogative of the head of state, although Med¬ rano continued to run the network as “Executive Director". By this time ORDEN had already proved its worth in the field of elec¬ toral politics; a role seemingly appreciated by President Sanchez, when, in the 1967 Presidential elections, it provided goon squads to disrupt opposition parties' political meetings. The first recorded occasion of ORDEN's activity in the electoral process was in the run-up to the elec¬ tions when, on 18 December 1966, ORDEN members attacked the printing shop of the Partido Accion Renovadora, the leading opposition party, destroying presses which had just produced leaflets calling for agrarian reform. In late 1967 President Sanchez and Colonel Medrano appealed directly to the nation's estate owners to support an expanded ORDEN as a means of guaranteeing their own interests. In a fund-raising speech 206

The New Security System: US Model

to a landowners' association. President Sanchez encouraged support for ORDEN as an essential element of the “war against Communism". The creation of the organization was described as “consistent with El Salvador's own historical experience", and with “the experience of numerous countries of the free world that have had to defend them¬ selves from falling into the hands of Communism''.-'*- According to Presi¬ dent Sanchez Hernandez. South Vietnam, the Philippines, Guatemala and other countries had already been assisted to successfully create “organizations like ORDEN” and: “Our free world allies that help us preserve democracy in the nation are willing to assist also in the con¬ crete case of ORDEN”.-'*' Colonel Medrano was no less eloquent and boasted of ORDEN as a means: “... to disseminate the democratic ideology to the peasants and workers of the countryside, to make a barrier to the attempts of the Communists to provoke subversion among the rural populace.”-'*'* Like President Sanchez Hernandez. Medrano described ORDEN as a model counter-guerrilla organization of civilian irregulars: ORDEN puts at the disposal of the Salvadorean State and the most res¬ ponsible sectors of this country a civilian army that can be armed in 24 hours, that will defend the democratic system, and that could easily reach 150.000 men.--*-'

As, after 1967. ORDEN grew and became more visible it expanded its role, working openly with the army and National Guard on “civic action” projects and maintaining a high profile in the governments high-impact community development projects, such as building new classrooms or repairing a bridge. But with less fanfare ORDEN was also increasingly involved in spying, at the community level, for the security services and helping out with their dirty jobs. In 1968, when Sanchez Hernandez government was shaken by a nationwide ANDES (national teachers' union) strike, ORDEN forces were deployed alongside regular security units, and in covert operations which presaged the later “deathsquad''actions carried out by ORDEN in the 1970s. Many striking teachers were attacked and beaten and at least two of their leaders, Saul Santiago Contreras and Filberto Martinez Carranza “disappeared” after being grabbed by ORDEN thugs, their almost unrecognizably mutilated bodies found much later.-'**’ By 1970 ORDEN's organizational development was largely com¬ plete. It could mobilize between 50 and 100,000 members for a wide range of tasks.-'*^ Supervision and deployment were effected mainly through the far-reaching network of National Guard s rural command posts in co-ordination with the army zone commanders. National Guard commanders, themselves part of the army's command structure, worked closely with the army's military reserve and recruitment apparatus to screen potential ORDEN members. Army reserves 207

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

continued to provide men for the traditional canton patrols, while com¬ pletion of this year of duty led directly to vetting for local ORDEN mem¬ bership. In time, ORDEN would replace the canton patrols and ORDEN units would undertake regular patrolling duties in their local areas. ORDEN’s main recruiting mechanism was provided by the army reserve system but most of its training was provided by the National Guard after 1967, when Colonel Medrano took over as head of the National Guard. But in regard to ORDEN, any strict distinction of the army's and National Guard’s role would be largely artificial. ORDEN was created by orders from the army high command and co-ordinated in each department and each military zone by the respective army com¬ mander. In so far as ORDEN was concerned, the National Guard, as in its other tasks, functioned as an adjunct of the army, commanded by army officers subordinate to the army high command. The National Guard's close linkage to ORDEN probably owes less to the fact that Medrano was its chief for three years while building up ORDEN, than to the advantages offered by its network of scattered commands in the rural areas which served as a mainstay of ORDEN’s own infra¬ structure. In January 1970 Medrano, ORDEN’s founder and director, was removed from his posts as Director of the National Guard and Execu¬ tive Director of ORDEN. This was partly in response to his personal success in the 1969 “football” war with Honduras, where he served creditably as commander of the National Guard’s “Expeditionary Eorce” in the brief but bloody conflict in which the Guard, not the army, proved the most effective in battle. On his return he was received as a national hero and promoted to General. His forced retirement in 1970 reflected the army high command’s unease at Medrano’s great personal popularity as well as his private political activities backed by the more reactionary coffee elites. His continued control of both the Guard and ORDEN would have concentrated too much power in the hands of a clearly ambitious officer. Medrano’s removal from power marked ORDEN’s institutional coming of age, its administration no longer requiring the presence of a single chief with a strong personality. ORDEN, by that time, provided a key mechanism of political control in the rural areas: “Its purpose is anti-revolutionary activity of various kinds, particularly training, imparted by the Guardia Nacional, for counter-guerrilla operations.”^"* Authorities, in 1970, still maintained it was an independent organiza¬ tion. Defence Minister Colonel Fidel Torres, in January 1970, ack¬ nowledged military direction of ORDEN explaining, however, that “there is an obligation to educate and orient the rural population which is constantly threatened by the preachings of Communist subversion”‘"‘^ and, that ORDEN was “not at all official”. In fact, ORDEN had no formal legal status then or afterward, although by late 1970 Defence Minister 208

The New Security System: US Model

Torres altered his position slightly and described ORDEN as “semi¬ official"; "... a group for the democratic indoctrination of citizens, especially in the rural areas, whose head is (ex-officio) the President of the Republic."'-'"

The Military’s New Role The introduction of US counter-insurgency doctrine was followed, in the mid-1960s, by a major shift in the Salvadorean military's perception of its own role in society and its view of the civilians' place in the security system. In the 1940s and 1950s army officers had been taught to resent and resist civilian encroachment on the prerogatives of the institutional armed forces. Internationally accepted concepts of military pro¬ fessionalism - taught, among others, by US army instructors at the Salvadorean military academy - always emphasized the exclusive nature of military institutions, their dedication to specialized and limited tasks. Traditional military doctrine stressed that sharing military functions, or expanding the military's role in society, were threats to its unity and institutional integrity. The introduction of numerous loosely organized, loosely disciplined civilian auxiliaries, as demanded by the post-1960s counter-insurgency doctrine, conflicted with previous classic, military doctrine, and - if not always reflected in practice - ideals. The concept of “counter-terror" also posed doctrinal problems to an institution that, traditionally, had delegated its dirty work to the political police, a body separate from the regular security forces. After 1960, however, military doctrine encouraged both an expansion of the military role to include tasks previously regarded as non-military, and sharing the traditional military role with semi-autonomous, heavily politicized paramilitary organizations. The concept of civilian irregular forces as the conventional military forces' shadow counterparts implies a key doctrinal shift from the traditional military ideal, no less in El Salvador than in countries with more developed military institutions. El Salvador's unfavourable historical experience with 19th Century civilian militias, and the short-lived L/goRoyo (Red League) of the 1920s, augmented the Salvadorean military's awareness of the danger of armed civilian organizations getting out of control and making a bid for power. After 1961. however. Salvadorean army officers, like their Guatemalan counterparts, were encouraged to overcome their distrust of organiza¬ tions of civilian irregulars. Since 1941, US military doctrine had served as the foundation of Salvadorean military doctrine; it now changed abruptly, calling for departure from the traditional military ideal wherever insurgency threatened. Military and civilian advisers pro¬ vided by the Public Safety Program and the US military mission, the 209

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

steady post-1960 stream of “TDY” advisers, and the Army Mobile Training Teams (MTTs) persistently encouraged the abandonment of traditional concepts of military professionalism and gave on-the-spot advice on changing military structures and functions to suit the impera¬ tives of the new counter-insurgency doctrine. As in Guatemala, the new orientation was reflected in the local military journals of the 1960s where articles by Salvadorean officers faithfully reflected the changed US doctrine and, occasionally, adapted it to local conditions in El Salvador. Articles from US army magazines, and other US military doctrinal material were also reproduced. Salvadorean officers' articles reveal that they interpreted the new counter-insurgency doctrine as rationalizing insurgency as an external threat to national sovereignty, to be equated with an occupying force, thus justifying counter-terror and the organization of “counter¬ guerrilla" forces for irregular warfare as a valid professional response. “Counter-guerrilla" organizations are frequently compared to the Spanish partisans harrying the Napoleonic troops occupying Spain in the early 19th Century, or Russian militias pursuing Napeleon's army in the retreat from Moscow. In both cases irregular forces were used against a foreign invader. Such comparisons implicitly equated local insurrectionary forces with an invading army, making the use of nor¬ mally unacceptable tactics morally acceptable. Salvadorean officers welcomed the provision of US doctrine calling for the co-operation of irregular forces with regular military and security forces to fight subver¬ sion in their own country, and wrote of how this could be applied to El Salvador. As subversion was defined as foreign intervention. US doc¬ trine prescribed that it could legitimately be fought by organizing civil defence or commando groups, using guerrilla tactics historically employed by resistance movements to fight armies of occupation. The organization of counter-insurgent irregular forces was built upon El Salvador's own historical experience of using militia-like organizations to suppress repeated outbreaks of rebellion by the Indian peasants, and to buttress the security establishmenf s preservation of the landowning elites' interests. The military establishment justified setting up new paramilitary organizations as prudent preparation for potential subversion within El Salvador. Pre-emptive measures to deal with limited subversion before it became a real threat were justified on the same grounds. Unlike the unsavoury operations of the traditional secret police, the new, extra-legal methods of “counter-insurgency" warfare were - sometimes - quite openly justified, as a valid contribution to the global fight against International Communism. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the Salvadorean Army Staff College's Revista de la Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor ‘Manuel Enri¬ que Araujo” published articles which illustrate the sequential develop¬ ment of Salvadorean military doctrine. In “Irregular Warfare in the Central American Context" (January 210

The New Security System: US Model

1964).“^' Major Gustavo Atilio Hernandez points out that interAmerican treaties place the five Central American countries under obligation to assist each other in the face of outside aggression, and states that, given the absence of powerful military establishments, only guerrilla tactics by the five countries, even combined, could repel aggression; “One must think of a way to carry out an effective campaign, of short duration, with few troops: this can only be done through the method employed by Guerrilla Forces." He concluded that: .. . the best way to repel an aggression against Central America would be the system of irregular warfare or Guerrilla Warfare, even if the system employed by the aggressor should be Guerrilla Warfare.

In another article, in April 1963‘^" Major Manuel Alfonso Rodriguez, later Chief of Staff of the armed forces outlines three types of “guerrilla organizations" to be used as a means of combining the government, the armed forces and the civilian population in the fight against “a foreign foe", and points out that any of the three “can act on its own initiative, or in close collaboration with the regular forces”. The three types he des¬ cribes can: 1) arise spontaneously; 2) be sponsored by “chiefs or citizens of great influence and with the personal means to recruit; or 3) be organized as “commando”s. “on the basis of army units”. In Major Rodriguez' opinion, such “guerrillas”, organized on behalf of the government and under the supervision of the armed forces had the advantage over regular forces because; .. . regular warfare is the procedure in which the contenders submit to law's. In contrast, irregular warfare is not subject to laws: anything is poss¬ ible. Moreover, guerrilla warfare is a primitive form of war. man's natural manner of combat, with all means and methods available to him.

In “Guerrillas and Counter Guerrillas” (August 1964), Major Roberto Monge,"^’ after reiterating previous arguments in favour of “guerrilla” warfare'm support of regular security services, stressed that a “counter-guerrilla” force should be organized long before conflict arises, preferably employed as a means to ensure conflict never does arise. He emphasized that every element of “counter-guerrilla” organization, including provision of arms and equipment, must be planned in advance at General Staff level. In confronting the problem classically posed by irregular forces: their tendency to spin out of control unless subjected to close army supervision and discipline. Major Monge echoed Major (later Colonel) Rodriguez' concern, expressed in a 1963 article, in which he strongly advocated the presence of regular army per¬ sonnel in the irregular organizations, and the need for providing an ideological common denominator for prospective members as some 211

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

guarantee of their loyalty and discipline. In El Salvador ORDEN s close links to the army reserve system achieved this aim. A further guarantee of loyalty was the development of ORDEN not only as a paramilitary but also as a para-political organization which, working in conjunction with the ruling Party of National Conciliation, offered an aggressive and starkly simple anti-Communist platform. In his 1963 article Major Rodriguez set out these essential elements, later to be embodied in ORDEN’s organization;’-'’ The guerrilla force organized with regular members of the Army produces the best results. The basis of the guerrilla is the “man"; not just anyone, rather those that fill the following requisites: - That they have ideological training and good morale; - That they know the territory in which they work in detail; - That they are patriotic.

In the same article he stressed that to ensure close co-ordination with regular security services units the “guerrilla” command must be cen¬ tralized, and recommended especially, that if it is impossible to man the force with army personnel, “to put at their head a [military] professional”.’-'^Later, in a 1966 article,--^'’ Rodriguez (by then a Colonel) expanded the blue-print, while keeping the basic premise that “subversive” guerrillas are by definition Communist, and Communist guerrillas are by definition proxies of foreign powers: The communist guerrillas can be defeated, if action is taken rapidly and aggressively ... The [counter-guerrilla] should cut off the guerrillas from popular support and win the active support of the civil population. The guerrillas should be cut off from the support of the power that foments them and serves as their source of supply. Anti-guerrilla forces, specially trained, utilizing qualified local men. are much more economical in cost, number and results than large forces using conventional methods.

The advantage of counter-guerrilla forces, which can use uncon¬ ventional methods and are economically and strategically preferable to regular forces was again stressed, as was their usefulness as “... a complete and efficient information network, operating under central¬ ized direction.” The same article considered the desirability of provid¬ ing incentives and discretionary powers within carefully circum¬ scribed limits to the “counter-guerrilla” forces - a feature of both ORDEN and the Guatemalan paramilitary system. Members of auxiliary forces: Should be granted adequate incentives to support the government and oppose the guerrillas... Local units [supporting] the government

212

The New Security System: US Model should be given the means and carry the responsibility for combatting the guerrillas in their areas.

Salvadorean military writing on counter-insurgency also emphasizes that aspects of counter-insurgent organization and tactics potentially damaging to the armed forces’ reputation must be concealed from the public. Although the prescribed counter-insurgency methods are explicitly recognized as enabling military institutions, by disguising their personnel and concealing their actions, to carry out disreputable and “unmilitary” actions, the public relations factor is recognized; the authors stress that the use of “guerrilla” tactics either by the regular army or the forces it controls, must be so carried out that responsibility particularly for operations involving counter-terror - can be denied. In the same article Major Monge recognizes the problem posed to the institutional army should it be too clearly identified with the organiza¬ tion of a “guerrilla force”: .. . it is ... important that the army itself should not openly appear to be an instructor of guerrillas, because demagogues would take advantage of this to ascribe distorted ends to the army.

While not suggesting the army opt out of training “guerrillas” he recom¬ mends such training be presented “as if it were normal combat instruc¬ tion”. He also notes that sophisticated propaganda and counter¬ propaganda supporting the “counter-guerrilla” operations, and aimed at winning popular support and destroying the adversary's morale is essential. Propaganda and counter-propaganda should follow the same principles; It is important to win the confidence of the population giving at least at first information that does not stray from the truth, and when false, to see that it cannot be disproved... [Counter-propaganda] is developed in order to neutralize adversary subversive propaganda; it is directed especially to control the ideas, emotions and conduct of the population which the guerrilla is seeking to influence.

As public perceptions of guerrilla and counter-guerrilla operations are, owing to their very nature, changeable, both propaganda and counter¬ propaganda are of prime significance Major Monge also observes that rapid and secret actions - by “subversive” guerrillas or governmentsupported “counter-guerrillas” - create uncertainty and terror: “... these are all actions that suddenly strike directly at the adversary ... and then those that carry them out immediately disappear, creating a kind of phantom presence.” This is, of course, a valid description of either guerrilla action or government-backed “death squad” or counter-terror units engaging in “sabotage, espionage, ambushes, arson, harrassment. 213

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

demolition”. There is, however, an important difference: guerrillas generally are not concerned to disguise or deny their responsibility. Quite the reverse, their propaganda value lies precisely in the fact that they have succeeded in carrying out their actions despite all odds to the contrary, thus demonstrating their power and popular support. The “phantom” quality of the guerrilla strike lies in its total unpredictability - the next one could come any time, in any place. For the governmental “counter-guerrilla” operation the “phantom” quality is twofold; to unpredictability is added an element of accountability. Generally, armies prefer not to tarnish their prestige by public acknowledgement that they sponsor and train terrorists (irrespective of whether they regard them as legitimate “counter-guerrillas”); neither are they willing to be held accountable for their civilian auxiliary forces’ (counter¬ guerrillas) terrorist actions. Extra-legal security operations must, therefore, be attributed to “phantoms” (i.e. “death-squads”), or else totally denied to have happened at all (i.e., prisoners “disappear”; although even when the action is loudly denounced, the perpetrators are neither identified nor punished, or. in extreme cases, the actions are attributed to the guerrillas themselves. Major Monge, though acutely aware of the dangers to the institutional army posed by adopting guerrilla tactics to fight “foreign-backed” sub¬ version, nevertheless concludes in favour not only of setting up a counter-guerrilla organization parallel to the army but also of the use of guerrilla tactics by the regular army forces; The same factors considered in regular warfare should be considered in the case of the counter-guerrilla, but giving more importance to the factors of the nature of the enemy and of the terrain ... Referring to forces, it must be said that even when the army has much greater resources, these can come to be neutralized if the regular forces do not adopt the same pro¬ cedures used by the guerrillas."'’^

A Security System for the 1980s In January 1980 El Salvador’s security system faithfully reflected 20 years of United States security assistance under the precepts of counter¬ insurgency doctrine. Officers of the 9.000 man regular army, air force and miniscule navy, also controlled the traditional security forces, a vast body of armed irregulars, and a sophisticated intelligence apparatus responding directly to the army high command. Through the military junta and the Minister of Defense they also maintained effective control over most other areas of government. Advisory and material assistance under the Public Safety Program between 1957 and 1974 improved the technical capability of the con¬ ventional police services, and developed intelligence systems within each 214

The New Security System: US Model

conventional force as well as in specialized agencies. No major changes were introduced in the basic police structure, and personnel in the three main forces remained close to their 1960s numbers: the National Guard and National Police each at about 2,000 men, the Treasury Police at about 700.^^* By 1980, the National Guard had grown to only about 2,500 and the Treasury Police to over 1,000."-'^ The Public Safety Program's 1974 report on its achievements in El Salvador found that the “major objectives" of the programme set out in the initial surveys of the security system had been accomplished. It is felt that military and civil security forces have the capability to pre¬ serve law and order and to counter foreseeable threats. Extremist ele¬ ments in El Salvador retain capability to initiate limited attacks against public order but are not expected to seriously intimidate [sic] the political stability of this country nor to severely tax the forces resources.^**

Public Safety's “Phase-Out” report claimed the programme had con¬ tributed to “remarkable progress in the National Police”, particularly in the fields of communications, records, and “investigations”: “The inves¬ tigations division was reorganized”; “scientific laboratory and iden¬ tification sections were established”; “A central police records bureau was established"; “A case control system was instituted in the Investiga¬ tions Division”.^^' Specialized National Police units created under Public Safety guidance included two 50-man rapid response “riot controf' units based in the capital, and similar “equipped and trained” units based in San Miguel and Santa Ana. According to the same report, under “Anti¬ terrorist Activities”, Public Safety had assisted in the formation of a National Police “bomb-handling” squad responsible both for “inves¬ tigating terrorist activities” and for “providing training” to other agencies."“ Public Safety had provided training in “bomb-handling” through International Police Academy courses in bomb manufacture at Los Fresnos, Texas, at a Demolition Courses in the Canal Zone (nine trainees), and in a course entitled “Bomb Handling and Disposal” (eight trainees) and “Terrorist Activities Investigations” (five trainees).’^^ In the 1970s, most of the non-political “investigations” or detective work within the security system was performed by the National Police, although they retained both a Criminal Investigations and a Special Investigations section. Political investigations and operations became mainly the province of other agencies. Headed by an army colonel, with a graduate of Public Safety's International Police Academy as second in command, in 1974, the National Police Investigations Division was declared to have “all the necessary elements for good investigation' and to be “quite effective”. A central crime laboratory and efficient criminal records section run by the National Police, with central name and fingerprint, ^'modus operandi' (MO), and photograph files, was at the 215

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

disposal of each security force. Public Safety Assistance to the Treasury Police - later denounced as the most brutal of the security services^^"^ — primarily involved training and advice; Public Safety itself prepared a Treasury Police training text¬ book ... which contains rules, regulations, laws and operational procedures.. The Customs Police (Policia deAduana), whose numbers grew from 250 in 1967 to 527 in 1974,^^’ was aided by training its officers both in the United States and in El Salvador, with course including “Specialized training in the area of detection and investigation of narcotics offen¬ ses .. The expansion of the Customs Police, and its transtormation with the Immigration Police into what Salvadorean oppositions called “the political police” began in 1972 under Public Safety’s auspices: Until recently. Customs personnel were utilized mainly for port and warehouse security. In July 1972, a former AID participant was named Director and since that time has worked diligently to improve the Cus¬ toms services.“^^

The plain-clothes Immigration Police, a smaller body - 21 men in 1961, 350 in 1974 - shared the functions of borderguard and political police. Responsible for “the control, entry and exit of persons”. Public Safety reported a significant improvement in this service after 1972 under a director who had “completed a study of the immigration ser¬ vices in the United States”. Aided by the special attention of a Public Safety Immigration Adviser, advice and commodities needed to institute a “civilian records system” and “an alien control system” were provided. These systems facilitated immediate information retrieval on suspect foreigners, and in later years were used to maintain surveillance on foreign citizens (including US nationals) who, because of their work as missionaries, journalists, or other activities considered undesirable, might be wanted for arrest, interrogation, and in some cases, torture or murder. Many reforms have been instituted in Immigration in the past two years ... Effectiveness has improved also... in a recent suspected narcotics case involving two foreigners. Immigration was able to provide informa¬ tion on dates and means of entry and exit in a matter of minutes. In cases involving foreigners entering and leaving the country. Immigration can provide information readily.^™

Extensive Public Safety assistance to the National Guard began as early as 1963, concentrating on “training, records, communications, investigations, riot control, and police services”. In its last year the pro¬ gramme created a National Guard School “to include modern police subjects and techniques provided by IPA trained instructors.”"’' 216

The New Security System: US Model

While the National Police Investigations Section and its involve¬ ment in political police functions was apparently down-graded - to the benefit of its conventional criminal investigations work - the National Guard's Special Investigations Section (SIE) received a considerable boost in the early 1970s. After 1973 it was significantly expanded with Public Safety Assistance: Until 1973, its investigations were handled by personnel detailed from its ranks. This CY [Calendar Year] it was authorized 34 slots and is now headed by a graduate of the OPS senior officers course. About half of this unit's personnel attended a 234 hour criminal investigations course pre¬ pared by Public Safety late in 1973. Although the section is considered as 'Intelligence', it investigates common as well as political crimes... It also has good records, both criminal and dassified.^’^

By the mid-1970s National Guard SIE officers were visibly key figures in the Salvadorean intelligence community, and worked closely with the intelligence section of the army general staff headquarters and the presidential security agency: the apex of the intelligence hierarchy. In 1978 an Inter-American Commission of Human Rights delegation visit¬ ing the National Guard’s headquarters discovered secret cells, a purpose-built interrogation room provided with a one way mirror and equipment for applying electric shocks, all of which they subsequently described in their report.^’^ Their discovery confirmed previous denun¬ ciations of long-term unacknowledged detention, torture and murder of political prisoners.^’^ Security agencies engaged in intelligence or political police functions aided by Public Safety’s “Investigation Adviser’’, included the presi¬ dential “Salvadorean Intelligence Agency, the Immigration Bureau, and the Special Investigations of the National Police and National Guard".'” The 1974 “Phase Ouf’ study notes that the facilities for “the investigation of crimes”, and political investigations in each of the five security agencies the programme assisted overlapped to some extent; although one agency, not named, is described as responsible for politi¬ cal investigations only. Co-operation between the agencies was a major objective of Public Safety: Although one agency is charged solely with political investigations and reports directly to the President, the National Guard, National Police nevertheless conduct the same type of investigations. Recent joint train¬ ing, utilizing instructors from all agencies, has resulted in adequate co¬ operation in these matters.^”

This top presidential security agency, known successively as the “Security Service’’ and the “National Intelligence Service’’ (SNI) had. on the advice of US Public Safety advisers, been set up in the immediate 217

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

aftermath of the 1961 coup and throughout the 1960s was directed by Colonel, later General, Jose Alberto Medrano, who also directed the development of ORDEN. The SNI linked the Special Investigations sections of each security service, and gathered in the intelligence collec¬ ted through the farflung ORDEN network. Despite General Medrano's removal from power in 1971, his imprint on the system remained significant in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly through proteges who served with him in the National Guard and the presidential intelligence agency. A group of army lieutenants who served under Medrano both in the Guard and the 1969 Expeditionary Force, including then Lieutenant Roberto D'Aubuisson, were to hold key posts in the intelligence system in the 1970s.^” When General Medrano was deposed Lieutenants D’Aubuisson and Jose Antonio Castillo were considered so close to him that they were given a short-term assignment to the Military Attache s office in Nicaragua, safely out of harm’s way. General Medrano came to some accommodation with the army high command, however, and is credited with winning for D’Aubuisson and Castillo plum assignments to attend the Public Safety Program’s Inter¬ national Police Academy in Washington, D.C.^^* Both returned to serve as top intelligence officers: Castillo as head of the National Guard’s SIE, D’Aubisson as intelligence officer first in the National Guard, then in the Army General Staff, and finally, near the top of the presidential security agency, as deputy director oiAgencia Nacional deSeguridad deEl Salvador (ANSESAL) (Salvadorean National Security Agency).^’’ Despite a degree of continuity in personnel from the late 1960s, significant innovations, introduced into the intelligence apparatus after Medrano’s removal in 1971, were designed in part to institutionalize intelligence functions hitherto subject to overly personal control by individual intelligence supremos. The intelligence system also required greater sophistication to meet the technical requirements of a moder¬ nizing security system. To this end it matched the organizational development of the security services, including the paramilitary net¬ works, by enlarging its capacity to handle an increased flow of grass¬ roots intelligence data, and by means of centralized communications facilities for co-ordinating and controlling the system’s diverse sectors. Expansion of the network of paramilitary irregulars and more frequent deployment of paramilitary personnel on special operations required new capabilities for efficient recruitment, screening and control. The mass membership of ORDEN alone required a vastly extended counter-intelligence facility in order to ensure the loyalty and discipline of armed men outside the regular uniformed services. In 1970, the National Intelligence Service (SNI) serving the President and the army general staff, with offices in the Presidential Palace com¬ plex, was at the centre of the security system. Although at one time it reportedly had interrogation cells in the presidential compounds’s gar¬ ages^**" this core intelligence unit functioned primarily as a high-level 218

The New' Security’ System: US Model

clearing-house for intelligence collected by subordinate agencies, and as a policy-making rather than an operations or interrogation centre. Under the Molina government the SNI became ANSESAL, although still referred to as “the Security Service”. It retained offices in the pre¬ sidential compound, but also had operations offices, and conducted interrogations in the “special” sections of the National Guard and Immigration Bureau. Under Molina, ANSESAL served as an operational command centre, and took control of the organization and deployment of ORDEN; it also organized the first “death-squads”^^' - a function that continued into the 1980s. Serving as the co-ordinator and senior partner for the other security services' intelligence divisions, ANSESAL, under Molina and up to the 1980s, did not itself acquire a large contingent of personnel for covert intelligence collection and operations. Each director of the Special Investigations Service of the National Guard, Customs, Immigration and Treasury Police was responsible to his own director and to the director of ANSESAL. Above all. ANSESAL was the nerve centre of the combined intelligence networks of the security system, and in particular the co¬ ordinator of intelligence flowing in from the tens of thousands of ORDEN members; as a December 1983 report described it: ANSESAL was formed of the heads of the military services and internal security forces and answered directly to the president From its offices in the Presidential Palace, it functioned as the brain of a vast state security apparatus that reached into every town and neighborhood in the coun¬ try. By conservative estimate, at least one Salvadoran out of every 50 was an informant for the agency. In addition to gathering intelligence, ANSESAL was used to carry out death-squad activities ... according to Salvadoran and US officials.^®^

While serving as the regime’s intelligence command post, apparently ANSESAL also co-ordinated counter-intelligence work with the intelligence division of the army general staff, and had access to general staff records of active duty army and security personnel, as well as those with past service. A division of ANSESAL seems to have been responsible for vetting and monitoring ORDEN membership, a key counter¬ intelligence task, as well as co-ordinating information gathered through the ORDEN network, and deployment of ORDEN personnel on security tasks. Although managing to retain such secrecy on its activities that little has ever been written about it, several sources, including former govern¬ ment officials, suggest ANSESAL was particular involved in surveillance of former security personnel, and, with the general staff, vetting potential recruits for further special security service. The records of regular army conscripts and volunteers are, on termination of service, reviewed by the army general staff vis-a-vis their suitability for incorporation into the 219

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

police services (most National Guard and police personnel are rec¬ ruited directly from army service) for recruitment into ORDEN on return to their home areas, or recruitment into special operations groups directed by the intelligence agencies. ANSESAL could tap these general staff records systems in order to keep the ORDEN network regularly replenished with reliable personnel, and under control.By the late 1970s it could draw on an enormous manpower pool of of former service-men for reincorporation into government service, or to provide contract services to a select group of private employers. Large landow¬ ners and others of the Salvadorean elite have traditionally contracted private bodyguards and security personnel through the National Guard, which, since the 1930s made men no longer on the active list available to private employers who paid their salaries. Unemployed ex¬ guardsmen, part of the Guards’ unpaid reserve, were glad to get a paycheck, and big landowners happy to have trained security personnel at their disposal."®*' In the 1970s too, ANSESAL apparently built upon and rationalized this practice, providing a central service enabling politically safe private persons to contract former National Guard and other security services personnel as plantation guards, bodyguards, or for other tasks consistent with government policy. The requirement for these contracted employees to maintain contact and report their activities to ANSESAL ensured that body's continued effective control over them.-®^ ANSESAL, and through it the army general staff and the President, controlled vast manpower resources auxiliary to regular military or security forces, which could be covertly deployed for counter-insurgency warfare. ANSESAL's headquarters were still in the presidential complex at the time of the October 1979 coup, operating behind the screen of the President's CentroNacionaldeInformacion (CNI) (National Information Centre). In a separate building in the same complex were ORDEN’s administrative offices, said to employ more than 40 staff at the time of the coup.^®^ ANSESAL, like the Guatemalan Presidential security agency, is at the centre of a communications network tied in to the Central American telecommunications networks operated from the US military’s Southern Command in the Panama Canal Zone. ANSESAL is supported by two major communications centres in the capital. The Centro de Instruccion de Telecomunicaciones de las Fuerzas Armadas, (CITFA) (Armed Forces Centre for Instruction in Telecommunications) at the El Zapote Fort, linked to the Casa Presidencial by a tunnel, provides the Presidency with principal communications facilities.^®^ A second centre, providing data processing and communications services, including phone tapping facilities, is ANTEL {Administracion Nacional de Telecomunicaciones). the National Telecommunications Agency. This Agency, based in a large building behind the National Palace in downtown San Salvador, runs the nation’s telephone and telegraph service and controls all 220

The New Securin’ System: US Model

broadcasting. ANTEL acquired a major security function under the Sanchez Hernandez regime, under the directorship of the president’s brother Colonel Vicente Sanchez Hernandez."'^* By 1971 it reportedly housed sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment and within its large conventional establishment concealed much of the intelligence system’s high technology. As noted, most of the top army officers in positions of power after the October 1979 coup had served as ANTEL chiefs, a top intelligence post.^*'^ The significance of ANTEL (and CITFA) to the intelligence function should not be underestimated, but the key agency through which the President and the army general staff maintained control of the intelligence apparatus, and ORDEN, was ANSESAL. To the military governments of the 1970s, ANSESAL and ORDEN were indispensable and, consequently, were kept under close Presidential control. Threatened with the dissolution of both at the time of the October 1979 coup, the army general staff moved to conceal ANSESAL, and reorganize ORDEN to permit the minimum of disruption. According to recent reports. ANSESAL’s - and ORDEN’s - offices and records were transferred to the army general staff headquarters on the very day of the coup. Although ANSESAL chief Colonel Roberto Eulalio Santibanez, reportedly supervised the transfer, direction of ANSESAL from the army general staff was to have fallen to its previous second chief. Major Roberto D’Aubuisson. The appointment was kept secret from the civilians brought into the October junta, and from the reformist officers who had demanded that officers responsible for intelligence work under Romero be cashiered. The reformers had officially abolished ORDEN, the old informant net¬ work. But ... military officers suspicious of the young reformers secretly re-established - and expanded - much of the old intelligence system into a grass-roots intelligence network that fed names of suspected subversives to military and paramilitary death squads. Four days after the coup, D’Aubuisson said in an interview, he was assigned by members of the high command to help reorganize ANSESAL inside a military com¬ pound under the chief of staffs office - out of reach of civilians in the new junta.^’”

The secret reassignment of D’Aubuisson to ANSESAL was confirmed by junta member Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutierrez and then-Deputy Defense Minister (and later Treasury Police head) Colonel Nicolas Carranza.^^' The reorganized ANSESAL was set up as part of the general staff s “Section 5’’, (Civic Affairs’’). ‘We found ourselves obliged to close ANSESAL and open another’ Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutierrez, a conservative member of the new government, said in an interview. So we called D Aubuisson, sent him

221

Counter-Insurgency Emerges over there, to avoid that the information the old ANSESAL files should be taken out of there’. Gutierrez, who has since come to oppose D’Aubuisson, said the move was necessary to keep the files out of the hands of leftist infiltrators in the new government. A new version of the intelligence agency was re-established in Depart¬ ment 5, the “Civic Affairs” section of the army general staff, military sour¬ ces said. The little-known agency is in charge of jobs ranging from image-building tasks, like road construction, to covert actions. Extreme rightists have dominated the department, according to US and Salvadoran sources.^^^

222

Notes to Part 3

Chapter 10 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

US Embassy Cable 8 May 1961, released through Freedom of Information Act. US Embassy cable 19 May 1961, released through Freedom of Information Act. The exclusion of the new political parties from the countryside by physically preventing their contact with the peasantry is discussed further below. Agency for International Development (AID) “Transmittal Statement, FY 1964-1965 Program Submission", prepared 17 September 1963, p. TS 6. Howard I.. Blutstein,/Irea Handbook for El Salvador, op. cit., p.l88. NACLA's 1974 study, Guatemala, includes a chapter on the Central American Common Market (“Master-minding the Mini-Market") detail¬ ing the operation of the Central American Bank for Economic Integra¬ tion. and concludes that AID controlled rather than supported it. Blutstein, op.ciL, p. 188. INSAFI provided capital outlay up to 60% for new industrial projects, with 25 year repayment periods. Blutstein, op. cit, p. 148. Blutstein, op. cit. p. 159. A further element was the impact of Salvadorean industrial expansion on regional trade relations; favouring El Salvador - seen as an unequal dis¬ tribution of the Common Market’s benefits - was just one factor souring Honduran-Salvadorean relations before 1969. Blutstein, op. cit, p. 165. In the 1960s top army officers also moved to take a share of the economic largesse, much as under the military government of 1963-66 Guatemalan army officers began to join the economic elite as corporate board members and part owners of lucrative new industries. The process continued in the 1970s with Colonel Arturo Armando Molina (president 1972-77) becoming a top shareholder in the enterprise - Cemento Maya. President Sanchez Hernandez (1967-72) was finan¬ cially involved in coastal cotton farms being developed in the 1960s. AID, “Transmittal statement..." op. cit, p. 6. Blutstein, op. cit, p. 100, writing in 1970, reports an estimated 40,000 union members, or about 7% of the labour force in some sense “organized". Fegislative Decree 145, published in the Diario Oficial No. 173, 21

223

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

224

September 1962. The decree changes the name to Title III, chapter II, con¬ cerning "Rebelidn, Sedicidn y Espionaje", to append “y Actividades Anarquicas o Contrarias a la Democracia" “Anarchic Activities or those Contrary to Democracy”. Article 139 concerns ^'quienes promuevan. organicen. mantengan o estimulen paros o huelgas. . . en violacidn de las disposiciones legales que las rigen...” (“those who promote, organize, sustain or stimulate stoppages or strikes ... in violation of the legal dispositions in force . . ."). Blutstein. op. ciL, p. 100, notes the limitation labour laws put on overall organ¬ ization in the country: “The law ... limits labor unions to non agricultural labor; this significantly inhibits the growth of the labor movement.. .” Summarized by Thomas P. Kndcrson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of1932. op. cit., pp. 148-50. Browning, op.cit., pp. 271-2 deals with the issue at greater length, Martinez created a special fund in July 1932, the Eondo de Mejoramiento Social to provide cheap housing, and develop “general industrialization, and a program of land redistribution”, to be administered by Vne Junta Nacional de la Defensa Social, between 1932 and 1950, the Eondo reportedly purchased 26 haciendas, comprising 86,754 acres, distributing 73,655 acres to small holders (Browning, op. cit., p. 275). Browning also cites several sources to the effect that most of the land was promptly resold or otherwise abandoned (for example when rents could not be paid). Anderson cites Alejandro Dagoberto Marroquin: “that the land usually went to the dictator's personal friends, or to members of his Partido Pro-Patria” (Anderson, op. cit., p. 150); the latter observation is perhaps germane to the highly suspect progress of the 1980 agrarian reform. Browning, op. cit., p. 296. Ibid. The author adds that “the failure of past official programs to achieve such a rearrangement of tenure systems ... [does] not inspire confidence in the success of future attempts to implement it.” Blutstein, op. cit., p. 21. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 21; Blutstein also reported that'Tood allowances for farmworkers were increased”. In fact they were discontinued. Anderson, op. cit, p. 155. Browning, op. cit, p. 234, describes the transformation of the largely fores¬ ted coast to a vast mechanized farm. With agro-industry, furthermore, the traditional production of food crops in the area fell by the wayside; see ibid., p. 235. Statistics (in a footnote) show that 1950-63 coastal cotton fibre production rose from-5,565 to 71,441 metric tons - a 1,283% increase maize production rose only from 130,307 to 153,246 tons, and beans dropped from 16,471 to 14,447 metric tons. Browning op. cit., p 277, documents every aspect of El Salvador’s agricultural history, and compares the late development of the litoral in the late 1950s and 1960s to the rapid introduction of coffee culture in the highlands in the 1800s, with similar social costs. Until 1930 “The pattern of land use and settlement remained unchanged from that of previous centuries: most of the land remained under ownership of large cattle haciendas or remained as public land, upon which settlement by tenants, colonos, and squatters was allowed or tolerated”. Browning, op. ciL, p. 229.

Notes to Part 3 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

Ibid, p. 236. Ibid, p. 239. Ibid Roger Burbach and Patricia F\ynn. Agribusiness in the Americas, NACLA, Monthly Review Press. New York and London, 1980, p. 143: “To accom¬ plish this expansion the landowners carried out a massive expulsion of colono families ... Today many of these dispossessed peasants live in the makeshift mud and straw huts scattered along the dusty roads and barren mountainsides of the Salvadorean countryside." A 3/4 reduction in land farmed by colonos (77%) does not necessarily mean three out of four colono families were ejected, but population growth possibly resulted in a proportion of colono families forced to seek a livelihood elsewhere even if a nucleus remained on a private estate. Significantly, however, while the 1932 revolt flared throughout the highland coffee-growing area, where conditions rapidly deteriorated (estate workers were put out on the street) the 1980s revolution seemingly has its greatest strong points not in the densely populated coffee lands, but in the more arid, sharecropping coun¬ try of the northern departments on the Honduran border and in the vicinity of the coastal towns and cities. NACLA, Guatemala, p. 98. describes Honduras wide open spaces as “an escape valve" for the Salvadorean unemployed. Population density figures are for 1969. Ibid., p. 98. Blutstein, op. cit, pp. 22-3. Salvadorean immigrants were maltreated, and some killed in the lead-up to the war. Anderson, op. cit., p. 156. writes that Honduran President Colonel Lopez Arellano deliberately chose to encourage an “antiSalvadorean" campaign to take people’s minds off other Honduran pro¬ blems. but that the campaign went too far. New York Times. 31 August 1969: Juan de Om's, “Salvador Clergy call for Reform”. The bishops placed their call for redistribution of the land in the context of national security and the Honduran war: “El Salvador cannot present its struggle [with Honduras] as being in defense of human rights while ... citizens in our own territory ... [suffer] hunger and malnutrition, without the necessary support to lead decent lives.” Juan de Ora's noted that the appeal for land donations was directed particularly at absentee landlords, “many of whom belong to traditional land-owning families, but are now managers of El Salvador's recently established industries. The courses were perhaps more about the insidious dangers of Communism in the countryside than active labour organization. The history of AID's involvement in peasant training schemes is outlined in an unpublished paper by Carolyn Forche and Philip Wheaton, “The History and Motiva¬ tions of US Involvement in the Agrarian Reform Process in El Salvador. 1970 to 1980". aid's principal instrument was the American Institute for Free Labour Development, working as an AID contractor. Burbach and Flynn, op. cit., p. 214, describe AIFED as a body “funded by AID, suppor¬ ted by the AFE-CIO and US corporations, and often used by the CIA to undercut genuine progressive unionism in Fatin America". In rural El Salvador, however, there were at the time no rural unions to undercut or take over.

225

Counter-Insurgency Emerges 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

226

Forche and Wheaton, op. cit., pp. 6, 7: “The technical help ... came from the government’s Agricultural Extension Program, food was provided by CARITAS, and funding from US AID.” Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., pp. 6-10. Latin America Bureau, El Salvador under General Romero. London, April 1979, p. 229. “Religious Persecution in El Salvador", Hearings before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations of the House of Representatives, 95 th Congress,! st Session, 21 and 29 July, 1977, pp. 6-9, testimony of Rev. Jose Inocencio Alas, priest of the diocese of San Salvador, El Salvador. Ibid., p. 7. Blutstein, op. cit., p. 104. Ibid., p. 102. 15 seats had gone to the Christian Democrats. Blutstein, op. cit., pp. 103-4. Statistics on election results given by Blutstein and White vary slightly. White summarizes them as follows: “(In elections of 8 March 1970) the PCN won 34 of the 52 seats in the Legislative Assembly, compared with 32 in 1966 and only 27 in 1968; and won control of all but seven of the 261 municipalities; these seven went to the PDC, compared to the 80 which the Christian Democrats had won in 1968. The only cause for opposition rejoicing was the PDC’s retention of control over the municipality of San Salvador." Alistair White El Salvador. Ernest Benn Ltd, London, 1973, p. 195. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in El Salvador. 17 November 1973, p. 149, citing a com¬ plaint by a Salvadorean “political representative ". Blutstein, op. cit., p. 102 writes only that the PAR was declared illegal “allegedly for dis¬ seminating Communist ideologies”. Decree No. 145, Diario Oficial No. 173, 21 September 1962. The prede¬ cessor of Decree No. 145 was the 1952 Ley de Defensa del Orden Democrdtico y Constitucional. derogated early in the Lemus government, in the mid-1950s. White, op. cit., p. 208. Ibid., p. 208. AID “Transmittal Statement..." op. cit, p. 8. White, op. cit, p. 205-6. Ibid. Martinez’ Pro-Patria Party, while a precursor of the two subsequent “offi¬ cial" parties, differed in essence in that it remained basically apersonalista party, dedicated to maintaining the rule of one person, rather than any part¬ icular institution. (For the PRUD and the PCN, the military institution). Pro-Patria was generically closer to Xh^Partido Democrdtico Nacionalista of the Melendez-Quinonez family in the 1920s. Alistair White, op. cit, p. 193 sketched the PCN as follows: “The Partido de Conciliacion Nacional ( PCN) is the vehicle through which the continuity of the regime is translated into the terms of formal democracy... the PCN is the successor to the Partido Revolucionario de Unificacion Democratica (PRUD) of Osorio and Lemus, and inherited not only the forms of organization but a good many of the personnel." White, op. cit

Notes to Part 3 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69.

Ibid, p. 209. Ibid. Estudios Centroamericanos. Ano XXV, No. 265-266, October-November 1970, pp. 529-31, cited in Juan Hernandez Pico et al., El Salvador, Afio Politico 1971-1972, p. 12 and note. James Dunkerly, The Long War: Dictatorship and Revolution in El Salvador, London: Junction Books (1982) p. 84, reports Medrano's dismissal was for “ ‘disciplinary reasons' - the planning of a coup as a result of discontent with Sanchez Hernandez' irrigation law." Medrano's brief arrest in February 1971 (ibid. p. 85) followed his killing of a policeman, apparently in the course of a vendetta in which he supported the Salaverria family against the Regalado family. He admitted the charge but pleaded self-defence. Ibid, p. 64. Hernandez Pico et al, op. cit., pp. 11-12. See Dunkerly, op. cit., ch. 6, “The Rise of the Left" for a detailed discussion of ihQ Partido Comunista Salvadoreho's ideological history; also ibid, p. 91. Ibid., pp. 55-6. Ibid., p. 58; notes the CGS was set up by Lemus in 1958 and subsequently funded by the American Institute for Free Labour Development (AIFLD), and affiliated to the US controlled Organizacion Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT). Ibid., p. 59. Dunkerly also outlines the progressive decline of CGS's role, from controlling 42% of organized workers in 1971 to 19% in 1976. Hernandez Pico, et. al, op. cit., pp. 11-12. Ibid., pp. 13-15, provides an excellent summary of the changes in the elec¬ toral law; in footnote 6 the authors add the texts of key articles of the law which remained unchanged in 1971, but provided the basis for exclusion of parties or candidates considered unacceptable. Hernandez Pico, et. al., op. cit., p. 187. Ernesto Regalado Duenas was known for his “modern” ideas for manag¬ ing industrial investment, but the Regalado extended family is probably the nation's largest landowner and coffee producer. In the 1970-71 season Regalado family holdings' coffee production totalled 85,000 quintales (the 46 kilograms units in which coffee is bagged). The Guirola family (72,107 quintales), was next in rank that year, followed by Llach and Schonenberg family Hill-Llach family, and the Duenas family, Dunkerly, op. cit, pp. 241-2, “Appendix Two: The Landed Oligarchy”, reproducing a table of leading families in order of their coffee, cotton and sugar production in 1970-71. From Discursos del Sr. Presidente de la Republica General Eidel Sanchez Her¬ nandez, julio 1, 1967 - enero 3, 1972, San Salvador,1973, speech of 24 Feb¬ ruary 1971, “Mensaje al pueblo salvadoreno reafirmando el proposito de combatir el terrorismo y mantener la tranquilidad del pais.” ("Message to the Salvadorean people reaffirming the intention to combat terrorism and maintain order in the country”.) Latin America Weekly Report, March 1971. Stephen Webre, Jose Napoleon Duarte and the Christian Democratic Party in Salvadorean Politics 1960-1972, Louisiana State University Press: London (1979) p. 162, citingD/'ano de Hoy, 16 February 1971. Webre also notes that “Months later, when suspicion had shifted to the leftists, Medrano denied under oath any recollection of this aspect of his statement” {cximgPrensa

111

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 85. 86. 87. 88.

Grafica (San Salvador) 17 September 1971. Ibid., p. 161 and El Grdfico (Guatemala) 3 November 1971. Webre, op. cit., pp. 159-60. For a detailed discussion of the political plat¬ forms and economic concerns of the various parties in 1971-1972 see Hernandez-Pico et al, op. cit., part II, "'Aspectos ideoldgicosy socioecondmicos de los programas electorates de los partidos contendientes". Webre, op. cit, p. 161. Even before the Regalado Duenas kidnapping Medrano was in line for exile, being detailed to a Salvadorean Consulate in the US (San Francisco) immediately after his 2 December 1970 dis¬ missal from the National Guard command, to take up his US post in Feb¬ ruary 1971. Hernandez Pico et al., op. cit, pp. 15-16. Ibid., pp. 23-107, for extensive details of the electoral process of 1972. Ibid., gives convincing evidence to this effect. In the event Napoleon Duarte gave a press conference on 21 February claiming victory by about 10,000 votes, based on final returns at the departmental level reported by UNO observers. Ibid., pp. 104-5. Ibid., p. 112. Chapter 4, "El golpe de estado del 25 de marzo de 1972", is the best source on the coup and its aftermath. Ibid., p. 113. There has been considerable speculation as to the pro¬ venance of the aircraft that bombed key points in San Salvador in the course of the rebellion. Discussing the possibility of Guatemalan aircraft, or other aircraft provided through the services of CONDECA Hernandez Pico et al, op. ciL, pp.l 11-36, discount charges of foreign intervention in the affair. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., citing £■/ Diario de Hoy, 26 March 1972, edicion Extra. Ibid., pp. 118-9. Ibid., p. 131. See, for example, detailed discussion in ibid., pp. 131-3, "Causas del Golpe". Ibid., pp. 126-9; and Webre, p. 176. Webre, op. cit., p. 178. Ibid. Hernandez Pico et al. op. cit., pp. 136-48.

Chapter 11 89.

90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

228

From the testimony of Dr Fabio Castillo in US Congress, Hearings on “Human Rights in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador: Implications for US Policy", June 1976. p. 40, and Webre. op. cit., p. 185. Webre. op. cit., p. 186. Prensa Grafica, 2 March. 1972; Webre. op. cit., p. 174, writes that police trac¬ ked the assailants to the National University and blamed the attack on “red terrorists". Prensa Grafica. 9 September 1972. Dunkerley, op. cit., p. 91, for FPL emergence. Diario de Hoy. Prensa Grafica, 14 February 1973, cited in Panorama Resumen Centroamericana de Noticias (Guatemala), February 1973. p. 7. Prensa Grafica. cited ininforpress Centroamerica, February 1973, p. 7. Later,

Notes to Part 3

96. 97. 98. 99.

100.

101. 102. 103.

104. 105.

106.

107. 108. 109. 110.

exile of this kind would gradually be superseded by extrajudicial execution. Prensa Grafica, 27 and 31 March 1973, cited in Panorama, March 1973. £//mpurczu/(Guatemala), 25 April 1973 and Prensa Grafica, 30 April 1973, cited in Panorama, April, 1973. La Prensa (Nicaragua), 25 August 1973, cited in Panorama, August 1973. Higinio Alas, El Salvador. Por que la insurreccionl, Secretariado Permanente de la Comision de Derechos Humanos en Centroamerica, San Jose de Costa Rica, 1982, p. 62. Ibid., and Fabio Castillo’s testimony in the US Congress, Hearings on “Human Rights in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador...” op. cit., p. 41. Webre, op. cit., p. 188. Higinio Alaz, op. cit, p. 62 and testimony of Fabio Castillo, op. cit, See Webre, op. cit, p. 189 and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in El Salvador, 1978, pp. 51-5. The Commission’s report included a testimony describing the calculated brutality of the attack; “Those in front wanted to turn around, but the armoured units had cut them off because the units had crossed over the bridge; ... the place became a trap ... as the demonstrators were turning around, the rifle and machine-gun fire began ... The objective of those responsible for the crime was not to disperse the demonstration ... The repressors were in a kneeling position ... as if they were facing a target in shooting practice. But they were not just bullets. The boys and girls who in their desperate flight wanted to jump over the walls ... received slashes on the head and other parts of the body; parts of the body were dismem¬ bered ... The streets at the intersection and in front of the main entrance to the [hospital] were wet with blood. Not even the heavy rainfalls that followed have managed to erase them entirely." Webre, op. cit., p. 189. See, for example, Webre, op. ciL, p. 190. The government never publicly established the whereabouts of the “disappeared” or accepted respon¬ sibility for their arrests, or their removal from the scene in the security ser¬ vices’ ambulances. Some bodies of students who died of their wounds (or were killed) after being taken away were returned to their families on the condition that this was not made public, and burials took place outside the capital. The reported intermediary for these agreements was Archbishop Chavez y Gonzalez, head of the Salvadorean church and, by early 1975, an increasingly outspoken champion of human rights. Dunkerley, op. cit., p. 99, notes that the coalition into FAPU followed a process in which the clandestine Salvadorean Communist Party (PCS) had been in temporary alliance with the urban union federations, and been rejected by them. See, for example, Latin America Bureau, Violence andEraud in El Salvador, (London), July 1977, p. 11. Panorama, August 1975, p. 9. The text of the communique was published by most Salvadorean dailies; see La Prensa Grdfica, 8 August 1975. Webre, op. cit., p. 191.

229

Counter-Insurgency Emerges 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121.

122. 123.

230

See Part 4. La Prensa Grafica, 8 August 1975. Ibid. Ibid. Latin America Bureau, op. cit., p. 13. Webre, op. cit., p. 191, suggests the numbers of political killings in the second half of 1975 were quite high, although suggesting that left and right killings were in some way balanced. See Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in El Salvador, op. cit., pp. 152-3 for details of FALANGE threats to candidates in the 1976 municipal and legislative elections. Prensa Libre (Guatemala), 26 September 1975, in Panorama, September 1975, p. 18. Prensa Libre (Guatemala), 5 November 1975, in Panorama, November 1975, p. 17. Prensa Grdfica (San Salvador) 5 June 1972, in Panorama, June 1972. See Webre, op. cit., p. 193, for a summary of the proposal, andPanorama, July 1976, citing Diario de Hoy, 26 July 1976, which gives the Christian Democratic Party’s brief contemporary assessment of the law. El Diario de Hoy, 22 June 1976, in Panorama, June 1976. Colonel Vides Casanova was appointed Director Suplente (deputy) of ANTEL for the Ministry of Interior on 20 June 1974, and made Director Proprietario (titular director) for the Ministry of Interior on 27 September 1974, until his appointment as a director of INSAFI in April 1975, as rep¬ resentative of the President, and, subsequently as INSAFI’s president. Colonel Garda was appointed president of ANTEL, on 12 March 1974. Webre. op. cit., citing Central America Report, 31 January 1977. US Congress, Hearings on “Religious Persecution in El Salvador”, July 1977, p. 12. The Universidad Simeon Canas was a target in part because of its publication, Estudios Centroamericanos, which in September-October 1976, for example, published a detailed analysis of the agrarian reform legislation, and was seen to take a strong position in favour of meaningful reform. In the July 1977 US Congressional hearings on "Religious Per¬ secution in El Salvador" Ignacio Lozano, Jr.. American Ambassador to El Salvador from August 1976 to June 1977, placed the beginnings of the “persecution of the church" with the acrimonious debate on agrarian transformation in 1976: “the landowners, [were] seeking to protect their own economic interests and reluctant to share their bonanza with their workersf... ] numerous right wing groups, mounted a shrill campaign in the Salvadoran press against the Catholic Church, accusing its priests of contributing to and openly supporting [unrest], if not actually creating it by preaching revolution and subversion from their pulpits. This campaign of vilification apparently had the tacit approval of the government which in its turn was mounting a campaign of harrassment and intimidation of Salvadoran priests, and the expulsion of foreign priests, including Americans.” Lozano's testimony recalls comments by American observers immedia¬ tely prior to El Salvador's 1932 agrarian revolt US military attache Major A.R. Harris in a dispatch of 22 December 1931 (report No. 4,000b) warned that plantation owners were the principal allies of agitators who wish to “stir up the people against the present system”. “[The agitators] are aided to a large extent by the reactionary ideas of prac-

Notes to Part 3

124.

125. 126. 127.

128. 129.

130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136.

cally all the large landowners, who do not want to let any of their land go. so that a middle class will be developed. Their arguments usually come down to this: ‘if we sell our land to these mozos (servants) we will have nobody to pick our coffee for us. The best thing for everybody is to keep things as they are’." See Latin America Bureau, op. cit. p. 20. for chronology of incidents; for the point of view of the most virulent right-wing landowners associations, the Frente Agrario Regional Oriental (FARO). (Eastern Region Agrarian Front) see US Congress. Hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections in El Salvador: Implications for US Foreign Policy”, March 1977. The record includes as appendix 8 (pp. 86-7) a statement from FARO of 18 March 1977: “Everybody knows it, and FARO published it. that the Jesuits have organized and exercise demagogic control of FECCAS and UTC; that those organizations committed acts of violence in Quezaltepeque where a humble market vendor was killed; that members of those organizations started the disturbance at Hacienda Colima which ultimately led to the death of outstanding citizen Guayo Orellana; that leaders of those organizations carried out acts of violence that ended in killings in the Tecoluca parish area; and that those organizations together with other organizations also under the demagogic control of the Com¬ munists ... rioted in the streets of San Salvador shouting “Death” and slogans threatening violence and bloodshed”. Latin America Bureau, op. cit, see also Hearings on “Religious Persecu¬ tion ...”, op. cit Latin America Bureau, op. cit, pp. 20-23. Hearings on “Religious Persecution ...”, op. cit, p. 63, statement ofJohnJ. McAward, Associate Director, International Programs, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Ibid. Excellent descriptions of the incident and its repercussions^ are to be found in both Hearings on “Religious Persecution ...” op. cit, and Latin America Bureau, op. cit Latin America Bureau, op. cit, p. 22. Panorama, March 1974, p. 11, citing La Prensa Grdfica. 13 March 1974. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Situation ... op. cit, pp. 152-153. The coalition's vice-presidential candidate was Christian Democrat Jose Antonio Morales Erlich, formerly the mayor of San Salvador. Eor details of the two “disappearance” cases see Inter-American Commis¬ sion on Human Rights, Report op. cit For a far more extensive treatment of secret captivity, and of the Poma kidnapping from the guerrillas’ point of view, see Ana Guadalupe Martinez Las Cdrceles Clandestinas de El Salvador: Libertad por el Secuestro de un Oligarca, 1978 (no publisher or place of publication given). Details of the election and events in its aftermath are included in the record of Hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections ...” op. cit Some of the tapes were played at the March 1977 congressional hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections ...”; Appendix 1 to the record of the Hearings (pp. 69.71) includes a statement from UNO describing the com¬ munications system and an elaborate system for co-ordinating local

231

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

137. 138.

139. 140 141.

142. 143.

144. 145. 146.

147.

148. 149.

150. 151. 152.

153.

232

ballot stuffing. Webre. op. cit.. p. 197, citing Central America Report, 28 February 1977. Letter, 14 March 1977: Colonel Ernesto Claramount R. to UNO leaders; included in Hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections ... , op. cit., pp. 55-6. US Congress, Hearings on “Religious Persecution in El Salvador”, op. cit., statement of John J. McAward, on p. 57. Ibid. They were Colonel Jose Napoleon Agreda, Commander of the 1st Army Brigade, Colonel Jose Antonio Agreda, Director of the National Police, and Colonel Jose Eduardo Iraheta, Commander of the 1st Artillery Brigade. Colonel Claramount would be accompanied on his flight to exile in Costa Rica by Lt. Col. Roberto Santibanez. publicly known as the chief of the Immigration Service and Police, but also then head of the pre¬ sidential security agency ANSESAL. US Congress, Hearings on “Religious Persecution in El Salvador”, op. cit., p. 58. Ibid. US church investigators described the killings as indiscriminate and widespread: “Security forces fired on the demonstrators at point-blank range with heavy calibre machine-guns ... A young American couple was almost shot while shopping for bread four blocks from the cordon area. Three persons were shot in the street within five yards of them”. Ibid. Ibid. The Christian Democratic Party’s September 1977 national convention, agreed a six point platform, stating: “as the government has closed the electoral process, the PDC decides that ... it will not participate in the electoral process to elect parliamentarians in March next year”. Point one declared the party’s determination “to struggle with the people to achieve a democratic opening” ... as a response to “the political program of a fas¬ cist nature that the present regime pursues.” See Panorama, September 1977, citing La Prensa Grdfica, 15 September 1977. Latin America Bureau, op. cit, p. 24. Also detained, blindfolded, handcuffed and beaten was Salvadorean priest Victor Guevara from Chalatenango. Ibid., ciXmgBoletin del Arzobispado de San Salvador, No. 16, 20 May 1977. The threatening letter consisted of cut-out letters from advertisements spelling “Mene Mene Tekel Phares" (a biblical warning of imminent death) on a black sheet of photocopy paper with the white silhouette of a hand on it. Eor full text see US Congress, Hearings on “Religious Persecution in El Salvador”, op. cit. Appendix No. 3. Latin America Bureau, op. cit, p. 26. The head of the Jesuit order, Pedro Arrupe, made his declaration to the press in the course of a meeting of Latin American Provincials in RJo de Janeiro (see Panorama, August 1977, citing La Tarde (Guatemala), 9 August 1977). In late 1977 military occupations of rural municipalities involving com¬ bined army. National Guard and ORDEN forces repeated the Aguilares experience in several areas of Chalatenango, Morazan. San Vicente and

Notes to Part 3

155. 156.

157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162.

163.

164.

165.

166.

167.

Cabanas departments. Large contingents of the security forces surroun¬ ded villages and carried out house to house searches during periods of from one to three days. Reports of detentions and “disappearances”, and execution style shootings followed these operations (See Latin America Bureau, El Salvador Under President Romero, London, 1979, p. 43). Ibid., p. 39. Including FECCAS and UTC. and the clandestine Communist Party-backed ATACES, the Asociacion de Trabajadores Campesinos Salvadorenos (Association of Salvadorean Peasant Workers). Dunkerley, op. cit., p. 115. Ibid., p. 116. Latin America Bureau, El Salvador Under General Romero, op. cit., pp. 4647. Dunkerley, op. cit., p. 117. US Congress, Hearings on "Religious Persecution in El Salvador”, op. cit, p. 17. See Volume II for further discussion of the basis of the human rights policy and the reaction of Latin American governments (“Human Rights and Security Assistance”). US Congress, Hearings on “Religious Persecution in El Salvador”, op. cit, p. 17. Mr Lozano's frank statements to the Fraser Committee also earned him the kind of frank comment that then Congressman Edward Koch, later Mayor of New York, was well known for: “Mr Koch. It intrigues me, Mr Ambassador, how did a nice, humane, conscientious guy like you become an Ambassador? Mr Lozano. Appointed by President Ford, you mean? Mr Koch. Exactly. Mr Lozano. We all make our mistakes.” Cable, American Embassy San Salvador to Sec. State Washington. 3 May 1977. “For Todman from the Ambassador”, classified as “Secret” declassified on 6 March 1982 through a Freedom of Information Act request by the author. Department of State Action Memorandum, 21 May 1977, declassified on 16 March 1982 through a Freedom of Information Act request by the author. Letter, 24 May 1977: His Excellency Colonel Arturo Armando Molina, from Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, declassified on 16 March 1982 through a Freedom of Information Act request by the author. Vance was blunt in this letter, informing Molina that the US government had con¬ cluded “that [Richardson) met with an untimely death in El Salvador evidently while in the custody of Salvadoran authorities”, and stressed its rejection of the story that Richardson had been deported; “Allegations that Richardson was deported from El Salvador - allegations that are con¬ tradictory as to date, place and manner of supposed deportation - have not dispelled our conclusion that he was killed in El Salvador. Department of State Briefing Memorandum, 25 July 1977, To: The Sec¬ retary. Through: Mr. Habib, From: ARA - Terence A. Todman, USG Policy and Actions on Human Rights Issues with El Salvador , Classified Secret. Declassified, with portions deleted, on 16 March 1982, through a Freedom of Information Act request by the author.

233

Counter-Insurgency Emerges 168. 169. 170.

Ibid. Ibid. See Volume II, (“Human Rights and Security Assistance”). Molina pre¬ viously responded to US congressional hearings on the March presiden¬ tial elections, and to the publication in April that year of the Department of State’s annual report on human rights in countries receiving foreign assistance, by joining Guatemala, Argentina and Brazil in renouncing US military assistance extended under conditions it considered abusive to national sovereignty (Uruguay and Chile had already had their aid sus¬ pended). As the level of military assistance granted to the Salvadoreans in 1977 was low, and the continued presence of the military group advisers would not be affected by the “renunciation”, the gesture was relatively unimportant. Threat of economic sanctions was far more serious both for Molina and his successor. 171. Memorandum: Todman to Habib and Vance, 25 July 1977, op. cit., andLa Prensa Grdfica, (San Salvador), 3 August 1977, for quote on reaction. 172. Memorandum: Todman to Habib and Vance op. ciL 173. Department of State telegram, “Subject: Richardson Case”, “FM AMEMBASSY SAN SALVADOR TO SECSTATE”, 28 July 1977, including the translation of a note from the Salvadorean Minister of Foreign Relations, summarizing findings of the Attorney General’s report and presenting the Government of El Salvador’s apologies. The full Spanish text of the Attor¬ ney General’s report (a three page text with few details) is included in a Department of State telegram of 29 July: “Subject: Richardson Case; FM AMEMBASSY SAN SALVADOR TO SECSTATE”. Both telegrams were declassified on 9 November 1982 through a Freedom of Information Act request by the author. 174. Department of State telegram. 29 July 1977, op. cit. 175. US Congress, Hearings, “Religious persecution ...”, p. 35. testimony of Richard G. Arellano, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs. 176. Ibid., p. 98. 177. Ibid., citing letter: Deputy Assistant Secretary for Congressional Rela¬ tions Douglas Bennet to Senator Kennedy, 21 October 1977, noting “encouraging steps” taken by Romero on human rights, including “not reimposing the State of Siege, protective action for Jesuits, and an invitation to the OAS Inter American Commission on Human Rights to visit El Salvador”. The formal invitation was by diplomatic note of 14 September 1977, see Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in El Salvador, 1978, for the result of the visit 178. Latin America Bureau, El Salvador under General Romero, op. cit. p. 57. 179. US Congress, Hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections ...” op. cit, p. 4, and Hearings on “Human Rights Conditions in Selected Countries and the US Response”, 1978, p. 99. 180. US Congress, Hearings on “The Recent Presidential...”, op. cit, p. 92, response of Department of State to questions submitted by Subcommittee chairman Fraser. 181. Latin America Bureau. Violence andEraud ... op. cit, p. 32, citing Depart¬ ment of Public Relations, Presidential House. El Salvador 1974-1975, San Salvador.

234

Notes to Part 3 182. 183.

184.

185.

186. 187. 188. 189. 190.

191. 192.

Ibid. Colonel Romero’s more conventional military duties were performed with less elan; he was widely blamed, as chief army supply officer, when in 1969 advancing army and National Guard troops were brought to an abrupt halt some distance inside Honduras when munitions and other supplies were exhausted at the front. The contrast between the war records of Colonel Romero, who remained safely behind the lines in 1969, and Colonel Claramount, who led a force into Honduras, was made much of in military circles prior to the 1977 elections. President Sanchez Hernan¬ dez, however, never wavered in his staunch support for Romero. The two week trip was arranged by the US government’s International Visitor Program, see US Congress, Hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections ...”, p. 92. Romero remained close to the US military representatives in his country after he became President. When Romero informed the US government to expect a prompt .response on the Richardson case he did so via the Defence Attache: “President Romero told DATT over weekend that an official reply on Richardson case would be forthcoming by next Thursday” (Memorandum: Todman to Habib and Vance, 25 July 1977, op. cit.). Panorama, November 1977, citing £/ Grafico, 18 November 1977. Amnesty International Report 1978, p. 121. Higinio Alas, El Salvador: Por Que la Insurreccion. op. cit., p.72. Amnesty International Report 1978, p. 121. For an exhaustive study of the Public Order Law, see Latin America Bureau. El Salvador under General Romero, op. cit., the law was actually derogated in February 1979 (as inapplicable) in the final phase of violence and terror under Romero. Higinio Alas, op. cit., p. 198. Ibid., pp. 199-200, dind Amnesty International Report 1979, p. 62.

Chapter 12 193. 194.

195.

196. 197. 198. 199.

Embassy Despatch 21, 26 July 1960, to the International Co-operation Administration (later to become AID), and the Department of State. Ambassador Thorsten V. Kalijarvi described it as “an objective and wellbalanced appraisal of the needs of the security forces here and a wellreasoned estimate of the type and quantity of equipment that can be utilized”. (Foreign Service Despatch No. 62,7 September 1960, American Embassy, San Salvador to Department of State. Declassified through Freedom of Information Act request, June 1980.) Ibid., enclosure 1: Memorandum, 24 August 1960, to Thorsten V. Kalijarvi. Ambassador, Through: Colonel Miller, D/USOM, From: Herbert O. Har¬ din. Chief Latin American Branch PSD/ICA/W; David Laughlin, Chief Public Safety Adviser, Central America and Caribbean Area. USOM/ Honduras, Subject: Internal Security in El Salvador. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. International Co-operation Administration, Report on the National Police of the Republic of El Salvador, November 1956; declassified on 31

235

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

200.

201. 202. 203. 204. 205.

206. 207.

208. 209. 210.

211. 212. 213. 214. 215.

216. 217. 218. 219.

220.

236

October 1958. Ibid. The police establishment’s sophistication should not, however, be overestimated; in 1956, certain police methods were still of a traditionally primitive nature and provoked special comment in the ICA report: which describes the “sweat-boxes” in use at the National Police headquarters: "Special disciplinary facilities of the jail consist of six sweat boxes which force the prisoner to remain in an upright position. These boxes are con¬ structed of heavy planks, and air is admitted through holes bored in the box." Not to belabour the issue of Salvadorean brutality it should be noted that similiar "sweat boxes" were in use in some big-city detention centres in the United States at least until the 1930s. Hardin Report, op. cit. Memorandum, 24 August 1960 (ICA), p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. The Hardin report also noted that, despite its military organiza¬ tion. “it has limited value as an internal security force" (p. 4.). Ibid., p. 3. Ibid. Ibid., p. 7: “First year (FY 61) programming is too late for routine con¬ gressional presentation process, therefore, in view of the need for immediate action, special request should be made for SA funds. For sub¬ sequent years, routine program process should be followed". Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., pp. 5,6. The first year program was to be budgetted at $105,000; the second at $54,000. Principal costs were to be dedicated to grants of45 jeeps ($90,000) and communications equipment, including 56 mobile trans¬ ceivers and 5 Base transceivers ($30,300). Ibid., p. 8. Embassy Despatch No. 62, 7 September 1960, to State, op. cit. Cable US Embassy. 19 May 1961. “Assessment of Threat” by the "Washington Internal Security Assessment and Programming Team”, present May 5-9, 1961", op. cit. Ibid. Ibid. US Embassy, Cable to Department of State, “Analysis of threats to inter¬ nal security”. No. 698, 8 May 1961 (FOI Act request). Ibid. Department of State. Despatch No. 400, US Embassy to State. 19 May 1961. Donald P. Downs, Counselor, for the Ambassador. Secret, released through Freedom of Information Act request by the author. Termination Phase Out Report, op. cit., pp. 11-12. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., Attachment C. “Commodity Recap for El Salvador". A further recommendation was for MAP support for the provision of two coastal patrol craft, and development of a maintenance and repair facility to deal with "automotive, small arms, artillery, communications equip¬ ment, and optical instrument maintenance." considered a necessity “If any material aid offered to the Salvadorean Armed Forces, including the Public Security Forces, is to retain its effectiveness for a period approach¬ ing normal life expectancy ..." (pp. 4-5). Ibid. “... this Signal Support Company will provide each Salvadoran garrison and the army .. . with a mobile, flexible system of communica-

Notes to Part 3

221. 222.

223. 224. 225. 226. 227. 228.

229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234. 235.

236. 237. 238.

239. 240. 241. 242.

243.

tions between the garrisons and the field in both radio and wire. .. Per¬ sonnel to operate and maintain the proposed communication equipment can be obtained, with little more training, from the current Salvadoran Armed Forces .. Department of State, Despatch No. 44, US Embassy to State. 19 May 1961, op. cit., pp. 5-6. Ibid., pp. 5-6. The same source noted at the time that a mobile intelligence training team had been programmed for El Salvador for some time, but that “it was subsequently cancelled each time due primarily to lack of pro¬ per co-ordination at the Washington level (see Embassy Telegram 552 of March 9, 1961)". Ibid. Hardin report, op. cit., p. 4. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Termination Phase Out Report op. cit. In 1967 the Stewart Report indi¬ cates its force level was 87. Agency for International Development, Transmittal Statement: FY 19641965 Program Submission, El Salvador (17 September 1963), Section E-1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Stewart Report, op. cit. Ibid., op. cit.. p. 24. As in Guatemala, primarily, the rural poor were subject to military ser¬ vice; corruption ensured that the sons of the rural elites could buy exemp¬ tions from either conscription or alternative reserve service. In contrast to their Secciones de Investigaciones Criminales, (SIC) Criminal Investigation Sections. Stewart Report, op. cit. p. 24, Ibid. Stewart notes some concern that while Colonel Medrano’s "30,000 man military reservist informant network” channelled information to his group, “information received did not become directly available to the National Police or the Guard” (p. 24), and recommended “an attempt be made to make available to all agencies the intelligence collected by Colonel Medrano's group” (p. 25). Ibid., pp. 4, 5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid. ORDEN has certain historic antecedents. In the 1920s the MelendezQuinonez regimes official party,Partido DemocrdticoNacionalista, organized strong-arm supporters in the so-called “Liga Roja”, or “Red League ; largely composed of peasant farm-workers provided by large estate owners, and paid to disrupt oppositionist public meetings; they were also brought from the countryside and given free meals to attend rallies for the official party’s candidates. Text of 1967 speeches of President Sanchez and Colonel Jose Alberto Medrano to landowners’ association, mimeograph, undated.

237

Counter-Insurgency Emerges 244. 245. 246. 247. 248.

249. 250. 251. 252.

253.

254. 255.

256. 257.

258.

259.

260. 261.

238

Ibid. From Estudios Centroamericanos, San Salvador, January-February 1972, pp. 279-80. Text of 1967 speeches of Sanchez and Medrano, op. cit. Testimony of Fabio Castillo in US Congress, Hearings on “The Situation of Human Rights in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador”, op. cit. Alistair White, El Salvador, op. cit., p. 207 footnote. White estimated that ORDEN’s strength was “between, 50,000 and 100,000 in all probability”, other sources put the figure at 80,000. Ibid. Ibid., citing Stephan L. Rozman, “The Socialization of Military Rule in El Salvador”, University of Nebraska, mimeograph, 1974, p. 24. Ibid., quoting El Mundo, 18 December 1970. Major Gustavo Atilio Hernandez, “Guerra Irregular en el ambiente centroamericano”. Revista de la Escuela de Comandoy Estado Mayor, JanuaryMarch 1964, pp. 25-30. Major Manuel Alfonso Rodriguez, “iSera Efectiva la Defensa Movil Ante la Guerrilla?”, Revista de la Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor, AprilJune 1963. pp. 30-38. The author notes that existing Salvadorean army doctrine on counter-insurgency was defined in a two voiumo Manual de Contra-insurrreccion, FAT 1-1 and FAT 1-2; these documents have not yet come to light. Major Roberto Monge, “Guerrillas y Contra-Guerrillas”, Revista de la Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor, August 1964. Rodriguez, op. cit. Major Mofige makes the same allusion to guerrilla activity in conjunction with regular warfare against foreign aggression as his colleagues. Defining guerrilla warfare, the author declares; “Guerrilla [warfare] is an efficient procedure ... even though they [guerrilla forces] have their origin in remote times, they should be considered a new for¬ ce... The results guerrillas obtained during the last world war in Greece, Italy, Russia, the Balkans, Arabia, China and other European and Asiatic countries, have been so favourable that many military thinkers have put their attention to this new tactical procedure ...”. See note 253. Major Alfonso Rodriguez, “La Guerrilla y la Contra-guerrilla en la Guerra Revolucionaria”,7?evwra de la Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor, no, 10, January-March 1966. Office of Public Safety. Termination Phase-Out Study, Public Safety Project El Salvador, May 1974, pp. 3-6. This was a report assessing the Public Safety Program's work in El Salvador from its inception, prior to its closure in late 1974. Institute for Policy Studies, Resource, “Background Information on the Security Forces in El Salvador and US Military Assistance”, prepared by Cynthia Arnson, Washington, D.C. Office of Public Safety, Termination Phase-Out Study, op. cit, p. 2. Ibid., pp. 11-13. The National Police School was used almost exclusively for recruit training; the basic training course’s duration was initially six months, extended to 11 months at the time of the 1974 Phase-Out Study. Evidence that the police training establishment would retain close links with the US was provided in ongoing plans for English to be taught there:

Notes to Part 3

262. 263. 264. 265.

266. 267. 268. 269. 270. 271. 272. 273. 274.

275. 276. 211.

278.

“Included in the new curriculum, at the request of the National Police, is English language instruction provided by professors of the US/El Salvador Bi-National Center. The school graduates about 90 recruits per year." Ibid., p. 27. Ibid. Ibid., p. 8. US Congress. Hearings on "The Situation in El Salvador”, 1981: former Ambassador White, for example, singled out the Treasury Police, and particularly their commander, from 1979 to 1981, Colonel Moran, as the most bloodthirsty of security personnel; of Moran he said (p. 175) “He is a particularly regrettable example of a person who consciously uses troops to torture and kill people". Office of Public Safety. Termination Phase-Out Study, op. cit., pp. 1314. Ibid., p. 14. Stewart Report, op. cit. Office of Public Safety. Termination Phase-Out Study, op. cit, p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 27 for list of courses. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in El Salvador, op. cit, pp. 69-70. Ibid. All the cells were empty; the commission's delegates found, scratched on the door of one cell measuring 1 by 1 metres, the intitials of several people who had “disappeared” after detention, including those of Lil Milagro Ramirez Huezo, detained in November 1976 and never seen again. Stewart Report, op. cit Termination Phase-Out Study, op. cit, p. 10. Government publications commemorating the Expedition^ary Forces list Lt D’Aubuisson and Lt Castillo as having served under Medrano; both served as National Guard intelligence officers in the early 1970s; a third lieutenant serving under Medrano, Juan Bautista Garay, was reported to head the Custom’s Police “Special Investigations” section (SIE) under the Molina government (Lt Garay was described as a “communications” specialist in accounts of the 1969 war.) See for example La Guardia Nacional en Campaha, published in 1970 by the Ministry of Defense of El Salvador, p. 44, which notes that Lt Roberto D’Aubuisson commanded the 4th National Guard company. One account of D’Aubuisson and Castillo’s relation with Medrano comes from ERP guerrilla leader Ana Guadalupe Martinez’ book on her long months of secret captivity in the National Guard, in which she cites frequent conversations with both Castillo and D’Aubuisson (A.G. Martinez, Las Carceles Claudestinas de El Salvador, op. cit.pp. 234-6, 282-8). Her account should not be considered objective, but intended to contribute to her organization’s effort to overthrow the Romero regime, but much checks favourably against other sources of information. In particular, her accounts of interrogation sessions with Lt. Castillo and, on one occasion (July 1976) with then Captain D’Aubuisson from the intelligence service

239

Counter-Insurgency Emerges

279.

280. 281.

282. 283.

284.

285. 286. 287.

240

ANSESAL, rings true. Both are presented as rather decent chaps, trying to win her confidence by small kindnesses, leaving the brutal part of the interrogation process to others. D’Aubuisson is credited, for example, with having had her brought down from the Guard s secret fourth floor cells on New Year's Eve 1976, when he was celebrating the New Year and promotion to Major, with Lt. Castillo and other Guard officers, and giving her a transistor radio as a gift - much treasured by the fourth floor prisoners in subsequent weeks. D'Aubuisson is also credited with having sent out for special celebratory tamales for the “special" prisoners. Both officers are named in official lists of International Police Academy graduates. See for example Time, 5 April 1982, “A Einal Orgy of Insults , citing Christain Democratic Party campaign attacks on D'Aubuisson, in which “They reminded Salvadoreans that D'Aubuisson once confessed to hav¬ ing headed ANSESAL, the notorious Salvadorean political police, and charged that the ARENA leader had transformed the agency into 'an executioner and torturer". In fact ANSESAL's director under Romero was Colonel Roberto Santibanez, Major D'Aubuisson the deputy director. Interviews by the author, 1979. ANSESAL was run by the Presidential General Staff, a parallel military staff to the Army General Staff There is little in print describing ANSESAL's scope of operation; this section is based in part on a series of interviews in the course of 1979. Craig Pyes, “Right Built Itself in Mirror Image of Left for Civil War", in iht Albuquerque Journal, 18 December 1983. The division of responsibilities between ANSESAL and the army general staff headquarters, which maintained its own records and vetting system, remains obscure. In the Guatemalan case, described in Volume II, the army staff performs the key vetting/counter-intelligence role. Reference to this arrangement is made in the War Ministry's annual reports in the 1930s; e.g., the \93)% Memoria de Guerra, Marina y Aviacion, reports the following, partly explaining how control in the countryside was maintained with a relatively low active force level of the National Guard: “Certain persons and private enterprises also requested the services of the National Guard, to maintain order on their properties, guaranteeing to pay the extent of the salaries of the agents, in the form established in the Regulation of the body. These services, given prior authorization of the Ministry, are provided without affecting the regular personnel, as Reserve Guards are called for them; and in this manner the requests were satis¬ fied". No statistics are available on the numbers of reserve Guardsmen employed in this fashion then or in more recent years. Similar arrange¬ ments remain in effect in Guatemala, where members of the Policia Militar Ambulante not on active duty are detailed to serve private employers who pay their salaries. Licences for personnel to be employed by private security agencies repor¬ tedly also required clearance from - or registration with - ANSESAL. Statement by Junta member Guillermo Ungo after the “dissolution" of ORDEN was decreed, API 9 November 1979. In the purging of young officers supporting Colonel Adolfo Majano’s reformist politics a principal objective was to overcome Majano's control

Notes to Part 3

288. 289. 290. 291.

292.

of El Zapote and the military communications centre; this was achieved in October 1980. According Xo Latin America Regional Reports (24 October 1980) “One of Majano’s leading supporters. Colonel Julio Agushn Tru¬ jillo, commander of the armed forces’ communications centre at the Zapote barracks in San Salvador, had been earmarked to become military attache in Caracas". Although Colonel Trujillo held on for a matter of weeks he was eventually deposed. Interviews, 1979. See also Hernandez Pico et al, op. cit., for the role of ANTEL in the 1972 coup. See Part 4. Laurie Becklund, “Death Squads: Deadly ‘Other War’ ’’, in Los Angeles Times. 18 December 1983. In 1982, Colonel Nicolas Carranza, Vice-Minister of Defence in the first year after the October coup, was described as one’ of the particularly bru¬ tal officers whose removal from power was demanded by the Christian Democrats in December 1981 as a condition for collaboration in the military government: “A representative example of Christian Democratic impotence is that, in disregard for an agreement made when the Christian Democrats joined the junta, the armed forces retained in high posts two officers with especially brutal reputations. Colonel Francisco Moran con¬ tinued as head of the Treasury Police, a post he still holds. Colonel Nicholas Carranza, though replaced as Vice-Minister of Defense, was named head of the national telecommunications agency, ANTEL; if any¬ thing, this reassignment increased his power, in that ANTEL functions as the nation’s effective intelligence center.” From Americas Watch/ American Civil Liberties Union. Report on Human Rights in El Salvador. 1 July 1982, pp. 146-7. See also Daily Telegraph (London), 23 March 1984: “Colonel Nicolas Carranza ... has been in the pay of the CIA since the late 1970s, it was reported yesterday in New York. American officials familiar with CIA activities in El Salvador were quoted as saying the colonel had received more than $90,000 (£63,000) from the spy agency over the past five or six years. The Aw York Times reported that Colonel Carranza was recruited while he was Deputy Minister of Defence to pro¬ vide information on power struggles within the Salvadorean military, and on political and military developments." Laurie Becklund. op. cit.. 18 December 1983.

241

Part 4: Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

13. Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

Preparations to remove General Romero from the presidency without waiting for the 1982 elections probably began in the course of the serious strikes and widespread disorder in March through May 1979. Although influenced by the contemporary disintegration of the Somoza regime the Salvadorean officer corps had considerable previous experience in deposing the President of the day when the continuity of military rule was threatened by protests at misgovernment. To the Salvadoreans the demonstrations and strikes of early 1979 recalled the long last summer of the Lemus regime. In spring 1960 anti-Lemus demonstrators were elated with what was then the unique example of the victorious Cuban revolution, but mobilized against the regime for their own reasons. Protests had continued despite (or because of) bloody repression until, when matters threatened to get out of hand, the army itself moved in October 1960 to oust Lemus. Then, as in 1979, a controlled transition on the army's own terms was a logical response to the breakdown of public order, and a discredited President’s inflexibility and incapacity to restore order. In 1979, international factors — the new influence of human rights considerations on foreign relations, and the Nicaraguan revolution — helped to ensure that General Romero’s replacement was carried out with the full approval of the United States. In Nicaragua. Somoza had. in a sense, become “The State" and no serious option existed for maintaining the status quo without Somoza. The Salvadorean military, in contrast had a tradition of replacing officers serving as Presidents whenever they deemed it expedient. The US’s influence in El Salvador would be most decisive not in how General Romero was removed, but in what replaced him. Some planning for Romero s removal appears to have been in progress within the US foreign policy establishment even before the May 1979 troubles and panic as events in Nicaragua slipped wholly beyond United States power to influence them. Frank A. Devine, the US Ambassador to El Salvador at the time, has written that in March 1979. in San Jose, Costa Rica, a crisis-management meeting of US ambassadors to Central America and top officials of the State 245

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

Department and other agencies was held to discuss both the handling of the Nicaraguan revolution and its repercussions on the balance of power in the region. El Salvador was on the agenda as Xhcother Central American state facing imminent collapse.' Twice, in the months prior to Romero s overthrow. State Department officials Viron Vaky and William Bowdler- paid unpublicized visits to San Salvador and brusquely urged Romero to resign.' To US poliey makers the way to save El Salvador from the fate of Nicaragua was to pour in security assistance, after General Romero's replacement by a less unsavoury government To the Salvadorean officers Romero had become a liability because his international reputation for human rights violations preeluded security assistance and he was dragging the military into disrepute. The determining faetor in his removal, however, was that he was losing the war against subversion. By late September most of El Salvador knew a coup was brewing. In a speech to the US House of Representatives on 11 September — rapidly disseminated in San Salvador by the US Information Agency Assistant Secretary of State for Latin Ameriean Affairs "Viron Vaky ealled for a strategy more responsive to the demands for change in Central America and characterized El Salvador as the most likely Central American country to collapse under the pressure of these demands.'' Vaky's speech was widely interpreted in El Salvador as a warning to the Salvadorean military to put their house in order. Three days later US Presidential press spokesman Hodding Carter acknowledged to the press that on their visits to El Salvador Vaky and Bowdler had urged Romero to resign.'' As it became elear that he had to go, there was a process of internalconsultation and alliance-building within the armed forees which would determine the future course of the military government. One faetion was identified with senior army officers whose eareers had been spent largely as eommanders of the seeurity services and who were considered perhaps further to the right than Romero himself In the months leading up to the coup these officers were in the minority; the dominant faction, composed of middle and senior officers, clustered around a group of colonels with impeccable service records who combined experience in intelligence work with successive administrative positions as top executives in semi-autonomous state agencies, including the Salvadorean Coffee Board {Compahia Salvadoreha del Cafe) and the Industrial Finance Institute {Instituto Salvadoreno de Finanzas (INSAFI)). These officers, largely unknown to the public, while not further left than Romero, were not popularly associated with his regime's excesses. Within the cluster of officers plotting to oust Romero was an intermediate group of three officers who had been promoted full colonels in December 1977: Colonels Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, Jose Guillermo Garcia and Nicolas Carranza.^ All three belonged to 246

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

the same graduating class at the military academy, the basis for the army's tanda or clique system. They allied themselves with senior officers from oXhtrtandas, notably Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutierrez, who shared their conviction that to preempt a successful revolution Romero had to go. These four officers had all served as top executives of ANTEL {Administracion NacionaldeTelecomunicaciones) between 1974 and 1977,^ and represented a position of “realistic” conservatism. There was also a large group of junior officers who not only shared the general concern among the plotters that General Romero was losing control of public order and bringing the military into disrepute, but also wanted more than a change of faces in the Presidency. This group, who formed the loose Military Youth Movement, wanted more innovative solutions to the crisis of public order than an increase in state-generated bloodshed, and demanded a programme of fairly radical reforms be introduced by the next military government. Their spokesmen, who emerged in the intra-military negotiations leading to the coup, were Colonel Adolfo Majano, then director of the military academy, and Colonel Rene Guerra y Guerra. In the last weeks of September the Garcia-Carranza-Vides CasanovaGutierrez group of conservative army colonels came to an accom¬ modation with the young officers’ movement, and final arrangements were made to ensure a smooth transition after General Romero’s departure. A factor uniting the officer corps and speeding up their decision to oust Romero sooner rather than later was the creation, on 20 September, of a new coalition of opposition groups. This appeared to be an effective alliance of both the traditional, lawful, opposition parties, and important sectors of the non-party opposition represented by the popular organizations. Calling itself the Popular Forum {Foro Popular) the new body included 14 organizations, including three political parties (the Christian Democrats, the MNR and the UDN); the largest trade union federation (FENASTRAS) (itself the largest affiliate of the FAPU); the Ligas Populares; and several trade union groupings. The Popular Revolutionary Block was not included, but the Foro Popular may have seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of the alliance of disparate middle-class and labour organizations that preceded the fall of the Femus regime in 1960; even more disconcerting was the similarity to the much more recent coalescence of cross-class opposition to the Somoza regime, precipitated by the January 1978 assassination of opposition leader Pedro Joaquin Chamorro. In Nicaragua, Somoza’s heavy-handed handling of the crisis had united business and labour organizations, traditional middle-class political parties, and the armed opposition FSFN, into an unbeatable alliance bent on extirpating the Somoza dynasty. In El Salvador, at least in 1979, the opposition faced a much more flexible power structure than had Nicaragua, where refusal to give an inch brought about Somoza’s downfall, despite his strict obedience to counter-insurgency textbooks. El Salvador’s military 247

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

institution had no Somoza-father figure whose personal authority or sheer, crude power could enable him to retain control of the administration in spite of his obvious incapacity to maintain public order. On 11 October General Romero, unaccompanied by fanfare, and ostensibly for reasons of health, paid a flying visit to the United States. Whom he met there remains a matter of conjecture; he returned the next day. On 14 October his family flew to the US. That same night reports that a coup had taken place or was in process circulated both in San Salvador and in the international press.^ The following morning, 15 October, rebel officers were reported to control every military garrison, without a shot having been fired. Unlike previous coups, even the commanders of the security services had failed to organize resistance on the President’s behalf General Romero remained in the Presidential Mansion until late that afternoon, consulting with heads of the main garrisons by telephone, and, eventually, with the top army officers backing the coup who were gathered in the cuartel San Carlos in San Salvador. He formally capitulated at this point, agreeing to go quietly on condition that he and loyal officers, including some holding major posts in his government, were guaranteed their security. Collected by helicopter at about 4:30 pm at the Presidential Mansion General Romero and his most important supporters were flown to the airport to board a Guatemalan government aircraft which flew them out of the country.^ Almost before Romero had crossed the frontier, a series of decrees and accords (acuerdos) were issued from the Presidential Mansion by a new “Revolutionary Government Junta”, comprising Colonels Majano and Gutierrez, the rebel officers’ spokesmen. Decree No. 1 simply declared that it had removed from office President Romero, his ministers, members of the legislature and the Supreme Court and others, and had assumed legislative and executive powers. The new junta then issued “Accord No. 1” of 15 October 1979 to appoint (“making use of its constitutional powers”) Colonel Jose Guillermo Garcia as Minister of Defense and Public Security (Colonel later General Garcia, was the conservative officer who dominated the military establishment a/rJ the government for the next four years.) One source, quoting inside sources, describes a bargaining process which purportedly took place within the military before Romero’s overthrow. According to these sources a US official served as arbiter in the negotiation, and expressed a clear preference for making Colonels Garcia and Gutierrez the mainstay of the new order; also that the young officers’ movement “unanimously” chose Colonel Majano to serve on the junta, with Colonel Guerra y Guerra as their second choice — a choice not favoured by the US.'° From the first day of the coup the diverging political philosophies that had precipitated it — represented by the young officers headed by 248

Military' Coup: October 1979 — And After

Colonels Majano and Guerra y Guerra, and the seeurity system's old guard. Colonels Garcia and Gutierrez — were retlected in the eviction, by gunfire, of striking trade-unionists from factory sit-ins, and the new junta s statements. From the first, there were two strikingly different "15 October proclamations by the junta purporting to explain the reasons for General Romero's overthrow and outlining the new regime's orientation. Only the second broadcast at 2:40 am on 16 October, was subsequently published, under the title "Proclamation of the Armed Forces". This second proclamation, reHecting the Majanista faction's views, as well as US pressures in favour of a reformist orientation, became the new governmenfs official platform. The first proclamation, soon consigned to the dustbin, read over the radio in the late afternoon on 15 October, was couched in terms indistinguishable from other proclamations issued after traditional coups. The coup was justified by Romero's loss of control over the countiy. its state of "anarchy", and failure to obstruct the actions of "extremists": In view of the anarchic situation in the country, as a consequence of activities directed hy extremist elements, which the present government has proved incapable to resolve... Permitting a recurrence to violence as a means to resolve the political problems of the country, precipitating a possible confrontation of the armed forces with their people;.. the Armed Forces of El Salvador, reacting to the general clamor and in an eminently institutional function, depose the present government of the Republic in order to restore constitutional order."

Promises in this version of the "proclamation" were minimal and conventional; the Armed Forces would “establish the bases and environment appropriate for the establishment of a real and dynamic democracy" and create conditions for "free elections in which the will of all Salvadoreans will be reflected". A warning was issued to "extremists": Citizens, the Armed Forces will lead the destinies of the nation ... lor a prudent period... We make a call to the extremist forces of right and left, that they cease their violent attitude, because in the future, they will be able to participate peacefully in the democratic process of the country, respecting the will of the majority, which, we will reiterate, will be enforced by the Armed Forces.'-

The second proclamation, however, introduces the human rights issue, which it refers to as a motivation for the eoup, and outlines a programme of action including many of the Popular Forum s demands, as well as longstanding demands by the opposition parties MNR. UDN and the Christian Democratic Party. Some observers suspected that 249

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War leading civilian reformists, sounded out as potential civilian members of the post-coup government, had either drafted this second proclama¬ tion themselves or insisted on its more radical provisions being included as the price of their co-operation and participation in the new regime.'^ In the event Colonels Majano and Gutierrez s proclamation on 16 October made no reference to Romeros incompetence in crushing disorder, but stressed primarily his violation of human rights. Citing their "right to insurrection” the armed forces presented a series of reasons to justify their overthrow of the government; 1) 2)

It has violated the human rights of the conglomerate. It has fomented and tolerated the corruption of the Public Admini.s-

3) 4)

tration and of Justice. It has created a true social and economic disaster. It has brought into profound disrepute the nation and the noble institution of the armed forces.''^

In the second proclamation, the analysis of the roots of El Salvador s problems is surprisingly in accord with Roman Catholic social doctrines consistently disseminated at the time by the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) “Simeon Canas". whose rector. Dr Roman Mayorga. would be one of the three civilians to briefly join Colonels Majano and Gutierrez in a “Civilian-Military Junta": . . . the problems previously mentioned are the product of antiquated economic, social and political structures that have traditionally prevailed in the country, those which do not offer the majority of the inhabitants the minimum conditions necessary fortheirfull realization as human beings. LS

Structural changes responding to these traditional inequalities were to be considered after the country's “chaotic political and social situation” had been stabilized. At the same time emergency measures were promised: to create a climate of tranquillity and to establish the bases on which to sustain the profound transformation of the economic, social and political structures of the country.'^ In direct response to the Popular Forum's demands, promises were made to dissolve ORDEN. to guarantee respect for human rights, to declare an amnesty for political prisoners and exiles and to “create firm bases from which to initiate a process of agrarian reform”. On 17 October the army announced the incorporation of three civilians into the junta. UCA rector Roman Mayorga was described as the junta's liberal civilian technocrat; the Popular Forum selected Guillermo Ungo, MNR leader and a UCA professor, as its representative.

250

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

over the Christian Democrats' proposal of Antonio Morales Erlich. The third civilian was Antonio Andino. considered the representative of the entrepreneurial private sector. Investigative journalist Carolyn Forche, in a June 1980 article for The Nation, noted that Andino's appointment to the junta placed four individuals closely associated with ANTEL in top positions in the new government: With the naming of Andino, a pattern emerged, possibly providing a clue to the rationale for American support of Garcia and Gutierrez. Both had been associated with Antel, El Salvador's telephone and telegraph company. Garcia had been its former president, Gutierrez had been a manager. Col. Nicolas Carranza, Garcia's second-in-command [as Deputy Defense Minister] had been a technical manager. Andino was associated with an electrical installations firm, Conelca, a subsidiary of Phelps-Dodge Corporation. Conelca was the major supplier of cable to Antel.'^

The Cabinet appointments, on 22 October, represented a wide political spectrum. The Christian Democrats were represented by Hector Dada as Foreign Minister, Ruben Zamora (today a key figure in the Salvadorean opposition and regularly described as a “guerrilla spokesman'') as Minister of the Presidency, and three others in ministerial posts. The Social Democrats (MNR) won four ministries. Unprecedented appointments were those of nominees of the UDN, the Salvadorean Communist Party's thinly disguised front. Much criticized by the right — these were authentic “card-carrying" Communists — the UDN's agreement to join the government was criticized with similar vehemence by some of its own members, and by others further to the left as lending credibility to a military government bent primarily on more efficient repression. Most of the civilians appointed to the new Cabinet resigned en masse in the first days of January 1980. But why did men of the moral stature of Mayorga, Ungo, Zamora or Dada agree to join the government at all? And why did they remain as long as they did? In El Salvador's most recent experience of reformist coups, those of October 1961 and March 1972, idealistic young officers had pursued similar stated aims to those proclaimed in October 1979, and won the support of liberal-left civilian sectors. In both cases, however, the reformist initiatives were vigorously opposed not only by the old guard of the armed forces and the civilian elites, but by the United States. If, instead of encouraging its overthrow, the US had supported the abortive impulses of social and political reform of the October 1960 “Civil-Military Directorate", some reform might possibly have come of it. In the aftermath of the October 1979 coup, liberal and leftist civilians allowed themselves to be persuaded into joining the government, believing that young* officers with similar 251

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

inclinations to those who took power after Lemus’ fall in October 1960, and who sought to defend the democratic process in 1972, had gained ascendancy in the newly formed government. If the dominant force within the armed forces really was the large group of “Movement of Military Youth” officers represented by such middle-ranking officers as Colonel Adolfo Majano, there was some hope that the new government would honour its proclaimed “revolutionary” aims. Not until midDecember did the military conservatives, headed by Defense Minister Garcia, finally marginalize the young officers loyal to reformist principles and to Colonel Majano. If the eager reformism of the young officers appeared authentic, a supporting factor, suggesting that the new military government would actually keep its initial promises, was the public posture of the United States. The October 1960 military reformists who likewise invited leading liberal and leftist academics and politicians to join the government had faced the undisguised opposition of the United States, and were soon brought down by a counter-coup. Since 1978, however, leaders of El Salvador's legal opposition parties had been encouraged by the Carter government’s vocal condemnation of the Romero regime’s human rights record, and its calls for significant political-economic reforms presented as an urgent necessity to stave off revolution. In the months before the October coup, Vaky and Bowdler.'^ on their flying visits, had directly transmitted to opposition party leaders the notion that once Romero was out of the way, the US would support the moderate opposition parties’ platform. Civilian leaders thus joined the government in the belief that a dominant sector of the armed forces was sincerely committed to a serious reform programme, and ihat Carter’s administration would support such a programme. Despite the escalation of government violence against labour and political opposition groups immediately after the coup (the security services killed more Salvadoreans in the first month of the “reformist” regime than in the first nine months of 1979) the liberal and left-wing civilians stayed in government for ten long weeks, until the beginning of 1980, watching from the sidelines as a power struggle was played out within the military. Periodically, concessions won by the Majanista reformist faction were served up to the civilians, and. for a time, seemed to justify their support for the junta. On 29 October, the junta created a special commission to investigate the practice of torture, and the situation of political prisoners and an estimated 300 “disappeared” persons. The commission was given full authority to demand access to detention facilities, and security services’ assistance in its activities and requested to report on its findings within 60 days.'*^ Despite the obstruction (not assistance) offered by the security services the commission carried out its task admirably. It subsequently reported the discovery of 67 unidentified bodies and of 25 bodies it had identified as those of “disappeared” prisoners. In its final report, presented on 3 252

Military Coup: October 1979

—

And After

January 1980, the members of the commission also presented their resignations, citing the new government's failure to act upon their recommendations and naming individual officers it had recommended prosecuted for criminal offences against political prisoners. The commission also reported that it had found none of those reported “disappeared” alive, but had “proof of the capture of many of them, by various public security forces, or, in several cases, of their detention in the barracks of the same forces.. Noting that “We have found a great quantity of cadavers, among which those that have been identified correspond to disappeared persons. . the commission concluded that the outstanding “disappeared" of the Romero regime should be considered to have died in security forces’ custody. Initially interpreted as a concession to one of the leff s more pressing demands and an indication of the new regime's good faith, the security forces’ lack of collaboration, the special commission’s failure to locate any living political prisoners and the military’s refusal to take action against the officers reported responsible for torturing and murdering the prisoners, rebounded upon the military. On 3 January the commission’s letter of resignation protested that to continue their investigations or present further recommendations was futile without the co-operation of the military. A second concession granted by the new government was to accede to the demand that ORDEN be dissolved; this coincided with a recommendation made in the 1978 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Although ORDEN’s dissolution took place on paper only, the decree was. at the time, thought a major triumph for the civilians in the new government. Decree No. 12 of 6 November, after all, had declared ORDEN “dissolved” and henceforward acts done in its name “illegal”.-- Civil and military authorities using ORDEN to perform their duties would be considered guilty of “abuse of authority”. Perhaps most promising was the revocation of ORDEN members photo-ID cards, which extended a wide range of privileges to the bearer: The identification cards issued by ORDEN are declared without value, and their use prohibited in the carrying out of any act. Civil and military authorities are obliged to confiscate such documents from any person that seeks to make use of them.^^

In spite of Decree 12 ORDEN was not dissolved, although some gestures were made in that direction. Furniture and archives were removed from its offices in the Casa Presidencial compound and. according to Guillermo Ungo, 40 ORDEN staff members were taken off the Casa Presidencial payroll.But meanwhile ORDEN remained intact and operational under the control of the Defense Ministry and ANSESAL. Within a year its local security groups would re-emerge as 253

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

Civil Defense Groups. At the same time their role changed from that of electoral guarantors for the official party and passive informants on local affairs to that of active service guides and gunmen in the counter¬ insurgency offensive launched in early 1980. Both the toothless inquiry into the security services’ past torture and murder and the ineffective decree “dissolving” ORDEN provoked instead of assuaged anti-junta passions, but some economic measures in November and December 1979 bought the junta a little more time. In November decrees lowered the prices of certain basic foods — maize, beans, rice and eggs — by about 40% by setting official maximum prices and providing for temporary closure of establishments found to be overcharging.^'^ On 15 November a minimum wage was set for agricultural workers in the cotton and sugar harvests.^^ An even more encouraging apparent commitment to real reform was Decree 43 of 7 December, which froze all sales or transfers of agricultural properties of more than 100 hectares, a measure described as preparatory to the implementation of an agrarian reform.-^ Intended to prevent a hurried subdivision of large properties into small holdings registered under different names, less likely to be affected by a reform aimed at only the largest units of land, the measure was an essential precondition for even the meagre agrarian reform measures later introduced. Minister of Agriculture Enrique Alvarez (later head of the opposition to the military government, and detained and put to death) praised Decree 43 in a lengthy televised speech on 11 December. Dr Alvarez said that the decree would affect about 2,000 rural property owners whose land covered over 800,000 manzanas (1.7 acres), almost half the arable land of El Salvador.-^ While junta members Ungo and Mayorga succeeded in pushing through these reformist measures the security forces continued to systematically kill suspected members and sympathizers of the popular organizations and other groups that had opposed Romero’s regime. A rising curve of deaths from 15 October through the end of the year rendered the junta’s proclamations and reformist decrees essentially meaningless, except as cosmetic devices to retain uncritical foreign support for the regime. The institutional violence also signalled to the popular organizations — the main target of repression — that there could be no common ground between them and the “new” military regime, whether or not it included civilians.

Strikes, Demonstrations and Machine-guns Erom the beginning the three largest opposition groups, the Popular Revolutionary Block {Bloque Popular Revolucionario (BPR)), the tradeunion based FAPU and the Popular Leagues {Ligas Populares 28 de Febrero (LP-28)) refused to collaborate with the new regime. Although 254

Military Coup: October 1979

—

And After

FAPU’s largest affiliate, the trade union federation FENASTRAS, was a member of the Popular Forum and participted in selecting its representatives to participate in the new government, FAPU and the Bloque Popular as such did not participate in the Forum, preferring to bide their time before either expressing support or launching organized opposition to the junta. The Bloque did not immediately declare itself in opposition, but its trade union affiliates continued industrial action in San Salvador manufacturing plant that had been under way since the previous March, with workers occupying the Lido, Arco Engineering, Apex, Sherwin Williams, Diana and other factories. Had the military ever intended to seek a rapprochement with the popular organizations (and in retrospect it appears they did not) the National Guard operations on 16 October, dislodging strikers from every occupied factory, might have ensured its failure. The Guard killed at least 18 strikers in the process and arrested 78, many of them later badly tortured.^* As factory workers were fired on troops moved in the countryside to evict peasants conducting sit-ins in rural properties. Within a week of the so-called reformist coup which raised so many expectations at least 100 strikers and demonstrators were reported shot dead in cold blood by the security forces.^^ While the Bloque and EAPU reserved their decision during those first days of the new regime, the People’s Revolutionary Army {Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP)), the guerrilla organization most closely associated with LP-28, responded to the coup with abortive attempts to take over slum areas in the cities of Mejicanos, Soyapango and San Marcos, and Cuscatancingo, attempts suppressed by troops at the cost of some 50 lives.^° The three popular organizations responded to the rash of killings in the first week of the new regime with a series of mass demonstrations demanding an end to the violence and the release of political prisoners. The Bloque also occupied the Ministries of Labour and Economy for several days, suffering four deaths when the Labour Ministry was strafed with machine-gun fire on 26 October. Mass street demonstrations were the characteristic gesture of opposition to the new regime in the weeks after the coup, although, by December 1979, the shooting down of unarmed demonstrators brought disillusionment. In a typical incident EAPU organized a funeral procession for two slain militants on 22 October; this in turn was attacked, and six more killed. The greatest single death toll was on 29 October when a demonstration organized by the LP-28, but including supporters from all the opposition groups, was attacked and up to 70 marchers killed.^' LP-28 militants dragged the bodies of 21 of their own people away from the carnage and sought sanctuary in the Church of El Rosario, where they spent the night. The next day the central cemeteiy of San Salvador was found to be surrounded by troops; the planned funeral march to bury the dead was called off and the dead buried in the atrium of the church.^^ On 31 October the Bloque led a demonstration of tens of thousands 255

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

through the streets of the capital. It, too, was attacked, with a death toll of up to 29P At the end of the first two weeks in power the new regime had presided over the murder of more than 100 strikers and demonstrators in San Salvador alone. The lesson appeared to be that since the coup, supporters of the popular organizations, and even of less radical member organizations of the Popular Forum, could be shot down openly in the streets or fall victim to more selective assassination in their homes or workplaces. Despite the slaughter, the popular organizations continued to carry out sit-ins in churches and plazas throughout the capital. The church of El Rosario remained occupied by the Popular Leagues, that of El Calvario by FAPU, the Cathedral by the Bloque, the Plaza Morazan by UDN supporters, and the Plaza Libertad by the Committee of Mothers of Political Prisoners.^"^ The Bloque also held out in its occupation of the Ministries of Labour and Economy, with newly appointed ministers and some leading coffee growers held hostage to their demands until 7 November. They withdrew, offering a 30-day “truce" when the junta made some economic concessions, including an agreement to lower basic food prices, not to raise the price of urban transport, and to dissolve ORDEN.^^ In the countryside, November marked the beginning of the coffee harvest and a new round of protests and repression. The junta decree declaring a minimum wage for coffee harvesters should have relaxed tensions to some degree, but landowners’ almost universal noncompliance provoked instead widespread sit-ins in demand of the full guaranteed wage.-^^ Repression of peasant protests in mid-December in many parts of the countryside indicated clearly that nothing had changed in the rural areas, just as the machine-gunning of demonstrators and strikers had rendered talk of reform meaningless in the cities. A sit-in in a coffee plantation near the eastern city of Berlin, in support of a demand for the statutory minimum wage and daily food ration, was attacked with gunfire in combined army. National Guard and ORDEN-backed operations in which at least 15 peasants were shot dead, 20 dragged off and “disappeared”, and dozens wounded.^^ The same day combined forces attacked protesters at a coffee plantation near Opico where workers were making the same demands; the death of eight of the protesters was acknowledged by the authorities.^® In a third incident, on 18 December, troops backed by armoured cars and helicopters attacked a group of about 1.500 protesters on the coffee plantation “El Porvenir", some 25 kilometres north of San Salvador, killing at least 100.^'^ A wave of attacks on urban trade unionists rounded out the picture. Sit-ins were terminated by gunfire at the national printing office (11 December), the Minerva textile factory (15 December), a slaughter¬ house north of San Salvador (18 December), the electrical supply factory CONELCA (19 December) and the soft-drink bottling plant 256

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

“Tropical” (19 December). Towards the end of December the bodies of trade unionists detained in earlier police actions began to appear in the capital's streets and vacant lots. Those of two leaders of trade union federations FUSS and CUTS, arrested at the FUSS office in Santa Ana on 17 December, were found, badly mutilated, on the 19th. The body of CONELCA union leader Raid Martinez, detained on 19 December, was found on the 24th together with that of Manuel Marroquin, leader of a union of workers of the Goltree Liebes coffee export company who had been detained on 23 December. Both bodies, naked and covered with burns, were found in plastic bags, some 20 kilometres from San Salvador. Many more were found dead, or “disappeared” for ever in the same period.'**’ By the end of December 1979 there was little to distinguish the human rights record of the junta from the practices of Romero's regime. If anything, the new government seemed even more determined to smash the popular organizations, the radical trade unions, and the peasant organizations than had General Romero.

The Counter-coup On 7 December, civilian ministers and top officials first formally expressed their dismay at the governmenf s failure to take positive steps to implement promised reforms in the economic field or halt the on¬ going massacre of opposition groups. But if, initially, the new government had been willing to make concessions — at least on paper — the climate was changing as the balance of power shifted among the real rulers: the representatives of the armed forces. The consolidation of control by the Minister of Defense and the army high command was initially held back not by the civilian members of the junta, armed only with their moral authority, but by the young officers of the Military Youth Movement, and their leader. Colonel Majano. The Permanent Council of the Armed Forces {Consejo Permanente de las Fuerzas Armadas (COPEFA)), created in mid-November as a “democratic” body representing the various units of the armed forces, underwent a gradual purge of the young reformist officers who desired real struc¬ tural changes, instead of bullets, to pacify the opposition. On 18 December the 100 or so officers of COPEFA met the army high command in the military academy; when the meeting adjourned the COPEFA leadership had been shuffled: out with the reformists, in with the officers loyal to Defense Minister Garcia and the rest of the old guard. As Estudios Centroamericanos described the event in its “monthly chronicle”: The counter-coup was consumated on 18 December. . . COPEFA was

257

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War restructured, with men loyal to the new command, and the revolutionary initiative was over.^'

This restoration of the old guard was described to Carolyn Forche by a member of the Military Youth Movement as the natural restoration of institutional order in the wake of the coup: Once the coup was accomplished, there was a regression to institutional order within the military, Garcia was in charge and still is. ‘What happened to COPEFA?', I asked him. ‘Colonel Marenco is head of that now. He is Chele Medrano s'^- nephew and protege. He reorganized COPEFA in a few months. Eighty percent of its membership changed, all ofthem loyal to Garcia. He added that'Garcia is not one of us. What you hear about the repression is true, and it comes from Garcia's group.''*^

With its own ranks again under control the high command could deal more confidently with its nervous civilian partners. There would be no more concessions. Rather than being summoned by the civil-military junta, the army command took to summoning the junta Finally, after secret talks with the Christian Democrats: On the 26th [of December} the High Command again summoned the Junta and the Cabinet, and some top officials, in a show of arbitrary power, and threw in the face of the civilians the statement that they were only there because the military had put them there, and because they needed them [the military]. That was the detonator, as the civilians were not disposed to ... be exploited in a plan of military dictatorship and repression.'*^*

In the following days the majority of the civilian ministers and top officials met and drafted a manifesto addressed to COPEFA. Dated 28 December, this was an ultimatum, and demanded a response by 30 December. The main grievance was betrayal of the principles stated in the armed forces “proclafnation” of 16 October, which had motivated civilians to participate in the government in the first place. The betrayal was attributed to a rapid displacement of reformist officers from the line of command, a measure of the inability of civilians in the government to exercise the least control over the army high command’s decisions: The present high command of the Armed Forces is not the command with which an agreement was originally made to implement a new political program. The heads of the Ministry of Defense and some of the Commanders of Military offices are in practice exercizing Military Command over the heads of the Junta and counter to the proposals originated by the Military Youth Movement. This shift of power has

258

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After meant the political process has gone to the right; an organic, political and military strengthening of the oligarchic forces ... a political strengthening of the civil and military positions that identify as the fundamental enemy of the process the popular organizations and explicitly postulate a strategic alliance with the economic and political right of the nation, forgetting that it was precisely these right wing interests that have led the country into crisis. .

The problem was seen to reside in the Defense Ministry's overriding power and the isolation of the junta — or, at least, its civilian members — from command or even consultation on the functions of the army and the security services. The solution proposed by the civilians was that COPEFA, still nominally a representative body of army officers, become the intermediary between the junta (and the Cabinet) and the rest of the armed forces, over the head of the Ministry of Defense. If COPEFA had not already been purged of young officers this tactic might have worked. What the civilian members of the junta were demanding was straightforward, and an indispensable prerequisite for real change; that the junta be given power over the armed forces and that the armed forces officially recognize it; in fact they demanded a proclamation to that effect — a demand that, as the Garcia faction had already succeeded in getting rid of the young opposition within the armed forces, and held every card, had little chance of success. Further calls by junta members for COPEFA to take steps to stop “the intervention of the public forces in the current labour and union conflicts" had no more chance of being taken seriously. By the time the manifesto was issued. COPEFA was no longer a forum of young or middle-rank progressive officers. COPEFA’s written response not only refused to take steps to change the existing situation but refused to recognize the premises on which the demands were founded. It stated that the only channel of communication with the armed forces was the Ministry of Defense. Furthermore, by means of a reference to the 16 October “proclamation”, COPEFA made a barely veiled threat against those unhappy with the way the army was running the country: ... we invited participation in the process of democratization and the change of economic and social structures without distinction. Neverthe¬ less. the minority extremist organizations, ultra-rightists and ultra-leftists refused to participate and [now] obstruct the process, and should be considered counter-revolutionaries. It is the obligation of the people and their Armed Forces to defend their conquests and prevent the destruction of the republic and, furthermore, of the armed institutions.'^^

On 2 January, five civilian ministers and junior ministers, including Salvador Samayoa, Minister of Education, and Enrique Alvarez Cordova, Minister of Agriculture, presented their resignations. Both 259

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

subsequently became leaders of the unified opposition. On 3 January, 24 more civilian ministers, senior officials and Supreme Court magistrates, including junta members Guillermo Ungo and Roman Mayorga Quiros, also resigned. In the following days they were joined by Mario Andino, although for different reasons. The representative of private enterprise presented his resignation in tacit recognition of a change of government, in order “to give the Armed Forces complete liberty in restructuring a new governmenf’. Private chats with the Christian Democrats, previously referred to, now bore fruit. With somewhat indecent haste the Christian Democrats presented themselves to the military as civilian replacements. Already, on 31 December, three days after COPEFA’s response to the ultimatum of the 28th, the Christian Democrats issued their own manifesto. In substance this was a programme of reforms which differed little from those already promised in the young officers' 16 October proclamation. No mention was made of practical measures needed to implement the reform, nor of effective means to stop the security forces' on-going war of extermination against the non-guerrilla popular opposition. By 9 January the military regime had accepted Christian Democrats Hector Dada and Antonio Morales Erlich as members of the junta. They were joined by a third civilian, a political nonentity. Dr Ramon Avalos. Archbishop Romero, who had not lost his interest in politics, in his weekly sermon that Sunday expressed surprise that the army had so willingly accepted the Christian Democrats' reform platform in spite of having obstructed the implementation of a totally similar platform by the previous government. No innocent, he said: I hope this is not just a matter ofwords... Ifit is true that the new Junta and the Armed Forces are disposed to confront the oligarchy, and distribute the wealth and the land more equitably, actions will prove iC^

Hector Dada remained on the junta for only a few weeks, resigning on 3 March after the murder of Christian Democratic colleague Mario Zamora, who. for as brief a period, had served as Attorney General of this second junta. Mario Zamora had been labelled in a television appearance by former intelligence chief Roberto D'Aubuisson as a collaborator of the EPL guerrillas; three days later plain-clothes men crashed into his house during a party, grabbed him at gunpoint and shot him dead in his own bathroom."^^ Hector Dada and his fellow Christian Democrats had no doubt that the killers acted with the knowledge and acquiescence, or under direct orders, from the Ministry of Defense. They realized other Christian Democrats could be next on the death list. In his resignation statement Dada expressed dismay at the acceleration of killings by the security services, and doubted there was any reason to expect that the army would initiate the negotiations with the popular 260

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

organizations, which had been part of the deal with the Christian Democrats, justifying their entry into the government Hector Dada, who had been head of the party during the lengthy exile of Napoleon Duarte thereupon declared that those leaders of the party who continued to collaborate with the military regime did so in defiance of the wishes of the party's membership, and explicitly declared them renegades, trahors and outcasts: . . . the Christian Democratic leaders Jose Napoleon Duarte, Antonio Morales Erlich and Adolfo Rey Prendes are alone and isolated, the Christian Democratic rank and file are retiring from the governmenD'^

On 10 March, six Christian Democrats resigned not only from the government, but from the party. Among them were Dr Roberto Lara Velado, know n as the founder of the party. Hector Dada, and Ruben Zamora Rivas. They took much of the party's membership with them, founding a breakaway party led by Dada and Zamora; the Popular Social Christian Movement (MPSC). The puzzling decision of Jose Napoleon Duarte, former leader of the Christian Democrats (who had been defeated in fraudulent presidential elections and lived in exile for many years, perhaps losing touch with events within the country) to join the third junta, and the founding of a breakaway party by Dada and Zamora, marked the end of the Christian Democratic Party as a mass movement in El Salvador. One of the main arguments of opponents of collaboration with the October 1979 junta was that, in the long history of so-called “reformist" coups led by young officers, all, in the end, had failed to deliver on their promises, and/or been ousted as effective governments. This latest coup, moreover, looked suspiciously like a pre-emptive coup, intended to save the old order just as it was about to be overthrown from below, by the mass movements themselves. The repression of the mass organizations that immediately followed the coup tends to confirm this interpretation; it also forced the opposition to face the new military government as a united front. On 11 January 1980 the three major popular organizations —• Bloque Popular. FAPU and LP-28 — and some member organizations of the Foro Popular came together in a meeting held at the National University to form the Coordinadora Revolucionaria deMasas (CRM) (Revolutionary Coordinator of the Masses). In a sermon that week Archbishop Romero described the creation of the new coalition as: ... the first step to unity between the popular organizations... a National Coordinator that is inviting the participation of all the progressive forces of the nation. It makes me happy that they wish finally to break with sectarian and partisan interests. .

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Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

The CRM's first public act was a mass demonstration, called for 22 January, to demand a halt to repression. Attracting between 200 and 300,000 marchers, it took place against determined opposition from the security forces and sectors of the agrarian elite backing the newly createcl Broad National Front (Frente Amplio Nacional (FAN)). In a mass media campaign Major D’Aubuisson was particularly strident in exhorting the far right to assist the security services in halting the demonstration.^' The contribution made by plantation owners to the march’s disruption was the provision of crop dusters which flew along the route of the miles long procession dousing marchers with DDT. The light aircraft then refuelled, courtesy of the Salvadorean Air Force, at Ilopango airport. Not until the mass of demonstrators had nearly filled the cathedral square in front of the National Palace was the march fired upon. Snipers in the windows of the National Palace and on the rooftops of ANTEL and other government buildings began firing at about 1 pm. At least 21 demonstrators were killed and 120 seriously wounded.-'’^ These killings, like those attributed to “death squads”, were said by the authorities to have been perpetrated by “outraged private citizens” and described as a response to violence by demonstrators themselves. After the 22 January march the CRM renounced mass demonstra¬ tions by unarmed sympathizers as a means of political expression. The CRM's next major action was a 24-hour general strike on 17 March. This too was met with indiscriminate killing of the strikers and a warning by the junta that those who supported the opposition were taking sides in a war. Although broadly supported throughout the country the strike laid supporters open to retaliatory violence; 54 people were killed in San Salvador alone. The Coordinadora proved that it had the allegiance of the workers, but was still unable to protect them adequately; 54 people were killed in San Salvador on the day of the stoppage. The scale of military operations in the city was as great as if there had been an insurrection. Dr. Avalos, the junta’s medical 'independent', warned that 'activists must be willing to vanquish or die. just as in any other type of war'.^-^

It is hard to understand why the mass opposition groups took so long to realize the military had declared war upon them immediately after the October coup. The strikes and demonstrations which had been used to force Martinez and Lemus from office in 1944 and 1960 were no longer relevant. The very success of these tactics in Nicaragua helped ensure their failure in El Salvador. The assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, more than any other single act of repression against unarmed opposition, was, however, necessary to force the people of El Salvador to understand that the terms of confrontation had changed, that civil war had been declared against them and they must 262

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

indeed be prepared to “vanquish or die”. Archbishop Romero’s assassination eliminated the most eloquent voice in support of a middle way. calling for compromise between polarized camps, and removed the backbone of the Roman Catholic church as an institutional defender of human rights in El Salvador. It also removed an important critic of the armed forces who appealed to the conscience of its members and therefore posed a real threat to its discipline and hierarchy. While Archbishop Romero's attempted disruption of Salvadorean efforts to attract American security assistance was no minor consideration, potentially, the much greater problem for the high command was his appeal, in broadcast sermons, to the members of the armed forces to disobey orders when ordered to torture and kill; and, too, reminding the lower ranks that, after all, they shared the same social background as most of their victims. In a 20 January sermon the Archbishop read out a letter he had received from a group of soldiers, listing the lower ranks' grievances and asking him to make it public and support their requests. The letter was devoted partly to bread and butter issues: better food; that the officers stop abusing them with blows and insults; higher pay than the current equivalent of US $8-12 monthly; and higher life insurance. More telling were protests concerning what their officers ordered them to do: They should not send us to repress the population; they should explain why they send us to fight; the Armed Forces are made up of us troopers, of chiefs and of officers, and it is only the chiefs and officers that are responsible for all of the oppression against the people.^^

Finally the letter called on “the workers, peasants and students and all of the union and popular organizations" to support the soldiers’ demands, offering in return to take responsibility: “.. .to create an army that protects and defends the interests of the people and not of the rich. . On 23 March, in the last of his Sunday broadcast sermons, the Archbishop returned to the subject: I wish to make an appeal of a very special kind to the men of the army, and concretely, to the lower ranks in the National Guard, the Police, in the barracks. . . In the face of an order to kill given by a man. the law of God must prevail which says: Do not Kill. No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God.... It is past time that you restore your consciences and that you obey your consciences and not an order to sin.^^

The Archbishop continued, with one last challenge to the Army high command: Christians have no fear of combat; they know how to fight but they prefer 263

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War the language of peace. Nonetheless, when a dictatorship gravely attacks human rights, the common welfare of the nation; when it becomes insupportable and all channels of dialogue, understanding and rationality are closed, when this occurs, the Church speaks of the legitimate right to insurrectional violence.-^*^

Archbishop Romero was going beyond anything he had previously said to the nation, and may well have done so on that particular Sunday because he believed it would be his last opportunity. There is considerable reason to believe he had been warned of an imminent assassination attempt, urged to flee to another country, urged to end his Sunday broadcasts and save his life. In previous sermons he had spoken of fear, of death, of martyrdom; in his last 23 March, sermon, he speaks of his own death in a manner which seems to reflect more than a mere presentiment; it is, in fact a testament: I have been threatened with death frequently. I should say. that as a Christian I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the Salvadorean people. 1 say this without the least pride. With the greatest humility. As a pastor I am obliged by divine mandate to give my life for those I love, who are all of the Salvadoreans, even for those that come to murder me. Should they come to fulfd their threats, from this moment I offer to God my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador... A bishop will die, but the Church of God, that is the people, will never perish... I know that my hour approaches and I foresee that my mission will not end, but will begin. I wish to stay on the earth until the end of the world, to stand by all men, fighting with them for their liberation. I cannot rejoice and cannot rest until all men are liberated. When history ends, and the liberation is total, then I will repose with all of those chosen to do so and 1 will enjoy forever the happiness of God.^^

He had not long to wait for martyrdom. He was shot dead with a single .22 calibre bullet through the heart, at 6 pm on Monday 24 March, as he was celebrating a memorial mass in a hospital chapel. A single plain-clothes gunman stood in the back of the dimly lit chapel and fired the bullet from a rifle equipped with a “Starlight” night vision telescopic sight. Four days later nearly 100,000 mourners, including dozens of foreign bishops and high church dignataries, gathered in the cathedral square for his funeral serv'ice. True to form, Salvadorean troops fired into the crowd killing at least 40. The slaughter was witnessed by clergy and assorted press men from around the world. Government press releases, denying troops had been in the area, were refuted in interviews with witnesses and by a joint communique signed by bishops and clergymen from many countries, stating emphatically that the crowd of mourners had been fired on (as earlier, on 22 January) by machine-guns from the second floor of the National Palace.^" 264

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

In the immediate aftermath of the Archbishop's bloody funeral, organized opposition to the military regime reached the final stages of unification. On 1 April leaders of the Popular Social Christian Movement — founded by Christian Democrat ex-cabinet members Ruben Zamora and Hector Dada — joined forces with the socialdemocrat MNR and several independent labour organizations, and constituent organizations of the Coordinadora to form the Democratic Revolutionary Front (Frente Detnocrdtico Revolucionario (FDR)).^' Members of this new broad Front elected as their president former Minister of Agriculture Enrique Alvarez Cordova, and adopted the Coordinadora's compromise platform relatively intact, a platform designed to ensure support and membership from all sectors of the opposition. The unification in the FDR of the political parties, labour federations and mass popular movements was paralleled by a rapprochement between the various guerrilla organizations. Representatives of the various guerrilla groups met on 22 May and founded a unified “political-military command", the Unified Political and Military Revolutionary Command (Direccion Revolucionaria Utiijicada PoliticoMilitar (DR\J-PM))f- In December 1980 a further step was taken with the creation of a single guerrilla organization, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front {Frente de Liberacion Nacional Farabundo Marti (FMLN)). The FMLN, which added to the previous DRU-PM members the small Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers {Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores Centroamericanos (PRTC)), would operate as a single force, under the direction of a unified command — still called the DRU — comprising 15 members, three from each member organization. A general staff was to be appointed and four military zones established, each with its own revolutionary “front”. From the beginning, the member organizations declared their intention to have close relations with the FDR. The reaction to the repeated massacres of protesters and, finally, the murder of a beloved Archbishop were not, therefore, spontaneous uprisings by the people, too easily stamped out. If the Coordinadora (predecessor of the FDR) had not yet been organized at the time of Archbishop Romero’s murder, the popular organizations on their own might have indulged in sporadic riots or uprisings, to be crushed — as the church warned might easily happen — one at a time, and the opportunity used to wipe out the popular organizations. The Coordina¬ dora played its most important political role by publicly dissuading them from launching a popular insurrection before it could have any chance of succeeding. If the opposition had good reason to bide its time, the government, on the other hand, kept on its chosen course of responding to protest by eliminating the protesters, waging war against the population. By the end of May 1980 church sources reported 1,844 civilian deaths. 265

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

In the next two months, June and July, there were 2,756 more, bringing the total to 4,600.^“^ By the end of the year some 10,000 had died at the hands of government forces.^^ In the next year, 1981, Socorro Juridico logged 12,501 more deaths, 2,644 of them in January alone.*’^ Any hesitation felt within the ranks of the civilian-based Frente Democratico about supporting armed insurrection evaporated in the course of 1980's long summer of bloodshed and, if that had not sufficed, it would certainly have come to an abrupt end with the murder towards the end of the year of six of its principal leaders. On 22 November 1980 some 180 uniformed army and police troops surrounded the Jesuit “Externado San Jose”, a private high school in San Salvador, at the same time that squads of plain-clothes men raided an FDR meeting and brought out Enrique Alvarez Cordova, the FDR’s president Juan Chacon, a top leader of the Bloque Popular, and leaders of FAPU, UDN and MNR. Their bodies were found the next day slashed by machetes and riddled with gunshot wounds. The government issued its routine disclaimers, attributing the murders to “death squads”.

Agrarian Reform The original junta's civilian members were forced out by the end of January 1980 but the reformist officers took longer to dislodge. Purging the young reformists within the military, and the ousting of Majano, their leader, was precipitated by the March 1980 launching of an agrarian reform, and violent resistance to it by the Salvadorean agrarian elites and their spokesmen in the armed forces. This reform was to be the centre-piece of the US development plan for El Salvador, a positive side to the counter-insurgency strategy. Successful resistance, however, proved that US counter-insurgency aid would continue whether or not prescribed reforms were implemented, even when US AID personnel there to promote the reforms were themselves murdered. On 6 March 1980, the junta decreed an Agrarian Reform which, on paper, went far beyond any proposed by previous governments, although based largely on studies carried out by the Salvadorean Ministry of Agriculture early in the 1970s. Decree 153 provided, in “Phase I” for the expropriation of a large proportion of any landed estate of 500 or more hectares, with compensation to be paid through a complex combination of agrarian bonds and cash payments; this phase affected mainly the landholdings devoted to cattle ranching and the recently established cotton and sugar plantations of the coastal areas. An estimated 250 properties fell into this category, which comprised about 15% of the farm land in the country“Phase 11” affected landholdings of 150-500 hectares — in El Salvador this meant coffee plantations — and hit directly at the most powerful and reactionary of the Salvadorean elites. That, initially, at least part of the government 266

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

meant business was underlined by pre-emptive legislation in December 1979 (announced by Minister of Agriculture Enrique Alvarez Cordova) forbidding transfer of ownership of properties in these categories, preventing landowners subdividing their holdings by quick sales or gifts to friends and relatives. Alvarez Cordova, who, had as Agriculture Minister under Sanchez Hernandez and Molina, worked out abortive land reform legislation resigned with other civilians in January 1980, and re-emerged as president of the combined opposition front; on 22 November 1980. he was arrested and murdered. The third and most controversial “phase” of the agrarian reform, not included in the original. 6 March. Decree 153, was introduced on 28 April, in Decree 207. which provided for tenant farmers to gain title to the plots they worked. Phase 111. a carbon copy of the Vietnam “land-tothe-tiller" programme, equally surprised the Salvadorean government’s own agrarian experts and the landed elites, having apparently been dictated by the Carter administration’s aid director for the junta’s rubber-stamp legislation. The uncomfortable Vietnam parallel was underlined by the presence of Roy Prosterman, architect of the Vietnamese land reform and chief consultant for the Salvadorean version, even though he admittedly had no special knowledge of Latin America.^^ Both Salvadorean and US experts agree that the programme was more or less forced on the government without warning, and with insufficient preparation. Simon and Stephens, in their study of the Salvadorean land reform, quote a Salvadorean Ministry of Agriculture official as denying that Decree 207 was “the third stage” of the planned agrarian reform. It was, rather, “completely unplanned for and unexpected. It was totally improvised”.™ A US AID memorandum quoted by the same source confirms this: Phase III presents the most confusing aspect of the reform program, and it could prove especially troublesome for the US because it was decreed without advance discussion, except in very limited government circles, and. we are told, it is considered by key Salvadorean officials as a misguided and US imposed initiative.^'

The worried officials’ misgivings were justified. Phase III would never be implemented and, in the context of an all-powerful security establishment more strongly influenced by the local elites than hesitant and ambiguous US reform policy, was doomed from the start.™ “Phase III” did. however, serve a political purpose in the US itself; by appearing to promise that US aid and patronage would bring El Salvador out of the dark ages, it indirectly justified continued military aid to help its government vanquish “foreign-backed insurgency . An undated AID memorandum from mid-1980, after registering local Salvadorean land reform officials’ resentment of “Phase III” (“because it was designed 267

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

virtually in its entirety by Americans and slipped into legislation without their being consulted. . . ”) added that: Many believe it is a 'symbolic and cosmetic measure which was proposed because it would look good to certain American politicians and not necessarily because it would be beneficial or significant in the Salvadorean context.^-^

Even the far right in the United States, which had denounced the reform programme's imposition on the Salvadoreans as misguided, soon acknowledged it would not seriously affect the productive land of the nation. On 15 October 1980, the right-wing United States Heritage Foundation issued a secret “Backgrounder” to its select subscribers, calming their fears that the Salvadorean agrarian elites were about to be dispossessed and informing them that the reform process raised, in practice, “no serious economic risk ” but was primarily designed for its “high political impact”.^'* Unlike Phase I — which required the formation of co-operatives — and Phase II, which was wholly inapplicable without the revolutionary overthrow of the coffee barons. Phase III was predicated on a straightforward presumption that creating a class of peasant small¬ holders on marginal agricultural land would provide a barrier against guerrilla recruitment, since the new landholders would have a stake in the regime which had given them the land. The programme's Vietnam antecedent was frankly recognized in an 8 August memorandum by Jonathan Silverstone, of AID'S Program and Planning Coordination Committee: “It is based on Asian precedents — including US supported programs in Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. . Silverstone also cites Prosterman, and his associate Mary Kemple, as urging the programme's acceptance as a last chance to save El Salvador from a take over by the far left.^^ The programme's failure in Vietnam was completely ignored, and Prosterman is given as an authority for regarding it as ideally applicable to El Salvador: If it has come in time, and if the violence can be brought under control, the El Salvador land reform could be a textbook demonstration of the viability and importance of the 'New Directions' language of the US Foreign Assistance Act.^^

Post-mortem studies have pointed out that in many ways the “landto-the-tiller” programme was completely inappropriate to El Salvador: the tenants' small plots could not be planted year after year without the soil deteriorating or, alternatively, requiring escalating investment in fertilizers and machinery to keep it productive. In El Salvador tenants did not usually lease the same plot for two consecutive years, yet the “Phase III" legislation required beneficiaries to cultivate the same plot 268

Military Coup: October 1979

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And After

for 30 years, or lose title to it3*^ Factors prompting this measure were, however, mainly political. In Vietnam, Prosterman had maintained that the key to the war was to win over the approximately seven million people dependent on tenant farming (from a rural population ob about 11 million). As in El Salvador, families could be evicted at will, and paid rent even if crops failed. Only the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) offered to change the system; “The Vietcong promised land, and when they took over an area they fulfilled the promise.”^^ When army forces succeeded in ejecting the Vietcong from an area, it was immediately restored to the old landlords; this further alienated the peasantry: ... negative land reform drove tens of thousands of peasants into the arms of the NLF, the landlords riding in with the ARVN jeeps after the American innocents had cleared and 'secured' the village... Clearly, the experience of being 'saved from the Communists’ meant something different to them than it meant to us.*^

The universal solution proposed by Prosterman was quite simple: “Land to the Tiller" would give peasants the land the guerrillas offered them, turn them into small landholders, and cut off their support for the guerrillas. The flaw in the theory was to imagine that the Salvadorean agrarian elites would part with their holdings under any circumstances. After all, they were fighting a counter-insurgency war precisely to avoid turning over their property to the peasant hordes; to hand it over without a fight was unthinkable. In practice, the “land-to-the-tiller" programme did have an impact in El Salvador, though not that predicted and anticipated by Professor Prosterman. Decree 207 made no provision for the programme’s implementation, and no legislation to this effect appeared for over a year.*' Meanwhile, the law’s threat to landowners renting to tenant farmers or sharecroppers prompted them to expel thousands of peasants from their meagre plots. In December 1981, the AIFLDsupported Union Comunal Salvadorena (UCS), whose members were to have been Decree 207’s main beneficiaries, published a report stating that over 25,000 peasant families that would have benefited from the law had been illegally evicted: “before the Spring planting in 1981 ... tens of thousands of additional families have reason to fear another wave of evictions before Spring 1982.”*^ The UCS report also detailed the arniy and police forces’ killings and “disappearances” of hundreds of UCS members, promoters and employees.*^ . . th ir ♦u Violent reaction to agrarian reform did not wait for Phase III. It the first reformist decree on 6 March 1980, shocked the agrarian elites, they were infuriated on 7 March, when army troops moved to take over some 30 coastal estates affected by Phase I. Owners moved rapidly to slaughter livestock and remove farm machinery. Much of the marketable 269

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

meat and portable machinery was taken across the border into Guatemala where many landowners had further agricultural properties.*'^ Some of the 238 estates threatened by Phase I were, in fact, occupied by the security forces in March and April, and the full-time workers ordered to organize co-operatives. Those co-operatives which survived were frequently directed by former administrative employees of the previous owners, often members of ORDEN, and not peasant labourers.*^ In other cases, as instructed, agricultural workers elected leaders to head the co-operatives, and these were promptly shot. A land reform official describes the procedure: ... troops came and told the workers the land was theirs now. They could elect their own leaders and run the co-ops. The peasants couldn’t believe their ears, but held elections that very night. The next morning the troops came back and I watched as they shot every one of the elected leaders.*^ By May 1982, when further expropriations were declared illegal. Phase I of the agrarian reform had officially benefited 25,000 peasant families, but only seven of the over 200 co-operatives set up had received titles to the land, and their future was shaky.*^ In any case the estates were run much as they had been under private ownership: often with the same administrators.** A return to the original owners, despite millions paid in compensation from US AID funds, would involve only redirecting the estates' profits from the agrarian reform agency to the former owners.*^ In practice, the agrarian reform laws not only failed to achieve any real and lasting change in the country's economic structure, but. owing to the state of seige imposed on 6 March 1980 (when Phases I and II were decreed) provoked and screened mass killings of peasants in areas likely to be affected and in those where independent peasant organizations were strong. The church-backed Socorro Juridico registered a dramatic leap in the number of reported killings of non-combatants, from 234 in February to 487 in March 1980. The toll rose to over 1,000 for the month of June, and by the end of the year had reached a cumulative total of over 10,000.^° As early as the end of March 1980 several key agrarian reform officials resigned in protest at the bloodbath accompanying the reform. In a resignation statement, Under-Secretary of Agriculture Jorge Villacorta, a prime mover in drafting and promoting the agrarian reform law, expressed his disillusion: ... from the first moment that the implementation of the agrarian reform began, what we saw was a sharp increase in official violence against the very peasants who were the supposed 'beneficiaries’ of the process ... to 270

Military Coup: October 1979

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And After

cite one case, five directors and two presidents of the new peasant management organizations were killed.'^'

Villacorta s resignation was followed a month later by a mass strike of the technical staff of the government’s Institute of Agrarian Trans¬ formation (ISTA), the agency responsible for implementing the reform; the cause of the strike was stated as the escalation of governmental violence against the peasants.^- Local Salvadoreans most concerned with planning, implementing and making a success of agrarian reform, the agrarian experts, were deeply troubled in its very first stages by the way events were moving, and in the first weeks after the original decree were unwilling to collaborate with it any longer. Other reformist Salvadoreans in high positions, such as Napoleon Duarte, exhibited much more patience. In an April 1981 interview, Duarte, then President of the (third) junta, acknowledged the problems in the programme, but still defended the process: “Duarte said it was never meant to be an 'overnight' success, and the dispossession of the old oligarchy would now take up to 30 years.’’^^ El Salvador's agrarian reform finally became extinct after the March 1982 election of a Constituent Assembly, little more than two years after its inception. On the initiative of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, President of the Assembly, the conservative majority voted in Decree 3 (26 April 1982), revoking previous legislation that had permitted expropriation of agricultural land. Decree 6 (18 May 1982) dealing more precisely with measures providing for transfer of land to tenants, effectively abolished the “land-to-the-tiller” programme. Scrapping the Agrarian Reform Programme so strongly backed by the US government did not, however, seriously affect US policy towards El Salvador. Ambassador Dean Elinton rushed to Washington after Decree 6 was enacted: to try to counteract the actions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which had voted to eliminate the increase in military appropriations for El Salvador this year if the Salvadorean government ‘modifies, alters, suspends or terminates any provision of the land reform program in a manner detrimental to the rights of the beneficiaries

Ambassador Hinton, like Ambassador White, his predecessor, one of the land reform legislation’s most enthusiastic supporters, was forced after Decree 6 to minimize its significance. Neither abolition of its pet land reform, massive human rights violation, nor even the murder of its own citizens, could be permitted to seriously affect US military assistance.

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Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

Neutralizing Majano and the Reformists Between March and May 1980, the showdown between the reformist officers — or such as remained after the 18 December purge of COPEFA — and the agrarian elites and their army backers took shape. It began with a mass publicity campaign, a repetition of the campaign to halt Colonel Molina's 1976 reform project.'^^ It also involved buying off numerous young officers with the unlimited funds available to the agrarian elites, and a confrontation in which Colonel Majano, forced to move against the military establishment’s far right, found himself without support and the tables turned against him. When the escalation of the anti-reform campaign reached the extent of wide circulation in army barracks of a video-taped message from Major D'Aubuisson, calling for the removal of Majano and the Christian Democrats from the junta as “Communists”, Majano decided to move. On 7 May 1980, after receiving a tip of a meeting at the Finca “San Fuis” (an estate near the capital) to be held by conspirators plotting to overthrow the government. Colonel Majano, with a group of men loyal to him, raided the estate and arrested the participants, including three majors, four captains, five lieutenants and 12 civilians. One of the prisoners was Major Roberto D’Aubuisson. Documents confiscated from the participants, including those D’Aubuisson reportedly tried to eat upon capture, included an expense notebook kept by Captain Alvaro Rafael Saravia, also taken prisoner, which apparently incriminated Major D’Aubuisson. Major Roberto Mauricio Staben and others in the murder of Archbishop Romero. A year later, after his dismissal by the Reagan administration. US Ambassador Robert White described the documents, copied to him by Colonel Majano, as “evidence that is compelling, if not 100% conclusive, that D’Aubuisson and his group are responsible for the murder of Archbishop Romero”.*^^ The active duty army officers detained with D’Aubuisson, to Majano’s subsequent regret, were not freelance conspirators, but included leaders of the special intelligence group, ANSESAF, acting on the authority of junta members Colonel Abdul Guierrez and Colonel Garcia, the Minister of Defense. Four years later. Deputy Minister of Defense Colonel Carranza, told an interviewer he was proud to have helped D’Aubuisson and ANSESAF at the time, and that he himself had authorized D’Aubuisson’s video-tape “media campaign” against Majano, after clearing it with Colonel Garcia.^^ When Colonel Majano raided the Finca “San Fuis” meeting on 7 May, he was perhaps unaware of how high in the military establishment support for Major D’Aubuisson, ANSESAF, and the counter-reform video campaign went. The confiscated documents revealed this to some extent, giving names of officers who liaised between the special operations group and each major army garrison and security agency. 272

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

and who supported the political line of the right-wing FAN, as expressed by Major D'Aubuisson. In retrospect, it seems that Colonel Majano acted on his own without fully appreciating the power and influence of those he and his supporters were challenging. If he thought evidence that D Aubuisson and his group were plotting his removal from the junta, or engaged in such activities as murdering the Archbishop, would lead to prosecutions, or that army officers involved would be cashiered, he was mistaken. Rumours ot coups and noisy protest by FAN’s civilian supporters disrupted San Salvador tor a week after Colonel Majano’s precipitate action, while the serious business of counting heads went on within the military establishment. Colonel Majano’s call for prisoners arrested at theFinca San Luis to be prosecuted for endangering state security was almost immediately turned on its head: the majority of the officers with a voice opted to oust Majano and demand D’Aubuisson's freedom. On 14 May Major D'Aubuisson and the others were released unconditionally. The active-duty intelligence officers returned to their posts and their involvement in the Archbishop's murder was not mentioned until the following year, when the US Ambassador made public documents captured on 7 May, that had been copied to him. On the day of the releases, junta member Colonel Gutierrez, and the Minister and Vice-Minister of Defense, Colonels Garcia and Carranza, stripped Colonel Majano of his command over the armed forces (formerly exercised jointly by the two military junta members). The only junta member to be included in the new line of command was Colonel Gutierrez. Majano was not formally dropped from the junta, but permitted to remain in name only.^* One source described Majano’s ousting as a "mini-coup" which placed complete control of the government in the hands of Colonels Garcia, Carranza and Gutierrez "with the collaboration of the three civilians ... to add an air of respectability’’.^^ From 14 May 1980 until his forced resignation from the junta, and arrest and exile in November, Colonel Majano and his supporters were politically dead. Also on 14 May 1980, Colonel Gutierrez held a press conference to announce a major reversal in the agrarian reform process: “Phase H”. which had threatened the coffee elites, was to be indefinitely suspended; “Phase I ” expropriations were to be brought to an immediate halt. By July 1980 at least 68 of the more valuable properties expropriated in March and April under “Phase I", including those with coffee processing plants, had been returned to their owners. Further ad hoc exemptions for Phase I property owners followed.'®® The reversal of the reform programme continued, and a new line of more concerted repression, facilitated by the return of most officers dropped from the active list at the time of the October 1979 coup. Within two years some 40 of these top officers (all identified with escalating repression under Romero) had been brought back and integrated into 273

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

the command structure.'*" Among them was General Romero s information chief and former head of ANTEL, Colonel Rafael Flores Lima who, in January 1981, became chief of staff and third man in the army's hierarchy. According to some sources Majano had retained his seat on the junta only at the demand of the US Embassy. This is a reasonable claim, as Ambassador Robert White himself had been vilified by the Salvadorean right for his insistent support of major reforms, in which Majano had been a key ally. Conversely, the winding down of the agrarian reform announced on 14 May was accepted with hardly a murmur from the US government, although Ambassador White did protest bitterly against the release of D'Aubuisson and his colleagues. By September, however, the US Embassy's main objective appears to have been a unified officer corps, capable of conducting the counter¬ insurgency war; considerations of internal reform, or even of external appearances, had become secondary, and the Salvadorean military knew it. At that point the US opted to support Colonels Garcia and Gutierrez in their move to complete the neutralization of Majano’s reformist supporters within the officer corps. This was accomplished by the September “Order of Battle", the periodic list of military appoint¬ ments, transfers, promotions and demotions issued by Garcia and Gutierrez, in which Majano's supporters were stripped of every post of significance, including all those entailing command of troops. The young officers were given administrative postings, sent off for extended tours of foreign study or training, or assigned posts in obscure diplomatic missions. Some young officers surrendered their principles after bribery; others were assassinated.'*'^ Majano did not capitulate without a struggle, but he was without the necessary support; If (the) appointments were accepted, complete control of the military apparatus would fall into the hands of the hardliners. The dissidents replied by demanding the removal of Garcia and Carranza and negotiations with the FDR. Majano set up his own general staff in the Zapote barracks and a coup looked highly likely. Within the junta Morales Erlich and Avalos backed Majano but Duarte sided with the Garcia camp and toUred the barracks with Gutierrez urging ‘unity'. The US Embassy, now skilled at arbitrating between these factions, found against Majano, whom it considered incompetent and potentially dangerous.'**^

The “Order of Battle" thus went through. For most of his last months as a nominal junta member Colonel Majano was travelling outside the country. The battle — to reform or not — appears to have been lost at the Finca “San Luis", the previous May. This had reflected both internal Salvadorean army divisions and the US foreign assistance establishment's 274

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Military Coup: October 1979

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And After

own internal conflict the military and intelligence agencies versus the economic reformers — over how hard the Salvadorean military government should be pushed towards acceptance of US-backed reform programmes. To some extent the US could exert pressure on the old guard led by Garcia and Gutierrez to institute some minor economic reforms on the grounds that such programmes (at least those, like Phase III. devised by US agencies) were an integral part of the overall counter-insurgency package; essential both to calm local revoludonary passion and for international public relations. More extensive reform programmes, implying major upheavals of the status quo — above all the agrarian reform — could, in diluted form, be pushed through only so long as it was made clear that US military, economic and political support would cease if such reforms were publicly jettisoned. In the prime of the Carter administration, pressure proved sufficient to force through the framework of an agrarian reform and a reform of the national banking system, and above all to instil the political necessity of including presentable civilians in the “revolu¬ tionary" government. But even then, the US’s principal concern was the conduct of the counter-insurgency war.

US Aid and Six Dead Americans The election of Ronald Reagan to the US Presidency in November 1980 signalled the Salvadorean government that compliance with the more bitterly resented parts of the reform programmes — those devised by Salvadorean agrarian reform experts — could be safely ignored. Under the Reagan administration little threat of sanctions for non-compliance with reformist legislation would exist, much less for non-compliance with international human rights standards. Even the torture or murder of US citizens would, in the final analysis, have no concrete effect on the real level of US assistance. Shortly after Reagan's election in December 1980 and January 1981, two group murders of American citizens tested the resolve of the US government to influence its Salvadorean allies actions. The murders were carried out in the dog days of the Carter administration, by a Salvadorean military establishment euphoric over Reagan s election. Local priests regarded by the military as subsersive or agents of subversion had long been liable to be murdered. Ten priests had been killed between February 1977 and March 1980 when the eleventh. Archbishop Romero, was shot in the heart. American clergy had remained untouched, despite many actively supporting programmes centred on concepts of social justice openly condemned as subversive by the military. Some, including American Maryknoll nuns Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, who worked with refugees in Chalatenango parish, had received death threats. In November 1980 Ita Ford told an 275

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

interviewer that the Chalatenango army commander Colonel Ricardo Pena Arbaiza had himself made veiled threats, telling her that the Church is indirectly subversive because it’s on the side of the weak”.''’"’

On the night of 2 December 1980, Ita Ford and Maura Clarke returned from a conference in Nicaragua and were met at the international airport by Ursuline nun Dorothy Kazel and lay worker Jean Donovan, both from the diocese of Cleveland, Ohio, then working in the parish of La Libertad. The four had intended to proceed from the airport and spend the night at La Libertad, the city nearest the new airport; the two Maryknollers intended to travel to Chalatenango the next morning. The Maryknoll nuns had been expected to arrive, with two others, on an earlier flight. Their friends had gone to the airport to meet that flight and returned to La Libertad with the two who had arrived. On the way they were stopped at a National Guard roadblock and identity check but neither harrassed nor harmed. They returned to the airport to collect Ita Ford and Maura Clarke from the 6:30 pm flight from Managua. Both cleared immigration control without hindrance, but Immigration Police information systems made data on their identities immediately available to airport security personnel. Possibly their names had previously been put on the airport “look ouf’ list. Subsequent events suggest arrangements had been made to prevent their return to Chalatenango considerably before their return from Nicaragua. The four women drove toward La Libertad in a white Toyota van and were stopped at a National Guard roadblock not far from the airport. They were detained, taken to an isolated spot off the main highway near Santiago Nonualco where some were raped and all four shot dead. Local people found the bodies the next day and reported their find to the local justice-of-the-peace on whose instructions the four bodies were immediately buried in a common grave. Despite the foreign appearance of the women, local authorities said later they did not report the discovery of the bodiesJustice-of-the-Peace Juan Santos Ceron subsequently explained that he frequently authorized burial of un¬ identified bodies found in and around Santiago Nonualco “under the direction of various armed forces” and that “he was personally asked to authorize such burials two to three times a week”.'*^^ All identity papers had been removed from the bodies. The US governmenf s reaction was twofold. Ambassador White was furiously angry, and demanded an investigation and suspension of US economic and military aid — the last time the Salvadoreans would be the object of pressure of this kind. In Washington the reaction was less vehement; the Department of State press release of 5 December declared the US governmenfs “shock and dismay” at the killings, and concern at “reports of involvement of the Salvadorean security forces”, and announced only that economic and military assistance would be put “on hold”.'**^ 276

Military Coup: October 1979

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And After

Washington’s main concern seems to have been damage control. Immediate steps were taken to deal with US public outrage — jeopardizing US policy toward El Salvador — at the murder of the missionaries. The four churchwomen’s murder, on the very day of the funeral ofvictims of another widely publicized multiple murder, that of six leaders of the Salvadorean opposition, confirmed the Salvadorean governmenf s growing reputation for savagery. To counter demands to restrict aid to El Salvador s government, just as guerrillas were mounting an offensive, Washington ensured first, that the Salvadorean govern¬ ment announced an inquiry into the killing of the American churchwomen, and. second, supported (or orchestrated) a high.profile shuffle in the Salvadorean junta's composition. On 7 December. William Bowdler, former Assistant Secretary of State William Rogers, and State Department Latin Americanist Luigi Einaudi. were dispatched to El Salvador, ostensibly on a three-day “fact-finding” mission on the killings and to impress upon the junta the urgency of an immediate inquiry into the incident.'®* On 14 December, a reorganization of the military junta was announced: ex-presidential candidate and graduate of Notre Dame, Napoleon Duarte, a civilian, would henceforth be addressed as “Presidenf’. and Colonel Gutierrez Vice-President. A little noticed by-product was the final disappearance from the junta of Colonel Majano. On 17 December, the Carter administration responded to Duarte's elevation, which placed a civilian, and a Christian Democrat, at the head of the government and. citing progress in the investigation of the missionaries’ murder, lifted the “hold" on economic aid. It had been frozen for exactly two weeks. The appointment of Duarte served admirably to distract media attention from the murder of US citizens and was read as a sign of a democratic change of heart in the military government of El Salvador. In practice it served to cover the final purging of the reformist officers from positions of influence. On 12 December, two days before Duarte’s elevation to the Presidency, the army high command announced Colonel Majano’s definitive removal from the junta, after a poll of the officer corps in which they had voted 300 to 4 in favour of his removal.'®® Presumably Majano’s supporters among the 800 or so active duty officers were encouraged not to vote, or simply not counted. Majano promptly went into hiding, to be subsequently arrested and exiled to Mexico. His ouster cleared the way for the 14 December refurbishing of the junta’s image by the appointment of a civilian president and a military vice-president. A simultaneous reshuffle ot the Cabinet, leaving only Defense Minister Colonel Garcia still in place, consolidated the government’s rightward lurch. Vice-President Colonel Gutierrez, not President Duarte, was to be, as before. Commander in Chief of the Armed Eorces. Ambassador White made no move to save Majano at the time - quite

)

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li Ii I I

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Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

conceivably his removal was a precondition for the military s appoint¬ ment of a civilian president. In late January, after his dismissal by the incoming Reagan administration, ex-Ambassador White defended Majano, ascribing his downfall, and that of the reformist officers he represented, to their efforts “to bring about an end to the repression” He attributed the rightward moves of the junta in late 1980 to “encourage¬ ment” from the incoming Reagan administration. To pressure the Salvadorean government into investigating the missionaries’ murder. Ambassador White was threatening to withhold aid, the US military assistance establishment and the State Department bureaucracy were preparing for an inrush of military advisers, planned to go ahead even before Carter was scheduled to leave the White House. In 9 April 1981 Congressional hearings. Ambassador White declared that the US and Salvadorean military had pressed both him and Duarte into approving — against their better judgement — sending military advisers to El Salvador. Senator Pell, questioning, referred to a letter signed by President Duarte asking for assistance and advisers: Ambassador White: What is the date of that letter, sir? Senator Pell: February 20. White: And what date did we put in the military advisers? Pell: I think we put them in during December or January. White: I think there is your answer.'"

Ex-Ambassador White then sought to explain the difference of opinion as a matter of divided loyalties within the US establishment itself: During the latter days of the Carter administration, there was a clear initiative on the part of the Pentagon to push on El Salvador military advisers and military’ equipment. There was a lot of direct contact between high officials in the Pentagon and high officials of the Salvadorean military. On occasion, high officials of the Salvadorean military would know about decisions before I would.'

With the Pentagon and the Salvadorean military establishment in league little could be realistically expected from any official inquiry into the murder of the nuns. Ex-Ambassador White probably realized he was fighting a losing battle the minute he started making his own unofficial inquiries into the case: Regarding the investigation. Senator, it was taken for granted when I spoke with President Duarte, it was taken for granted when I spoke with the leaders of the defense establishment, the military establishment, that the security forces were guilty of the murder of the American churchwomen. That was never really a question."-^

278

Military Coup: October 1979

1

; I 1

I

1 I t i 1' >1 !

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And After

Virtually the only official investigation in the year after the churchwomen's murder was that by the US government itself, and included sending an FBI officer to lift fingerprints from the burnt out wreck of the church van. Subsequently, at the demand of the US Embassy, six National Guardsmen on airport detail at the time of the murders were arrested on 9 May 1981. Two of them were confirmed as victims of mistaken identity and released in December."^ After Ambassador White’s departure, the US Embassy in El Salvador was in the difficult position of publicly guaranteeing that the inquiry into the four women's murder was making some tangible progress — mainly because the US Congress demanded such progress as a condition for aid — and simultaneously suppressing evidence that responsibility rested with anyone higher than the National Guardsmen already singled out as scapegoats. The Department of State’s periodic “formal statements’’ certifying the progress of the inquiry, only underlined the US governmenfs commitment to continued military aid. In July 1982 the Department of State certified “substantial progress in the case’’ and estimated a trial would take place later that year. In November 1982 a Department of State spokesman declared that “no evidence has come to light which would give credibility to allegations of higher involvement’’. In January 1983 the Department of State certified that “since the July certification, there have been significant develop¬ ments in the investigation and prosecution of the case of the four American churchwomen.’’"^ Despite such claims, however, the US government has refused the victims’ families access to documentation of EBl and other investigations into the case."^ The eventual conviction of the four Guardsmen, in mid-1984, still begged the question of higher involvement. It seems that by calling the US human rights bluff, with the murder of the four missionaries in December 1980, the Salvadorean military government had placed its ally in the position of covering up the murder of its own citizens. On 4 January, a second murder, which was eventually traced to top army intelligence officers, shook public opinion and created new problems for the US Embassy: gunmen assassinated Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman, American Institute for Eree Labour Development (AIELD) advisers, and Rodolfo Viera, head of the Salvadorean Institute for Agrarian Transformation (ISTA) and the US-backed UCS small farmers’ union, in a restaurant of the Hotel Sheraton in San Salvador. Since radical oppositionists saw AIELD as a front for unsavoury US government agencies (land reform adviser Roy Prosterman was technically an AIELD employee) the action might easily have been attributed to the left: yet, from the first, there were compelling reasons to believe that the murders were ordered by the fanatic right, lashing out against top exponents of land reform. As in the case of the murder of the four missionaries. Hammer’s 279

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

Pearlman’s and Viera’s murders were investigated primarily by the US government — not by El Salvador’s. These second murders, however, received relatively little publicity, although the US Congress would henceforth demand clarification of both the missionaries and the advisers’ murders. The AIFLD murders prompted less uproar partly because, initially, there was less evidence that the Salvadorean army (that is, the government) had any hand in them; after all the two American advisers were in El Salvador only to help with the reform side of the army’s counter-insurgency programme. A second factor in reducing public reaction was AIFLD’s decision to keep relatively quiet about the killings while pursuing its own investigation, a decision apparently shared by Mike Hammer and Mark Pearlman’s families, who maintained a discreet silence. A final factor was doubt as to precisely who was the main target: there was some reason to believe that the two Americans were killed only because they happened to be with Rodolfo Viera at the wrong time. Viera had been receiving death threats ever since the UCS, of which he was a leader, had gradually become more radicalized during 1980, due to many of its grassroots organizers being murdered by the security services. Viera also had close links with the then exiled Colonel Majano. Leonel Gomez, Viera’s second in command at ISTA, had no doubts as to the motive for the three murders, and afterwards sought political asylum in the United States. His subsequent testimony, in which he described hiding in a trash can as an army patrol searched for him, leaves little doubt that the order to kill top level agrarian reform officials had come not from far right factions acting alone or in league with landowning elites, but had originated at the highest level of the security forces. The “radical” phase of the military government born with the October 1979 coup was incontrovertibly over. That the Sheraton Hotel murders had, from the beginning, inten¬ tionally included the AIFLD advisers, demonstrating the military rulers' utter contempt for the UCS, the ISTA and the American-backed reform programmes, is to some degree supported by the circumstances leading up to the two Americans’ meeting with Viera. Hammer had responded to a call for help from Viera, who had been receiving death threats and was now seriously worried that Majano’s ousting had put him in real danger. Hammer had flown from Washington to give Viera his support on the day they met at the Sheraton. AIFLD made a full account available to the press more than a year after the murders: At Christmas 1980, Mr. Viera voiced concern to Americans about pressures on him to quit his government job because of bitter political opposition. He expressed his anxieties to his close friend, Mr. Hammer, an expert on agrarian affairs. Mr. Hammer, seeking to assure Mr. Viera that the Salvadorean official had the full support of the AFL-CIO even if he decided to quit his job and join the labor movement, left Washington 280

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After on the morning of Jan. 3 for San Salvador. Because of threats against him, he registered in different names in two separate rooms at the Sheraton.”^

In the case of the churchwomen’s murders evidence quickly emerged that responsibility went high in the military hierarchy. In the case of the agrarian experts, however, initial investigations, carried out under pressure from the US government, incriminated wealthy civilians, Roberto Sol Meza and Hans Christ, allegedly seen pointing out the victims to plain-clothes gunmen. Both businessmen were detained for investigation in April 1981; Hans Christ was arrested in Miami and held pending extradition."*^ The focus on the involvement of “private enterprise" in the murders temporarily distracted attention from the fact that the plain-clothes gunmen were active duty National Guardsmen, acting on orders from their immediate superiors, active duty intelligence officers who provided the arms, and apparently instructions, to murder Viera, Hammer and Pearlman. It was more than a year after the murders that the whole story emerged, when the initially discreet AIFLD, in reaction to the Salvadorean authorities’ refusal to prosecute those involved in the murders, revealed the results of its own investigation. In March 1982, after it became apparent that neither Sol Meza nor Hans Christ would be made to answer for involvement in the murders, and that steps to prosecute the two National Guard corporals identified as the actual assassins were grinding to a halt, the American press published leaked information on AIFLD's own investigations, and described the winding down of the inquiries in El Salvador.'^'’ At the time the AIFLD revealed nothing more. Not until late in 1982, when the Salvadorean court handling the case ordered the dismissal of charges against army officers implicated in the murders, did the AFLCIO release details of the case to the news media. Apart from Roberto Sol Meza and Hans Christ there were three other suspects — active duty army officers serving in intelligence posts in the National Guard. Two of them. Lieutenant Rodolfo Isidro Lopez Sibrian and Captain Eduardo Ernesto Alfonso Avila Avila, had been implicated in the murder of Archbishop Romero in March 1980, and had figured prominently in the Finca “San Luis” documents confiscated by Colonel Majano in his 7 May 1980 raid. On that occasion, both had been briefly arrested, and subsequently returned to active service as National Guard intelligence officers. The third officer implicated was Major Mario Deni's Moran, identified by opposition sources as head of the National Guard’s intelligence division (S-2).'^’ Lopez Sibrian had been confined to barracks some time after the agrarian expert murders, but Avila Avila was sent out of harm s way as military attache to Costa Rica, a key post from which he subsequently monitored the movements of Salvadorean exiles and dabbled in covert 281

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

action. In late 1982 he was finally expelled by the Costa Rican authorities for “placing a bomb outside a hotel in Puerto Limon intended to kill a Cuban diplomat”.'^^ In mid-October 1982 Time magazine published the following account of Lopez Sibrian and Avila’s involvement in the murder of Viera. Hammer and Pearlman; According to the investigation jointly conducted by the AFL-CIO and the Salvadorean government the killers were Jose Dimas Valle Acevedo, 35, and Santiago Gomez Gonzalez, 32, ex-corporals in the Salvadorean National Guard. They were apprehended, subjected to lie detector tests, confessed and were formally charged. Both were at the Sheraton Hotel on the night of Jan. 3, 1981, serving as plainclothes body-guards for police officers visiting the hotel. One of the officers was Lieut. Rodolfo Isidro Lopez Sibrian. . . The two men said in their confessions that Lopez Sibrian told them ‘Look, inside the hotel is Viera and two other fair¬ skinned men. You are going to kill them.’ Soon after. Lopez Sibrian handed Gomez Gonzalez a 9mm Ingram submachine gun. Meanwhile, another officer. Captain Eduardo Avila, slapped a 45 cal. submachine gun equipped with a silencer in Valle Acevedo’s hands. .

Time described the actual shooting as a classic death-squad killing: The killers walked up to the three men and opened fire. Viera was gunned down as he reached toward his waist, apparently for a pistol. Pearlman was shot as he rose from the table. Hammer died slumped against a locked exit door. The two gunmen darted out of the dining room, ran through the lobby and out of the hotel. In a country where at least 30,000 unsolved murders have taken place in the past three years, no one moved to stop them.'^**

Immediate pressure exerted by the US Embassy forced the Salvadorean military to go through the motions of an investigation with intent to prosecute, and accede to US demands that the FBI be given access to suspects and witnesses. According to the New York Times the two FBI polygraph experts who flew to San Salvador found “deception in principal areas” on the part of Lieutenant Lopez and Captain Avila’s testimony.'25 The co-operation of the Salvadorean government, although it helped neutralize American outrage over the murders just as the Reagan administration was escalating military assistance, was in practice severely limited.'^^ Despite — or on account of— the evidence of high level involvement in the murders, there was no serious investigation of the crimes, no concerted effort to prosecute or dismiss from active service the army intelligence officers implicated. By the time of the AIFLD advisers’ murders, the most resolute sectors of the military right were firmly 282

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

esconced in top command positions. By 1983 their dominance was reinforced by the election of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson as President of a Constituent Assembly which would be responsible for drafting a new constitution. In October 1982 Time remarked that American officials were “upset” not only because charges against Lopez Sibrian had been dropped, and never even brought against Avila Avila, but because of: The public support that Avila and Lopez Sibrian have received from Roberto D'Aubuisson, the right wing former army officer who became president of El Salvador's constituent assembly this year... [D’Aubuisson had called the accused officers] my colleagues and my friends, I am honoured to be their friend. 1 know they are good soldiers.'^^

D'Aubuisson's emergence as the President of the Constituent Assembly was the culmination of a long process. After May 1980 his star had continued to rise. In July 1980 he was feted on Capitol Hill by the American Legion and the private right-wing American Security Council, a group including former army officers and US intelligence officials. The meeting was arranged and carried out in spite of a formal prohibition — obtained through pressure by then Ambassador White who, more than once, described D’Aubuisson as “a pathological killer” — banning him from entering the country. Subsequently Major D’Aubuisson had the assistance of the army’s high command in organizing a far-right political party, Republicana Nacionalista (National Republican Alliance (ARENA)), to counterbalance and dominate the much weakened Christian Democrats. In coalition with the moribund PCN, ARENA gained a majority in the March 1982 elections, with D’Aubuisson becoming President of a Constituent Assembly in which his allies held most of the seats. This final outcome was probably predictable from the beginning. A Washington Post reporter, shortly after the May 8-14 1980 confrontation between D’Aubuisson’s and Majano’s groups, asked a US Embassy source whether he thought D’Aubuisson would be forced into exile, and recorded the reply: “If you ask me, I think he’s probably off somewhere having drinks with the high command.”'^* The murder of Viera and the AIFLD advisers was the last major action against personnel working on behalf of the US government (in this case financed by AID) that could be directly laid to the Salvadorean military. But these killings, like the murder of the four missionaries, marked the end of the military government’s acquiescence to US-backed reform policies or human rights requirements. They were, in practice, an unambi¬ guous statement that the Salvadoreans welcomed American advice and assistance in fighting the insurgents, but would make their own decisions regarding the utility of reforms in their counter-insurgency war. The military had risked reprisal, but emerged with all-round success. 283

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

The Maryknoll order withdrew its people from El Salvador after December 1980; foreign clergy could no longer carry out their pastoral mission in the country with any semblance of security. When, with permission from church authorities, the Maryknoll sisters decided to return some two years later, death threats were renewed. No Maryknoll sisters were after that sent to El Salvador to risk the fate of their murdered colleagues. After the murder of Viera and the AIFLD advisers whom he had called on for support, and the US government’s failure to pursue the matter with the only effective weapon at its disposal — withdrawal of military aid — the Salvadorean military was confident that it could follow through with the progressive dismantling of reforms already effected, and that the US would not put its threat of sanctions into effect. The AIFLD murders, of course, could never be acknowledged or openly justified by the military high command, but were publicly deplored and attributed to renegade killers perhaps seeking to destabilize the Duarte government and bring the armed forces into disrepute. Not long after these murders, however, there was an unprecedented legitimation of death-squad killings by the military establishment itself, when the Press Council of the Armed Forces (COPREFA) published what was widely interpreted as a “death list” of 138 people. The same list had circulated a year earlier and was then attributed to the death squads; even the random order of the names was unchanged.'^^ COPREFA’s death list was followed the next day by a second COPREFA list attacking the foreign press, and naming reporters in disfavour with the military — an ominous threat in view of previously “unsolved” murders of foreign pressmen.The foreign press challenged Duarte over both COPREFA lists; he is quoted as saying he was not consulted about their publication, and that he took issue with some of the names having been included on the list.’^' The COPREFA “death list” was published just as preparations for elections to the Constituent Assembly began. Former Ambassador Robert White cited the COPREFA list in congressional hearings as evidence of the somewhat fantastic quality of the notion that fair elections could be held under existing conditions in El Salvador, when potential opposition candidates were publicly named in a “death list” issued by the army in a military regime: ... it would take a great act of faith at this point on the part of the left realistically to consider participation in any electoral process when the military has published its hit list.'^^

The earlier COPREFA “death-list”, in the same random order, in the name of seven supposedly autonomous “death-squads”, had been published on 11 May 1980, four days after the arrest of D’Aubuisson and top intelligence officers by troops loyal to Colonel Majano. Although 284

Military Coup: October 1979 — And After

seen as a gesture of support for Major D'Aubuisson, it was then impossible to link it directly to the armed forces. In later publishing of the self-same list, COPREFA made no effort to disguise its true paternity by attribution to phantom “death-squads”; the armed forces as an institution now undertook responsibility for the “death list” and its consequences. With the reformist officers led by Colonel Majano out of the picture, no longer was any significant faction in the military hierarchy willing to oppose either the selective counter-terror epitomized by “death-squad” murders of opposition leaders and other “subversives”, or the mass counter-terror, through mass killings, in the countryside and in the streets.

285

14. Elections and Civil War

Publicity on the guerrilla opposition’s launching of a major offensive in mid-January 1981, and US government claims to have evidence of Cuban and Nicaraguan support for the insurgents, effectively pushed the unsolved question of the murdered Americans out of the news and spelled the beginning of a major escalation of US military aid to El Salvador. A 14 January 1981 Department of State press release declared that: Leftist guerrillas over the past weekend have . . . demonstrated that they are better armed and constitute a military threat. Captured weapons and documents confirmed that the guerrillas have received a substantial supply of arms from abroad.'^^

On 16 January a Presidential order was made for a $5 million emergency airlift of military material and advisers to El Salvador, President Carter's foreign policy establishment’s last convulsive effort to evade responsibility for having been “too soft’’ in dealing with the Salvadorean rebels. Four days before the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the measure acquired an air of panic, as if Carter’s people feared that the January guerrilla offensive would quickly topple the government, leaving them accused of “losing’’ another trusted ally. Ambassador White, shortly afterward fired by Reagan for his overly convincing posture as a reform and human rights champion, called for the emergency aid on the grounds that the guerrillas were receiving massive external support for their “final offensive’’. As described in congressional hearings the following March, White “raised an alarm over a reported landing of external forces that would assist the guerrillas ... but nothing appears to have come of that threat.’’’^'* He explained to congressmen who had subsequently become “ increasingly skeptical of the reality of that ‘invasion’ ’’ that the charges were based on reports to him of the discovery of five wooden boats on the shore of the Gulf of Fonseca, “made from wood found only in Nicaragua and Costa Rica”. None of the reputed “invaders” were ever captured.'-^-'’ While himself sceptical of the basis for the “invasion” scare. White 286

Elections and Civil War did not recant on his support for the rush of aid to the Salvadorean regime in Carter's final days in office, although he did draw the line at sending in military advisers. The spring 1981 congressional hearings were informed that White still believed the revolutionaries were receiving arms via Nicaragua, and that emergency assistance was thereby justified.'-^^ Emergency military assistance dispatched in those last days of the Carter administration, for the first time included overtly “lethal” weaponry, including M-16 rifles, ammunition and grenade launchers, the lease of six armoured “Huey" helicopters, accompanied by technicians to operate them, and teams of military advisers.'^^ The State Department justified the assistance as vital to deter foreign aggression; ... we must support the Salvadorean government in its struggle against left-wing terrorism supported covertly with arms, ammunition, training, and political and military advice by Cuba and other communist nations.’-^*

To the Salvadorean high command, of course, the last minute largesse from the Carter administration represented a total capitulation by US human rights champions to questions of military expedience. The lack of resolution that had hobbled the Carter human rights policy from the start contributed to its eventual disintegration in the final days of the administration. The FMLN launched its first countryside offensive on 10 January, with considerable forewarning to the military. Wrongly dubbed a “final offensive ”, it proved, nonetheless, a convincing show of strength. Major military operations continued for about a week, with the Santa Ana garrison falling to the rebels when junior officers led a mutiny and went over to the guerrillas with over 100 troops.'^^ No permanent gains were made in the offensive but government forces were, for the first time, hit with co-ordinated military assaults and suffered heavy casualties. It was a far cry from the sporadic guerrilla operations of 1980, but a logical progression after the Coordinadora’s two day general strike at the end of June prompted junta chief Colonel Gutierrez to declare If the left want war they can have it”, (as reported hy Latin America which called the “illegal” strike 90% successful”).'^ The same source suggested that the immense death toll then hitting the unarmed opposition made civil war inevitable: “With the death toll now about 20 a day, according to official estimates and 80 a day unofficially, open civil war does seem to be fast approaching.”'^' Under such conditions, that the guerrillas held off their offensive for so long can be seen as a show of rather admirable restraint; and careful planning. From mid-January 1981 El Salvador’s political life was dominated by the ongoing civil war, and the US’s increasingly open intervention. 287

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

Although President Carter took responsibility for the first infusion of US weaponry and military advisers into the Salvadorean conflict. President Reagan rapidly moved to expand US involvement in the war. President Carter’s provision of $5 million in emergency funds in January was boosted in March with a further supplementary allocation of $20 million for material, advisory assistance and training, and again with $18 million in June 1981 as emergency “Economic Support Funds”. The nature of the assistance provided is outlined in a later chapter. The Reagan administration’s El Salvador offensive in 1981, and its efforts to justify massive infusions of aid there were backed by an elaborate opinion-making campaign launched in February 1981. The most ambitious, and contentious presentation of the new administra¬ tion’s views on El Salvador was made in the form of a glossy “White Paper” issued weeks after President Reagan took office. Entitled “Communist Support of the Salvadoran Insurgency” the report cited captured guerrilla documents and intelligence information as presenting; definitive evidence of the clandestine military support given by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and their Communist allies to Marxist-Leninist guerrillas now fighting to overthrow the established government of El Salvador.’"*^

The report was circulated with a package of glossaries, translations and photographs, and photocopies of the captured documents upon which the White Paper’s conclusions were said to be based. The press’s analysis of the documents, however, soon discredited many of those con¬ clusions.''^^ The White Paper declared that Communist states had promised “800 tons” of arms to the guerrillas and delivered “200 tons” by January 1981, but the documents referred only to some four tons brought in — from Honduras. One independent analysis of the documents in March 1981 concluded that: None of the documents ... indicate anything but groups of Salvadorans organizing their own revolution. If the Soviet Union and Cuba were pulling the strings behind the guerrilla movement . . . evidence of such control is not to be found in any of the captured documents.'"^

Despite some scepticism, the White Paper affirmations were uncritically accepted by much of the American news media, the public, and the congress in the months following its publication and energetic promotion. Not until the Wall Street Journal published a major story on the White Paper, based in part on interviews with State Department personnel responsible for its preparation, were its bases effectively challenged. Entitled “Tarnished Report? Apparent Errors Cloud US ‘White Paper’ on Reds in El Salvador”, reporter Jonathan Kwitny’s article described the paper as having served the Reagan administration 288

Elections and Civil War

“as the launching pad for its anti-Soviet foreign policy”, despite serious errors and guesswork revealed by its principal author; ... it is surprising ... to hear Jon D. Glassman, who is given the major credit for its existence, describe parts of it as ‘misleading’ and ‘over¬ embellished.’ In a three-hour interview... policy planner Glassman freely acknowledged that there were ‘mistakes and guessing’ by the government’s intelligence analysts who translated and explained the guerrilla docu¬ ments. . . Several of the most important documents, it’s obvious, were attributed to guerrilla leaders who didn’t write them. . . Statistics of armament shipments into El Salvador, supposedly drawn directly from the documents, were extrapolated, Mr. Glassman concedes. And in questionable ways, it seems.'"*-^

Tht Journal article also demolished the White Paper’s assertions that the documents confirm the guerrillas' close relations with the Nicaraguans, the Soviets, and even Yasser Arafat; it noted that the documents released include only complaints about the Soviet Union’s reluctance to assist the Salvadoreans, oblique references to arms warehoused in “Lagos” (interpreted as Nicaragua) and a reference to Arafat’s attendance at the 1980 Nicaraguan celebration of the anniversary of Somoza’s ouster. This reference was made in unsigned “Document G” “in the context of much complaining that a delegation of Salvadoran leftists was coldshouldered and otherwise insulted on a visit to Nicaragua for the anniversary celebration...” The White Paper, in contrast, reported that Arafat had met Salvadorean leaders and promised “military equipment, including arms and aircraft”. The Journal also casts aspersions on the authenticity of some of the documents, although it concluded that part of the collection was undoubtedly among those discovered in a raid in November 1980 on an art gallery in San Salvador owned by Communist Party leader Shafik Handal’s brother, architect Jorge Antonio Handal. The documents were reportedly discovered in a hollow wall; architect Handal was arrested at the same time and “disappeared”. His body has never been found. Neither the White Paper nor \hQ Journal refer to Handal’s arrest or his fate. Former Ambassador White is cited by Kwitny in the Journal as confirming doubts as to the solidity of both the White Paper and the documents on which it is purportedly based, most ofwhich were already available for analysis while he was still Ambassador: “The only thing that ever made me think that these documents were genuine was that they prove so little ”, he says. “He concedes that he is a great sceptic when it comes to captured documents. . Kwitny concluded that the White Paper was prepared to promote a particular foreordained policy of the Reagan administration, and that in this it was enormously successful, whatever its factual failings: 289

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War Bearing copies of the report. State Department emissaries visited the principal capitals of Western Europe and elicited statements of support from most of them. Domestically, too, the White Paper, said to be based on 19 captured guerrilla documents, was accepted as fact by most of the nation’s press, and there were numerous follow-up stories quoting administration spokesmen on their plans for countering the allegedly growing military power of the Salvadoran guerrillas. Within days, the National Security Council announced it had approved plans to provide the tiny country with $25 million of additional military aid and $40 million of economic assistance.''*^

The Wall Street Journal effectively debunked some of the more outrageous assertions of the White Paper, but by mid-1981 the US military build-up in El Salvador was underway and not to be stopped. Indeed, the White paper was produced after the build-up was firmly launched, and intended to guarantee its acceptance.''** The White Paper was followed by a series of foreign policy extra¬ vaganzas designed to further impress upon the American public the Reagan administration's view that the civil war in El Salvador represented nothing less than a Soviet land grab aimed ultimately at American’s soft underbelly, with Nicaragua as its tool. They included a press show of 36 declassified aerial photographs exhibited in March in a State Department auditorium by John Hughes, Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Bobby Inman, Deputy Director of the CLA*'*^ The March 1983 presentation was a replay of the 1961 Cuban missile crisis when photographs of the construction of missile emplacements were shown. In the Nicaraguan case there were no Soviet missiles to point to but such features as a “Soviet-style obstacle course’’ and construction at Puerto Cabezas of an airport designed to accommodate fighter aircraft. Nicaraguan government spokesmen subsequently informed the press that plans for extending the airport had been drawn up in 1976 with AID funding under the Somoza government. (This in turn was a preview of the November 1983 invasion of Grenada, largely justified by the construction of an airport the US proclaimed had military purposes, but actually being constructed for tourism, by British contractors.) Later that month, the State Department presented to a televised press conference, a young Nicaraguan — Orlando Tardencilla — captured in El Salvador, who had allegedly confessed to having been trained in Ethiopia and Cuba. Once in the company of the press, however, Tardencilla said his confession had been made under torture, and that he had been coerced into agreeing to repeat the story in Washington: ... an official in the US Embassy told me that they needed to demonstrate the presence of Cubans in El Salvador. They gave me an option: I could come here, or face certain death.

290

Elections and Civil War

Time magazine, in an article subtitled ‘The US bungles its evidence of foreign subversion in El Salvador”, described the propaganda offensive as “a curious series of public presentations” presided over by “the prime proponent of the Administration’s us-vs-them world view. Secretary of State Alexander Haig". Time also compared this campaign to that on the Cuban missile crisis 20 years before, adding that; The purpose of the blitz was to convince skeptics of the correctness of the Administration's approach to the critical problems of El Salvador and its neighbors namely, that the struggles in Central America are not simply indigenous revolts but rather are crucial battlegrounds in a broad EastWest confrontation.'^'

Unlike the public relations offensive of 1961 Haig’s efforts were seen as unconvincing, with many showpiece elements badly bungled; notably the Orlando Tardencilla “confession” and the White Paper itself Time described the February 1981 White Paper as based on evidence that was “sloppily presented and exaggerated in some cases, opening the Administration to charges of fraud”.'^Despite the flaws in the Reagan administration’s campaign to make El Salvador (and Nicaragua) the centre of the East-West conflict the foreign policy “selling” campaign was sufficiently successful to ensure that no concerted effort could be mounted in the US congress against the escalation of the US military presence there. All that could be attempted was to slow it down. Campaigning on the insurgents’ alleged foreign support coincided with a major publicity effort to portray planned political developments in El Salvador as evidence of the benefits of the present regime, and the US assistance programme. Departing from the Carter administration’s vigorous promotion of socio-economic reforms as the solution to El Salvador s problems, the Reagan administration retained an emphasis on plans for demo¬ cratization”. The show-piece of the Reagan administration’s “democratization” programme was to be the election of a Constituent Assembly in March 1982, empowered to appoint an interim President, pending Presidential elections, and to draft a new constitution. The credibility of the United States’ commitment to political reform rested largely on the person selected to serve as provisional president of the republic prior to the 1982 elections, Napoleon Duarte. Duarte, appointed to his office by the military, was to enjoy the trappings of office without its powers, but would be endlessly cited by the Reagan administration as a legitimator of the regime throughout his period as President. Duarte’s tolerably decent past and supposed good intentions failed to have the least impact on the ongoing counter-terror campaign, apart from distracting public attention. From the time he joined the civil/ military junta in March 1980, to his departure from the Presidency in 291

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

March 1982, Salvadorean church human rights monitors estimated some 25.000 Salvadorean civilians were killed out of combat. In Duarte’s one full year as “President”, 1981, at least 13,500 fellow citizens were, according to these records, put to death by government forces. Duarte did, however, prove a superb civilian figurehead for the military regime, by providing a basis on which to characterize the regime as democratic — or “almost” democratic — and so distract attention from the bloodbath. In this Duarte proved a valuable asset to the US policy makers frantic to show that the Salvadorean government they wished to fund and arm was doing its best to move towards reform and democracy. Although the death toll of the military counter-terror campaign could not be wholly concealed. Duarte's previous role as leader of a liberal reformist party enabled the Department of State to argue that without him things could be much worse. This argument to some extent backfired after the 1982 elections, which he lost. In the months before the elections two new parties of the extreme right made their appearance: the Democratic Action Party (Accion Democrdtica (AD)), and the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA)), headed by the ubiquituous Major D’Aubuisson. The AD, nominally promoted by certain business sectors, appears to have been largely a paper-party designed by the military to lend more credibility to the elections by expanding the nominal range of participants: not coincidentally, the name chosen was the same as that of Venezuela's Social Democratic Party. ARENA, backed by the military establishment, was the real force on the right. Its leader. D'Aubuisson, campaigned vigorously on a “counter-insurgency” platform, promising to "exterminate” the guerrillas within three months of the setting up of the new constituent assembly. Not content to attack the armed opposition. ARENA spokesmen also accused the Christian Democrats of being camouflaged Communists and promised to try them for treason, on election. The heart of ARENA'S platform was a pledge to give the army its head in the fight against the guerrillas, without concern about human rights or cosmetic reforms: "Napalm is indispensable.' explained . . . campaign spokesman Willi Aleman— The armed forces would be freed of human rights restrictions on their activities. . . "We don't believe the army needs controlling,' said Mario Redael. the secretary of M. D'Aubuisson's party ... "Civilians will be killed, war has always been that way. When the Germans bombed London they didn't tell civilians to get out of the way first, did

they?' Although the Department of State depicted D'Aubuisson as virtually 292

Elections and Civil War

a renegade officer, an image generally refiected in the international press, his party was given extensive logistic support by the armed forces, support it shared only with the former official Party of National Conciliation (PCN). Convincing evidence that ARENA and D'Aubuisson enjoyed the army high command's blessing was the support of the regional militaiy commanders who, in the past, had been responsible for mobilizing the military reseiwists and ORDEN members behind the PCN. In provincial areas ARENA rallies were generally composed over¬ whelmingly of the former military personnel who comprise the bulk of ORDEN and military reserves alike. Much was made of Major D’Aubuisson’s personal charisma and organization skill, but there were quite clearly other factors: Though it has formally existed only six weeks, [Major D'Aubuisson'sj party appears to have out-organized the other seven in the race.. . It has entered candidates for every available post, and Mr. D'Aubuisson. escorted by truckloads of heavily armed bodyguards, is the only contestant campaigning in areas his principal opponents, the Christian Democrats, say they are afraid to appear in. A clue to the success emerged in conversations with groups of men wearing sombreros in the shade of the leafy square of Santa Rosa de Lima... where Mr. D'Aubuisson campaigned Sunday. All said they were supporting his party and all said they had once served in the military. . . [Christian Democratic leader Juliol Rey Prendes said the Christian Democrats had formally complained that the militaiy commanders in various towns around the country were actively aiding the Nationalist Republican.s.'-'''*

Apart from the fact that the PCN and ARENA were openly backed by the army, the inability of the real opposition to participate made the elections largely a sham. The names of iheFrenteDemocratico's leaders, the only real opposition, had been published in COPREEA's death lists,'"" and in November 1980. the last time some of them had appeared and held a meeting in San Salvador, they had been detained and murdered. Even had they dared to contest the elections, the military had already vetoed their participation “because it is not a political party but the democratic facade of the guerrillas".'"'^’ Colonel Majano, on a visit to Washington in December 1981. described the election plan as "madness" and attacked Napoleon Duarte for going along with it. calling him “the military's ally, who covers up human rights violations".'"^ The EDR and EMLN jointly stated their own support for honest elections, but concluded that the proposed electoral exercise was futile: Our Fronts consider elections a valid and necessary instrument of 293

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War expression of the people's will whenever eonditions and atmosphere exists that allow the people to freely express their will. In El Salvador today we do not have sueh conditions to carry out the electoral process, inasmuch as the regime's repressive apparatus, which assassinates political and labor leaders and activists remains untouched.'-'’^

While the only real opposition was totally excluded from the contest the sole reformist party to participate in the elections, the Christian Democrats, was, like the others, constrained to campaign on a basic “support the army" platform; to do otherwise would have been too dangerous. One US newspaper described the elections as “fundamen¬ tally non-democratic", given the threat of assassination of even moderate oppositionists, and noted that: “no candidate has campaigned on a platform of control of the military, the major obstacle to a political settlement in El Salvador; none could have, and lived."'-'’'^ Despite the lack of alternatives offered to the voters a fair turn-out on election day was guaranteed by the Salvadorean law which makes failure to vote a punishable offence; more seriously, not voting would clearly be interpreted as an expression of opposition to the government. Advertising before the election stressed the legal liability of non-voters and described procedures whereby compliance with the law would be checked. The election was held without an electoral register, with voters identifying themselves only by their national identity cards;'^'* govern¬ ment announcements warned that voters’ identity cards would be stamped at the polls as evidence they had voted. This was strong encouragement indeed; during the previous two years failure to produce an identity card had frequently been punished by summary execution and it was widely assumed that to present a card after the elections without the stamp proving the holder had voted could have similar consequences. Prospective abstainers were also informed that to avoid electoral fraud each voter's hand would be marked with indelible ink at the polls. Although the ink apparently was not indelible, fear that failure to acquire the mark would jeopardize their safety induced many to vote.'^- British Parliamentary Human Rights Group member Lord Chitnis was one observer of the process who commented on this intimidating procedure in his subsequent report. Marking identity cards and voters' hands with “indelible” ink: inevitably imposed considerable psychological pressure on people to vote. Even a well-off middle-class Salvadorean, with moderate left-wing sympathies, told me he felt it would be prudent for him to vote.'^"'

There were also other means of intimidation. Each polling station was surrounded by security forces — ostensibly to prevent attacks by guerrillas intent on disrupting the elections —, and ARENA poll watchers, equipped with walkie-talkie radio sets, closely monitored the 294

Elections and Civil War

process.'^"* Irregularities in the voting were identified by Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies scholar Robert Leiken in testimony to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee: In a number ot polling places they ran out of pens; the voters stayed in line; they handed in their unmarked ballots. There is suspicion that they were tilled in by election ollicials. A large number of ballots were annulled... Why was it that the indelible ink used to prevent people from voting repeatedly turned out not to be indelible? And why were 25().0()() cedillas lidentification cards] issued in San Salvador in the weeks before the elections? How could so many people have been without their identity cards when not to have one meant certain death? (Only guerrillas have no identity cards, it is assumed at police and army barricades).'^*'

While irregularities occurred in the voting the returns suffered from too great a regularity: . . .there is suspicion among experienced Salvadoran election observers that there may be a concerted inflation in the numbers of those who voted. As the results were being announced they pointed to the odd uniformity in the portion of votes attributed to the different parties irrespective of geographic location. .

The election results reported about 1.4 million valid votes out of an indeterminate electorate, nearly twice the 700,000 plus votes cast in the 1972 elections, the last for which accurate statistics are available.'^^ The Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana published its assessment of the vote describing the final count as "impossibly high" and maintained that the real total of votes cast was between 600.000 and 800,000.'^^ The most suspect returns came from the departments where the guerrillas were strongest, in some parts of which virtually no votes at all were cast. By midday, 29 March, for example, when one-third of the total votes had already been tabulated, no votes had been recorded in Cabanas and Chalatenango, both FMLN strongholds; several days later, however, the final results reported a massive turnout there.'^*^ The final count gave the Christian Democrats 41% of the votes and 24 out of 60 assembly seats, but failed to beat the ARENA-PCN block. When the time came to vote for the Constituent Assembly President, and then a provisional President, the Christian Democrats were badly outvoted, facing the combined opposition of the four other parties to win seats in the assembly (ARENA: 19; PCN: 14; AD: 2; and PPS (Partido Popular Socialista): 1). The immediate response of the United States, which had openly backed Duarte and the Christian Democrats in the campaign period, was a switch from criticism of the fanatical qualities of ARENA and the radical right to moderate praise: 295

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War Deputy Assistant Secretary of State F.verett Briggs told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 1 that ARFNA contained ‘some very liberal and some moderate people'. Ambassador Dean Hinton was quoted as saying of D'Aubuisson: ‘There are people who say he's been dangerous, but he s been a political leader and I think he s behaved very well.' Within days of the elections. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Fnders said that D'Aubuisson. barred from entering the United States since May 1980. would be allowed to enter and meet with US policymakers in the future.'^'

This rehabilitation of Major D'Aubuisson. the man who had probably orchestrated the death of Archbishop Romero and whom exAmbassador White had more than once called a“pathological killer”. was essential to save the US policy makers' face when the elections they made so much of ousted Duarte from the Presidency and put D'Aubuisson at the head of the Constituent Assembly. On 22 April D'Aubuisson was duly elected President of the Constituent Assembly and thus gained control of what was arguably the most powerful position outside the army high command. The largely symbolic provisional presidency went to the relatively unknown Alvaro Magana, described as "a banker with close ties to the military".In practice. D'Aubuisson and Magana apparently got on quite well together (in spite of Magana having been called a "Communist” and “little Jew” in ARENA leaflets before the elections) as. indeed, did all the parties of the right, to the discomfiture of the Christian Democrats who. within days of the assembly's first sitting, saw their moderate reformist initiatives reversed.'^’* In the government which emerged, the key Cabinet posts of Agriculture, Foreign Commerce and Economics went to ARENA; General Jose Garcia, of course, remained in command of the army as Minister of Defense, and the Christian Democrats were offered the minor Ministries of Labour and Education (largely inactive since 1980) and the Foreign Ministry. Despite the reversal of their steps toward reform during their uneasy alliance with the military, the Christian Democratic followers of Duarte chose to maintain some semblance of power, and Fidel Chavez Mena agreed to stay on as Foreign Minister, responsible for defending policies and practices which were anathema to his party's ideology and political platform. Despite the humiliation of Duarte and the Christian Democrats, the US. which had hoped they would emerge in a stronger position, was obliged to lay emphasis on the fact that elections had been held at all and to extol the new regime's "moderation”. In fact Major D'Aubuisson's stated views on how to deal with the guerrillas — no negotiations and no quarter — differed little from the US position; although the Major's unfavourable image in the US media did constitute a problem. But all could be arranged. As newspaper columnist Mary McGrory put it, the Reagan 296

Elections and Civil War

administration was "beguiled by his anti-communist fanaticism" and "learning to love the charismatic killer in the elevator boots..adding that: Eltorts are now being made to change his image. The firm of McCannErickson. which handled his campaign, is probably engaged for the public relations aspect ot d'Aubuisson's forthcoming visit here... During his visit, he will be heavily chaperoned and instructed to speak only from official texts.'^-''

The exclusion of the major opposition groups, the irregularities in the voting, the questionable count, and the army's wholehearted support for ARENA and the rump of the PCN. reduced the 28 March 1982 elections to a costly exercise to ratify the course of the military government. The major impact of the elections was felt outside the country, where they were used to justify US aid; the high turnout reported in the official statistics was taken as a rejection of the Frente, and. of course, a show of support for the regime. Liberal US congressmen's threats to cut off aid if the elections led to a worsening of the repression were sloughed off; aid “will continue in any case" was Ambassador Hinton's reaction to criticism of the election results.'^^ The elections had served their real purpose admirably; to still, for a time, congressional misgivings about sending aid to a barbaric regime. The opposition's failure to obstruct the elections was. moreover, taken as a sign of their weakness, although both the FDR and the FMLN had gone on record as promising they would not attempt to disrupt the election process itself'^^ President Reagan's 8 June 1982 speech on the elections to the British Parliament was a model of disinformation; “On election day the people of El Salvador, an unprecedented (1.5 million] of them, braved ambush and gunfire, trudging miles to vote for freedom."'^^ It was not the first time facts were massaged in order to present the opposition as lacking popular support. The guerrillas' first "final offensive", and the general strike of July 1981 were both characterized by United States apologists as total failures in the same way: ... the left launched a 'final offensive' to bring down the government. An estimated 6.()()() guerrillas, armed by the whole gamut of East-Bloc and Soviet-aligned Third World countries, fought major battles in Chalatenango. Morazan. La Union and Santa Ana... Calls for a general strike went unheeded ... lack of support for the so-called final offensive ... led [the guerrillas] to change tactics. For the first time, the opposition called for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.'^*^

The offensive had. in fact been moderately successful, if not final, and the strike was indeed heeded by the vast majority of the urban population; its only failure was that it was not an insurrection; and there 297

Coiinfer-Insurgencv and Civil War

was no apparent change in the opposition s position on negotiations. What had changed was the nature of the propaganda war. The United States’ media offensive scored a success in portraying the opposition as a minority force, minimizing their popular support and representing the offensive and strike action's failure to overthrow the government as a sign the US was supporting a popular regime. The campaign also served to destroy all chance of negotiations (interested Senators “rounded up only 14 co-sponsors for a bill that would mandate negotiations as a condition for further US military or financial aid").'^" The denial of even a modicum of popular support for the opposition repeatedly proved successful in garnering temporary political support for intervention, but led ultimately to policy failures. The tendency to interpret the results of government coercion as proof of popular support for that government (the defeat of a general offensive, or crushing of a general strike), like so many other aspects of the Salvadorean conflict, has a direct parallel in the US experience in Vietnam. In the 196()s the turnout for the 1967 Vietnamese elections, and the failure of the Tet offensive to achieve total victory were cited as proof that the NLF simply had no support. A 16 January 1969 CIA "National Intelligence Estimate" described the population's failure to rise en masse during the Tet offensive, and having turned out to vote in 1967, as proof of support for the government: there are . . . some general indicators of progress in this phase of pacification. First, there was an impressive turnout of voters in the national elections of 1967; even allowing for some coercion and dishonesty, this suggests that a large part of the rural population is at least partially responsive (to the Government of Vietnam]. Second, the rural and urban masses conspicuously failed to rise up and support the VC during the Tet offensive.’*^'

Although a top secret intelligence analysis prepared for top policy makers only, the "National Intelligence Estimate" might well have been prepared by the US Information Agency for a press release. It told the policy makers what they wanted to hear, and decisions were taken on the basis of wishful thinking.

Counter-Terror Escalates The massive inlJux of military equipment and supplies, training, advisory and technical support provided by the United States to El Salvador after the October 1979 coup was programmed explicitly for the implementation of a counter-insurgency doctrine virtually unchanged from the 1960s. The new military resources were thrown into a counter298

Elections and Civil War

insurgency offensive whieh began in the first months of 1980; its main feature was a massive escalation of counter-terror assassinations and executions directed against the insurgents' supposed collaborators and sympathizers. Confrontation with the insurgents themselves was a lesser concern. Killings of non-combatants believed to be the insurgents' base of support far surpassed the number of combatants' deaths in the civil war. Initially, the exeeution of counter-terror after October 1979 differed little from that under the Romero government; the difference was essentially one of scale. More demonstrators were shot by rooftop snipers, more trade union and political party activists were dragged from their homes and murdered, more known leaders of church and peasant organizations were the targets of selective assassination or detention and summarv' execution. Detentions and killings proliferated throughout the country during 1980. Selective night raids by small units accounted for scores of“death-squad" killings each week in towns and cities, while rural counter-insurgency sweeps designed to clear the guerrillas from rural areas resulted in thousands of deaths. The escalation of the killing, by the regular army — in addition to the police services — necessitated some change in the army officers' own conception of their military role. The counter-insurgency war after October 1979 was to require the conversion of all the Salvadorean army's commanding officers to the single-minded execution of a policy of mass counter-terror. Before 1979 the army was the executor of government violence through its institutional control of the Presidency and the Ministry of Defense and Public Security, as well as the appointment of active duty army officers to command the paramilitary corps. The “death-squad" killings, breaking up demonstrations, and the sporadic rural security operations of the 1970s were, however, generally delegated to the security services and ORDEN irregulars, and not to regular army units. In the aftermath of the 1977 elections, this pattern began to change, but changed decisively and comprehensively only after the purge of "progressive" army officers in early 1980. By the end of 1980, regional army garrisons' personnel were no longer kept away from police operations, but served in much the same capacity in “counter-terror operations as did the paramilitary police and irregular forces. Regular army units were deployed as assassination squads and were integrated with police and irregular forces for certain counter-insurgency operations — a development not altogether welcomed by young army officers most closely associated with the reform proposals made at the time of the October 1979 coup. Ex-Salvadorean army Captain Juan Erancisco Emilio Mena Sandoval a supporter of the 1979 coup, has testified that the growth of involvement by units of the regular army in mass killings of non-combatants reflected a policy change of the army high command after Januaiy 1980. 299

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He attributed the new policy largely to Defense Minister Colonel Garcia and his National Guard Director Colonel Vides Casanova, both of whom, he maintained, were the real power behind the junta, and engineered the progressive neutralization of Colonel Majano and his followers. The new development, initiated in the first months of 1980, was the direct deployment of the army in the escalation of counter¬ terror, coinciding with the purge of, or measures to compromise, reformist officers. Young, inexperienced officers were obliged to participate in atrocities, to bloody their hands to ensure that none could subsequently claim innocence and accuse others of misconduct, and "if the tactic of corrupting the young officers failed, they and their families would be threatened". Captain Mena Sandoval, who defected to the guerrillas in January 1981, dated the change in policy at the Second Infantry Battalion based in Santa Ana to the replacement of its "Majanista" (reformist) commander in early 1980 by old-guard Colonel Servio Tulio Figueroa:With the agreement of Col. Figueroa, the forces of the Second Battalion were to work directly with the security forces in the Santa Ana area, and with them they began the wave of killings in cold blood that were to corrupt the Second Battalion... The troops from the Battalion began to go on midnight or dawn patrols around the middle of last year (1980). and each time would drag defenseless people from their houses. The bodies of the victims would always appear on the street the next day... The number of verified killings passed one thousand, and sometimes there were so many bodies that we had to order them thrown out in other areas to avoid a scandal. Sometimes up to forty or fifty killings were carried out each night.'*'*-^

In 1979, the Second Battalion had been a stronghold of the Military Youth Movement but was progressively corrupted as all officers and men were obliged to participate in the murders. Captain Mena Sandoval quotes Colonel Figueroa as saying "I am myself more than compromised and anointed. And so we must all be anointed."'''^'* Mena Sandoval was not the only insider to denounce army participa¬ tion in death-squad murders. In April 1981 Salvadorean army officer and doctor Captain Ricardo Alejandro Fiallos testified before the US Congress that he was forced to leave El Salvador in December 1980: after having received anonymous death threats for criticizing high military command and the directors of the security forces for their lack of professionalism and for their role in perpetrating atrocities against the civilian population.'*^''

Captain Fiallos. who subsequently sought asylum in the United States, further asserted that: 300

Elections and Civil War It is a grievous error to believe that the forces of the extreme right, of the socalled "Death Squads", operate independent of the security forces. The simple truth of the matter is that "Los Escuadrones de la Miicrte" are made up of members of the security forces, and acts of terrorism credited to these squads such as political assassinations, kidnappings, and indiscriminate murder are. in fact, planned by high-ranking militai^ ofilcers and carried out by members of the security forces. 1 do not make this statement lightly, but with full knowledge of the role which the high militaiy command and the directors of the security forces have played in the murder of countless numbers of innocent people in my country. .

Former AIFLD associate Leonel Gomez, chief adviser to Rodolfo Viera, gave a more schematic account of the army high command's responsibiliw for the "death squad" killings, whether committed by units of the regular army and paramilitary police or by irregular civilian forces directed by the army. Gomez, who fled El Salvador alter Viera's assa.ssination in January 1981, testifying before the House of Representa¬ tives Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs in March 1981, ridiculed the "myth . . . propagated by your State Department, [that there] is a difference between the army, which is good, and the security forces, which are bad".'^^ Gomez affirmed that a well unified officer corps directed the security serv ices in a considered, co-ordinated policy of extermination; The primary institution of the armed forces is the officer corps: five hundred men. most all ofwhom attended the same military school. In many cases an officer will be rotated from one serv ice to another. The tactors that bind officers together from different services, especially the tandas. are greater than those which separate them. In summai7. there is an integrated officer corps. If its leadership Imly wanted to eliminate substantially the abuses now occurring it could. But remember, it doesn't The army is bent on a war to exterminate all possible challenges to its power.'^^

Most significantly, the point is made that the army itself as an institution, was responsible for the vast majority of the killings in El Salvador, and not the police, or renegade civilians. In each military region, the army commander is responsible tor the activ ities of the army. Through the chain ofcommand and the informal ties, he knows which forces are doing what and which soldiers are a part ol formal or informal death squads... The vast majority ot killings are made in sweeps in the countryside by the armed forces engaging in indiscriminate killings or by death squads that operate under the formal or intormal direction of the regional or local army commanders. Let me be clear. 1 am talking about the majority of the army officers now in charge. There are some, especially younger officers, who are revolted and shocked at what is tioing on. . . The problem is not the oligarchy. . . Noi is the problem the

301

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War so-called security forces or the death squads; both trace back to and are commanded by the army.'*^*^

Leonel Gomez' testimony concludes with a warning that the army s reliance on terror was progressively eroding popular support, even among its natural allies: The killings by the army have traumatized the Salvadorean people. One is very cautious about rising up against the government when one has seen bodies of people sawed in half, bodies placed alive in battery acid or bodies with every bone broken. I saw all those things last year. And I know who did it. and so do the Salvadorean people. So now we will wait and just try to survive, but we will remember. That is why the army must eventually lose.'*^’'

Before and after the October 1979 coup, statistics on non-combatant civilians reported killed by government security forces — military and paramilitary — were published on a weekly or monthly basis, by the Legal Aid office of the Archbishopric of San Salvador (Socorro Juridico) and the independent Commission of Human Rights of El Salvador (Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES)).'*^' JKs, Socorro Juridico’s and CDHES’s findings do not radically differ it is sufficient to cite Socorro Juridico's statistics to illustrate the change over time in El Salvador’s programme of political murder. Socorro Juridico documented 1.030 cases of non-combatant civilians murdered in 1979 as a result of political repression, either shot down in the street while demonstrating, in the countryside in army raids on their villages, or killed after detention by government forces. In the course of 1980 the figure rose to 8.062 non-combatant civilians killed on government authority. In 1981 the figure jumped to 13.353.''^- The real total of such deaths may have been as much as twice those reported: deaths in the countryside generally went uncounted, and relatives of "death-squad" victims in town and countiy often preferred silence to the risk of drawing assassins to their own doors. A study of the methodology of human rights reporting in El Salvador, prepared by the US-backed America's Watch, concluded that Socorro Juridico's figures “tended to be conservative because its standards of confirmation were stricf'; deaths and "disappearances" of civilians were registered only where they could be sufficiently documented as "not combat-related".''^^ Similarly, reports of massacres of large numbers of people were not accepted at face value; evidence was required on individual cases, possibly leading to a considerable under¬ reporting of the death toll in isolated areas. An example was the possible killing of over 1.000 peasants during a counter-insurgency sweep in the area of El Mozote in the department of Morazan in December 1981. reported in Socorro Juridico's bulletin with the qualification that the 302

Elections and Civil War

office lacked “sufficient evidence to compile an accurate body count, (and) did not include the estimated deaths in its tabulations".''*'' In contrast to the Socorro Juridico's scholarly reporting standards the US Embassy, according to the America's Watch study, was found to have made only superficial efforts to collect information on human rights problems and. more seriously, to have been guilty of consistent distortion in failing to attribute individual killings to the security forces.''*'' The quantum leap in summary e.xecutions of non-combatants from 1,030 in 1979 to 8.062 in 1980 was followed by a further leap in the death toll to 2.644 in the single month of January 1981.''*^ Socorro Juridico noted that a new pattern of killings began after 12 January 1981. when martial law and a curfew were declared (to the maintained until 15 October 1981). A total of 2.173 individuals was reported killed during curfew hours over a six month period; many were taken from their homes in the dead of night by uniformed security personnel and later found killed. At least 400 other people detained by security personnel during curfew hours were never seen again, and were registered as "disappeared". Salvadorean human rights monitors also recorded a significant increase in the number of unidentifiable bodies found after January 1981. Faces were disfigured by acid, or obliterated by automatic weapon fire or machete cuts; or bodies were headless. A major increase in decapitations was reported in Socorro Juridico registering 379 cases between June and August in which a guillotine-like instrument had apparently been used.''*^ In the same period, the press reported that machinery in a Santa Ana meat-packing plant had been used on scores of headless bodies found in and around the city. The beheadings were seemingly intended both to sow terror and to prevent identification of the victims.''*'' Monthly totals of counter-terror killings remained high throughout 1981. although the figures indicated lulls in the killings at regular six-monthly intervals. These six month periods coincided with a US government human rights reporting calendar; the US congress required the President to provide a bi-annual “certification" that progress was being made in human rights observance as a condition for further aid. And so President Reagan swore ritually, every six months, that progress was being made in “bringing under control" the Salvadorean “death squads"; and indeed there was a decrease observed by Socorro Juridico from 934 non-combatants killed in June to 546 in July, and from 820 in November to 395 in December 1981.''*'* In this first full year of sharply increased military aid to El Salvador, with US military advisers on the ground, the death toll was conservatively estimated at 13.353 non-combatant civilians killed by Salvadorean government forces. In 1982. Socorro Juridico received reports of fewer killings of noncombatants; 5.976. Its successor as the Archbishopric’s official monitoring 303

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

office, Tutela Legal (Legal Assistance), reported information on 5,399 for the year. A pattern similar to 198rs, in relation to the US human rights certification timetable, can again be discerned, suggesting a capacity to rein in the counter-terror programme when political expediency so demanded.-'"’ Although the reported death toll was lower than the previous year, the actual number of deaths may well have increased as the focus of counter-terror operations shifted from urban centres to isolated rural areas. There it was more difficult, or impossible for San Salvador-based human rights monitors to verify individual deaths.-'” Witnesses or suiwivors of the 1982 and 1983 rural counter-insurgency sweeps, confirm that counter-terror’s relatively selective nature in the cities (with many victims targetted because of their past trade union, political party, church or other “subversive activity) has. in rural counter-insurgency operations, yielded to the wholesale massacre of entire communities in areas where the residents are presumed to support the guerrillas. Despite the limitations under which human rights monitoring laboured, Socorro Juridico and Tutela Legal registered over 40.000 individual killings of non-combatant civilians between October 1979 and mid-1983; this figure does not include those who "disappeared", the immense majority of whom can be presumed dead. Reported murders for the first two months of 1983 averaged almost 500; January 430; February 537.-''The Archbishopric's Tutela Legal also collected reports on killings attributed to the guerrillas, providing figures of some interest in assessing the responsibility for mass murder in El Salvador's small society. Between May 1982, when Tutela Legal began recording guerrilla killings out of combat, and December of the same year, the office had obtained information on 40 such cases.-”-^ The overall pattern of repression in El Salvador, and the application of mass counter-terror in particular, is neither chaotic nor uncontrolled. After October 1979, as in the 1970s, many victims were openly members of legal trade union, professional, religious, political or other above¬ board organizations. Eor example, the leadership of the teachers' union. ANDES, was publicly elected, its membership known, and Ministry of Education — as well as Ministry of Labour — data on local union committee members could easily provide an index to potential “deathsquad" targets. As of23 June 1982 ANDES had documented the“deathsquad” murder of 258 of its members in the previous four years, the abduction of 67 (58 of whom remain “disappeared") and stated that 6,000 of its members had received death threats.-''” Understandably, many former ANDES activists have gone into hiding, and many have joined the guerrillas, arguably their only option to avoid slaughter. Other hard hit sectors, equally open, were members of trade unions perceived as “subversive" because of their 1970s corporate membership in such mass organizations as theBloque Popular, and religious activists 304

Elections and Civil War

involved in selt-help classes in urban slum areas and other progressive church programmes. These and others classified as “subversives” — lawyers, journalists, political party leaders or organizers, peasant leaders — could be spotted by collating lists from various ministries and police and military intelligence Hies. A very large proportion, perhaps the vast majority, of the victims of mass counter-terror in El Salvador, have been peasant farmers or farm workers. Killings began with the more or less selective elimination of the leaders or activists ot the rural organizations long regarded with dismay by the 1960s and 1970s military governments. Counter-terror operations launched in early 1980. later expanded progressively from selective assassination to include the population of entire villages, or even whole zones previously held by the guerrillas, where the people were collectively labelled as guerrilla collaborators. Of the 13,353 civilians murdered and accounted for in Socorro Juridico's register for 1981, 6,106 were identified as peasants-"-^ although, as already noted, deaths in the countryside are considerably under¬ reported. The strategy of killing suspected guerrilla sympathizers was reported not only by anti-government sources and human rights organizations, but by Salvadorean civilians and others who supported the programme. A report based on an interview with a former US Marine employed as a "mercenary" in El Salvador described the killings as the “essential strategy” of the war: .. . there is a striking difference between news reports of the El Salvador war and what actually takes place in the field. The difference is the target of attack. The army is not killing communist guerrillas, despite what is reported', he said. 'It is murdering the civilians who side with them'. 'It's a beautiful technique’, Lawrence Bailey said. ‘By terrorizing civilians, the army is crushing the rebellion without the need to directly confront the guerrillas', he said. Bailey contends that the massacres of civilians are not scattered human rights abuses in an otherwise traditional war. 'Attacking the civilians is the game plan', he said. From the talks he has had with others in his political camp in El Salvador, and from what he has seen in the field, the strategy is clear. 'Kill the sympathizers, and you win the war'. .

Later in the same interview the former marine contended that: ... 'human rights' talk clouds the issue. The murders are not a peripheral matter to be cleaned up while the war continues, but rather, the essential strategy.

305

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He also maintains the strategy is extremely successful: . . because of this policy. El Salvador is one war the communists are bound to lose!"-*’^ Some of the most eloquent examples of the move from selective assassination to massacre have occurred in the context of the mass population movements along the Honduran border. In this area wouldbe refugees fleeing from counter-insurgency sweeps have been mown down by helicopter gunships and ground troops while attempting to cross the Sumpul and Lempa rivers. The lirst major massacre of this nature to come to light (others may have gone unreported in this heavily militarized area) took place on the Sumpul river, near the Salvadorean hamlet of La Arada. on 14 May 1980 when several thousand refugees, mostly women and small children, sought to cross the river into Honduras. Turned back by Honduran army gunfire hundreds were slaughtered on the river banks and in mid-stream by massed gunfire from Salvadorean troops and at least two helicopters. This massacre was reported by the clergy of the Honduran parish of Santa Rosa de Copan whose Bishop issued a statement denouncing the killing of at least 600 defenceless Salvadoreans in the incident: At least 600 unhuried corpses were prey for dogs and buzzards for several days. Others were lost in the waters of the river. A Honduran fisherman found the bodies of five little children in his fish trap.-*'^

There was a similar incident on the Lempa river on 18 March 1981 when from 4-8.000 Salvadoreans (mostly women and children) fleeing the department of Cabanas were caught between Honduran and Salvadorean troops. At least 189 were confirmed as "disappeared"; many others were confirmed dead. According to eyewitness testimony by survivors, doctors, priests, and relief personnel present at the scene, the Salvadorean Air Force dropped bombs and helicopters [and] strafed them as the army fired mortars and machine-gun rounds.-***^

In a second Sumpul river massacre on 31 May 1982 during an army “clearance” sweep through the department of Chalatenango. some 2.000 refugees were attacked near Los Amates. Several hundred were reportedly killed by gunfire from troops and helicopter gunships.-'® Another massacre or series of massacres occurred during major “clearance" operations in the last four months of 1981, in the departments of Cabanas and Morazan. Authorities claimed to have killed 132 guerrillas in one operation which lasted from 20 to 29 October 1981, near the south-eastern bank of the Lempa river. Their version was flatly contradicted by detailed reports from witnesses of the operation and by human rights monitors: 306

Elections and Civil War Socorro Jundico documentation shows that this operation resulted in the murder of forty-four minors, the capture and murder of ten family groups, and the murder of thirty-three women. A total of 147 noncombatants were either killed by the security forces or taken away by them. People in the area saw corpses floating down the river after the operation, a phenomenon that the armed forces e.xplained by claiming that‘a number of terrorists crossing the river in boats had been sunk. . . According to testimony given to Socorro Juridico, |the operation] involved members of the elite Atlacatl Battalion trained by US personnel in El Salvador.-"

Some ot the most widely reported massacres of non-combatant civilians occurred on the Honduran border, where survivors and witnesses could subsequently give first person accounts from Honduras. Others took place in the course of “clearance" operations — described as sweeps, “cleansing" campaigns, or “cleanups" — in guerrilla strongholds in the country. In these operations the victims were not only residents caught fleeing but peasants who chose to remain in their villages because they thought they had nothing to fear from the government forces. The intention was no longer to admonish the population by picking off the rural leaders, but to “clear"' the area of an untrustworthy population by wholesale killings, and by driving the survivors into internal refugee camps where they could virtually be held prisoner. The evidence on clearance operations in some areas suggested an intent to kill as many inhabitants as possible in targetted villages, and to kill entire families, so that children did not grow up to avenge their parents. A delegation of three US congressmen that visited El Salvador told a congressional committee in February 1981 that Salvadorean army officers had informed them that clearance operations responded to the guerrillas' own tactics: ‘The subversives like to say they are the fish and the people are the ocean. What we have done in the north is to dry up the ocean so we can catch the fish easily'. According to the delegates' testimony, however, the army is "drying up the ocean' by endeavoring'to eliminate entire villages from the map. . .

Precisely these tactics were used in a series of clearanee operations, in Cabanas and Morazan departments, in the seeond half of 1981, undertaken by departmental commanders in collaboration with the first Salvadorean army battalion to be created from scratch by US funding and training, the Atlacatl Battalion. In Cabanas department major operations in August and November were directed by newly appointed departmental commander Lieutenant-Colonel Sigfrido Ochoa, who would subsequently be praised by US military mission chief Colonel Wagglestein as the most suecessful regional eommander 307

Counter-Insurgency and Civil iVar

and a model counter-insurgent. A description ot a clearance operation in the department of Cabanas in November 1981 was provided in testimony to the US congress by an American graduate student Philippe Bourgeois — who was caught up in the sweep and fled for 14 days with local villagers before reaching Honduras.-'-^ The offensive began on 11 November, when some 1.200 troops reportedly spear¬ headed by the Atlacatl Battalion moved into the area with air support from helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. The accounts of Phillipe Bourgeois and other witnesses suggest that the objective of the operation was to liquidate the population of the ten villages in the area: ... for the next fourteen days. I fled with the local population as we were subjected to aerial bombardment, artillery fire, helicopter strafing, and attack by Salvadoran foot soldiers. In retrospect it appears as if the Salvadoran government troops had wanted to annihilate all living creatures (human and animal) within the confines of the 30 square mile area.-'"*

In a press statement published on 20 November Defense Minister General Garcia described the operation as one of the most successful of the war. and claimed 152 guerrillas had been killed. There were no prisoners.-'-'^ A similar clearance operation in the department of Morazan. from 8 to 21 December 1981, involved some 3,000 troops of both army and other security forces, including paramilitary irregulars. The main strike force was, once again, the US trained Atlacatl Battalion. Survivors' accounts indicated the death of over 1.000 civilians in nine hamlets in the northern part of the department; Los Toriles. La Joya. Manguera. Cerro Pando. Mozote. La Capilla. Lajitas. Soledad and Arambala.-'^ Initial information described only the destruction of El Mozote and the annihilation of its inhabitants, with the Washington Post (January 1982) quoting a lone survivor. 38 year old Rufina Amaya, who described the systematic, dispassionate murder of El Mozote's residents. The New York Times ran a similar account reporting people from neighbouring villages' discovery of piles of as many as 40 corpses in El Mozote. children with their throats cut. machine-gunned and burned, and pregnant women with their stomachs slashed open.-'' According to Rufina Amaya the troops arrived on 11 December about 5:00 am. rounded up the villagers from their homes, and methodically killed them. Some of the bodies were burned; The men were locked in the church, the women and children in a house. At noon, the men were blindfolded and killed in the town's center. .Among them was Amaya's husband, who was nearly blind. In the early afternoon the young women were taken to the hills nearby, where they were raped, then killed and burned. The old women were taken next and shot. Of the 308

Elections and Civil War killings Amaya told a North American reporter The soldiers had no fury. They just observed the lieutenant's orders. |A Lieutenant Ortega, whom she identified from a previous military sweep through the area.) They were cold. From her hiding place, Amaya heard soldiers discuss choking the children to death; suhsec]uently she heard the children calling for help, but no shots. Among the children murdered were three of Amaya's, all under ten years of age.-'*^

Some time later, after guerrilla forces had retaken the area it was revealed that massacres took place not only at El Mozote, but also in eight other neighbouring villages.-''^ By March 1982 Socorro Juridico had sutticient evidence to estimate the total number of dead in the area as over 1,000. Survivors had compiled a list of more than 700 bodies and reported many so badly disfigured that they could not be identified: among those identified many were members of Protestant evangelical sects “who believed that their neutrality and religion protected them".--" Socorro Juridico observ^ed that most of the dead were elderly, or women and children, and that of 217 bodies whose identities the office had confirmed 97 were children under 14 years of age.--' The American Embassy sent two staff members to “investigate" the reports of the Morazan massacres; although the investigation was limited to an overflight of the area at some 2,000 feet, more than a month after the reported massacres, this was sufficient for Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders to testify that evidence of a massacre had not been found.--- US congressmen who investigated the reports in early 1982. however, found the evidence available fully convincing; Repre¬ sentative Thomas Harkin told a congressional hearing of his conviction after visiting El Salvador: I have no doubt that a massacre of some scale did occur in El Mozote in December 1981. I also have no doubt that elements of the Atlacatl Brigade, a rapid deployment unit with an earlier reputation for paying more attention to human rights, were involved in the massacre.---^

A similar operation — lasting ten days — was carried out in Chalatenango department at the end of May and beginning of June 1982. It was described as a successful “cleanup” operation by its commander, who claimed that 135 guerrillas had been killed, while, conversely. FMLN spokesmen claimed up to 600 civilians had been massacred during the operation.--'' The apparent massacre is of particular relevance because, once more, it was carried out by the Atlacatl Battalion, this time in collaboration with two other US trained battalions, one of them recently returned from training in Eort Bragg; it was described as an exercise in US counter-insurgency tactics;--'' and Atlacatl's commander. Lieutenant-Colonel Domingo Monterrosa. did not deny civilians had been killed but in a press briefing, justified those 309

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

deaths. He informed the press that 12 guerrilla camps had been destroyed, although the “vast majority” of the estimated 800 guerrillas had probably escaped the area into Honduras “or Joined refugees remaining in El Salvador after hiding their rifles".-'^ With regard to civilian deaths, he stated: It is natural that in these subversive redoubts the armed men are not there alone, that is to say ... they need their "masses" — women, old people, or children, including the children who are messengers, or the wives, and they are all mixed up with the subversives themselves, with the armed ones... if s natural that there were a series of people killed, some without weapons, including some women, and I understand some children, in the crossfire between them and us.--^

This version of how women and children were killed - “in the crossfire” — did not accord with the survivors' testimonies, nor with the findings of those who examined the bodies. The US State Department, however, supported Colonel Monterrosa's disclaimer and went so far as to blame the guerrillas for their inefficiency in failing to get civilians out of the area before they were attacked: The commander of the Atlacatl Battalion stated to members of the US press that some noncombatant civilians occasionally die during combat operations. The Embassy agrees with this statement. All too frequently guerrillas, who routinely travel with civilian sympathizers and who usually have advance warning of impending military operations, do not take adequate measures to remove their noncombatant civilians to secure '>'>X areas.—''

In any case the massacres did not harm Colonel Monterrosa's reputation as an effective counter-insurgent commander. Over a year later, in November 1983. he was still in command of the Atlacatl Battalion and once again called upon to explain its involvement in the deaths of some 100 civilians during another “cleanup” operation. Acknowledging that civilians had. in fact, been killed (after foreign correspondents had confirmed massacres on visiting the area in question), he responded to allegations that his men had murdered children by suggesting that the dead children were guerrillas: Once you have seen several 12-year-olds in action, you can no longer dismiss the possibility that any 12-year-old may be a guerrilla.--'^

While Colonel Monterrosa did not openly admit that civilians were murdered, his statements tend to confirm that civilians, including children, found in guerrilla-dominated areas are considered part of the guerrillas' “masses” which must be eliminated in order to dry up the sea 310

Elections and Civil War

in which the guerrilla fish swim. Similarly, groups ofinternal or external refugees are presumed to conceal insurgents — thus the raids on refugee camps and the frequently expressed suspicion that the refugees are not bona fide refugees, but guerrillas. The highest death toll has been reported from rural areas undergoing clearance operations, but arbitrary detentions followed by summary executions are continually reported throughout the country. These killings have been carried out by regular army troops working out of local garrisons, by paramilitary police forces, and by civilian irregulars based in their home communities. In one well documented case of urban “counter-terror" which took place under the noses of the international press on 31 January 1983, only days after the Reagan administration had certified there had been progress in respect for human rights in El Salvador, the army killed 17 men and three women in the suburb of San Antonio Abad. The official story was that the deaths had occurred in an armed clash; even President Duarte claimed they had occurred in a “battle". Evidence readily available to the news media made nonsense of the government’s account and supported neighbours’ claims that the victims had been dragged from their homes and killed in cold blood. ... A diplomat who studied the bodies found that 17 of them had been shot in the head at point-blank range, and that three of them showed signs of torture. Many were in their nightclothes or partially dressed, as if awakened from sleep. The people died, in twos and threes, in scattered locations around the fringe of the neighborhood, not in one place.--^*’

On 2 March 1982 congressman Thomas Markin’s testimony to the House Inter-American Affairs committee, reporting on the findings of a bipartisan congressional delegation to El Salvador that had investi¬ gated the massacre, added fresh evidence gathered by the US Embassy itself: The embassy sent an investigator to the morgue. He saw seventeen bodies. Most of these people had been shot in the back of the head and the investigator reported that some had powder burns clearly around each bullet hole, indicating the people had been shot at very close range... the evidence in this case is overwhelming. The first Brigade of the Salvadoran army carried out a massacre of unarmed people in San Antonio Abad.-^'

The Salvadorean people themselves never doubted that such massacres were government policy, they were only surprised that they would carry one out when the capital was teeming with foreign correspondents, and make such a clumsy effort to cover it up:

311

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War 'I can't understand how people who are fairly intelligent can do things with such lack of finesse,' a San Salvador intellectual said, referring to the army leadership. 'Their policy is to go out and annihilate civilians who help the guerrillas. Thafs what they do. And then they always say there was a fight It doesn't matter that the people were killed in their underwear.'-'*-

The Salvadorean military’s indifference to what people think about their tactics placed the job of public relations largely with the United States. The US government was well prepared for such a responsibility. A “Dissent Paper on El Salvador and Central America”, allegedly prepared by professionals within the US foreign policy establishment who disagreed with Central America policy, was published anonymously in November 1980, and described two categories of calculated public relations activities related to US policy on Central America under Carter.--'’-^ “Improving and protecting the international legitimacy and prestige of the regime" was a principal objective, to be pursued by; •

Encouraging Salvadorean recruitment of moderate, reformist per¬ sonnel for diplomatic representation. • Providing logistical support and orientation through US embassies and missions. • Actively encouraging increased diplomatic support from sympathetic Latin American and other allied governments. • Discouraging resolutions and other diplomatic initiatives critical of current government or possibly contributing to the legitimation of opposition forces. • Activating mechanisms to disrupt opposition efforts to obtain international support and legitimacy and to limit the impact of such efforts. • Creating favorable conditions for other countries' involvement in support for US initiatives in the OAS and the UN in relation to the situation in Central America. • Closely monitoring and feeding US and world media coverage of the region and publicizing widely US confidence in and support for current process in El Salvador.^-^"*

While the monitoring and “feeding” of US and international news media was one part of the campaign to establish the “legitimacy” of the Salvadorean regime (and of US policy on El Salvador), a second line of action was aimed specifically at convincing US public opinion and lining up congress behind established policy. This objective was to be achieved “through liaison and press relations efforts that emphasize”: • A moderate and reformist image of the current government. • US support for extensive but moderate reforms in the region as a means to contain extremist and communist expansion.

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Elections and Civil War •

Linkages between opposition guerrilla groups in El Salvador and Guatemala with Cuba.

•

Discrediting centrist spokesmen of opposition as puppets of hardline guerrilla leaders.

• Caretul monitoring ot US press coverage of developments in El Salvador to avoid Nicaraguan style publicity for opposition insurgents. • Arranging regular closed session briefings for congressional com¬ mittees and key MC's [members of Congress] concerned with the issue--

The Dissent Paper discusses specific ways in which media coverage was infiuenced by Salvadorean and US authorities during 1980: Infiuential US journalists have been banned from the country by threats on their lives. Salvadorean government restrictions on visiting reporters have kept a tight lid on many critical events in the past six months. Informal signals to foreign desk editors during the electoral campaign discouraged their interest in the region.--^^

The authors of the Dissent paper conclude that the effort to keep the lid on public opinion regarding El Salvador, has, by and large been successful. They make specific reference to the US policy of attributing government violence to “extremists” out of their control; . . . our efforts to emphasize the differences between the situation in El Salvador today and the one prevailing in Nicaragua before July 1979 have had an impact on public perceptions. Media coverage of El Salvador has been responsive to official government policies: greater emphasis on US interests in the region, continuous reference to Cuban involvement understatement of the 'human rights' dimension, effective use of the ‘extremists of the right and the left’ formula. Therefore, the current domestic environment is generally supportive of current policy as articulated for public consumption.-^^

Reform Abandoned The extinction of the agrarian reform was followed, in early 1983. by a clash between middle-ranking regional troop commanders and Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia. Garcia's main antagonist was Colonel Sigfrido Ochoa, in command of the operations in the department of Cabanas. Sigfrido Ochoa's close relations with ARENA party leader Major Roberto D'Aubuisson and others representing the uncompromising far right within the military, was one factor in the high command's attempt 313

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

in January 1983 to remove him by posting him as Military Attache to Uruguay. This decision brought conflicts to a head between Defense Minister Garcia and field commanders whose prestige with the US military mission had outstripped their place in the military hierarchy, such as Colonel Ochoa, a 40-year old officer praised by both the civdian right and the US Military Group.-^ Backed by other field commanders, Ochoa refused to surrender his command of the Sesuntepecjue garrison and instead demanded Garcia’s resignation, claiming that he was corrupt and inept The alignment of support for the two positions was unequal and General Garcia, due to complete 30 years service in February, the mandatory retirement period for army officers, showed no signs of going quietly. The Central America newsletter This Week reported: a large majority of the military districts and commanders sided with Garcia... [Ochoa had the support] of the Air Force, led by his friend Col. Rafael Bustillo, and the 1st Infantry Battalion commanded by another hardliner. Col Adolfo Blandon. National Guard commander Col. Carlos Vides Casanova, a man who shares Ochoa’s conservative views but not his loner activism, tried, along with Blandon. Bustillo, and the chiefs of the US-trained battalions, to mediate between the rebellious colonel and Garcia, but the effort failed.-""’

The efforts at conciliation succeeded in so far as Colonel Ochoa was not sent to Uruguay, and General Garcia was not forced to resign on the spot. But the showdown was only postponed. On 13 April 1983, Air Force commander Colonel Bustillo issued an ultimatum calling for Garcia’s resignation within the week — this time with widespread backing from the military high command and, apparently, the US. Garcia duly resigned on 18 April and was replaced by General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova. American news commentators attributed the clash between field officers and Defense Minister largely to differences over tactics. By the end of 1982, unnamed US military advisers were frequently quoted as having said that Garcia blocked their efforts to rationalize the paramilitary defence forces and use "the guerrillas’ own tactics” by sending out small, mobile patrols. In the words of the former head of the military training group. Colonel John D. Wagglestein: “Youve got to get your troops out into the bush looking for the gee’s [guerrillas], and when you find’em, you’ve got to be able to pile on.”-"*' General Garcia was depicted as a military bureaucrat with little knowledge of appropriate counter-insurgency tactics, in contrast to Colonel Ochoa and other younger officers. But there was a political difference too between Garcia and the officers who sought to replace him, including his eventual successor, 44-year old General Vides Casanova. Garcia had been quite aware of the political necessity, if only

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for international public relations purposes, of keeping the reform programme extant while carrying out wholesale counter-unsurgency campaign slaughter; the reform of the banking system and show-case agrarian legislation — implemented or not — were quite acceptable to Garcia as a means to an end, and, furthermore, were officially pushed by the regime s US backers. Garcia was doubtless taken by surprise when the tide turned against him and US influence favoured opponents of reform who were also showcase proponents of the recommended rriilitary tactics of counter-insurgency. That General Garcia was ousted from his seemingly unshakeable position as Minister of Defense, was a sign that the military's readiness to temper repression with reform was a thing of the past and that external pressure from the United States was insufficient to make even an appearance of reformism necessary to retain the active support of the US. More to the point the military was receiving mixed signals from the US; the Department of State, concerned at the US congress' reaction urged some modicum of reform be sustained, while the military mission backed the ascendancy of the army's no compromise “counter-terror" experts in the Salvadorean hierarchy. Bustillos and Ochoa are representatives of ultra-right sectors in the Salvadoran military thought to be aligned with Roberto D'Aubuisson ... Garcia, the only cabinet minister to have held his post since the October 1979 coup ... has given lip service support to social reforms. Despite this, the Reagan administration's increasing concern over the deteriorating military situation in El Salvador in the past few months has led it to withdraw its support for Garcia... The ‘new officer breed' represented by Ochoa and Bustillos accept US recommendations for a vigorous counterinsurgency campaign of the type employed by the US in Vietnam (or by Gen. Efrai'n Rios Montt in neighboring Guatemala). This includes the deployment of small combat units and continual military presence in potential zones of combaL-'*-

When, in the second half of 1981, troops and paramilitary forces under Colonel Ochoa's command were credited with clearing Cabanas of major guerrilla forces, his reputation began to build up.'"*-^ As part of the strategy, large areas were depopulated as suspect villagers were killed, or fled towards San Salvador, or north across the border into Honduras. Ochoa's troops first received international publicity when in November 1981, during a major sweep operation they were observed crossing into Honduras to drag suspects from refugee camps there. One such raid, on the refugee camp of La Virtud, coincided with a visit by celebrity-turned-activist Bianca dagger and US congressional aides who intervened to stop the return of at least one refugee to probable death in El Salvador.By mid-1982 members of the US military mission were describing Ochoa in glowing terms to the press:

315

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War An intense 4()-year old professional soldier with sharp mestizo features and yellow-brown eyes, Ochoa is pointed to by US advisers as their kind of commander. . . Ochoa is one of the few who whole-heartedly has adopted and adapted the classic counterinsurgency tactics on which Washington is pinning its hopes for affordable military victories in El Salvador.-'*-'’

In July 1982, the Washington Post described Colonel Ochoa as one of a core of troop commanders who, with then chief of staff Colonel Rafael Flores Lima, are “clearly favoured by the US Embassy”. Said to be partisans of “small unit tactics, strongly advocated by the US’, these officers were reportedly assisted in their advancement by the US advisory mission and credited with something like professionalism: “The idea is to make the army a neutral, stabilizing force interested more in fighting effectively than political plotting."-'**’ Colonel Ochoa's background, however, hardly fitted the classic ideal of the professional army officer implied by the US military mission, although it did, according to the Washington Post, include attendance at counter-insurgency courses given by Israeli trainers in 1976 and studies in “political warfare" in Taiwan.-'*^ Like many other top Salvadorean officers Ochoa's career included a stint of counter-insurgency dirty work in a paramilitary police service — the notorious Treasury Police, well-known for its ruthless political policing operations and described by ex-Ambassador Robert White as “the worst offenders”.-'*** According to former army captain Francisco Emilio Mena Sandoval, who went over to the opposition in 1981, then-Major Ochoa had commanded the Treasury Police in Soyapango under the Romero regime, and had ordered the systematic murder of political prisoners and the shooting of the parish sacristan there on 16 October 1979.-'*'* This seems borne out by the business newsletter This Week, reporting Major Ochoa as one of the officers “fired" by Colonels Majano and Gutierrez, on human rights grounds, immediately after the October 1979 coup. Ochoa’s reputation, according to the same source, was acquired as a chief of the Treasury Police, in which post he was “frequently accused of repressive acts”.--'’** Ochoa was also distinguished as one of the regional commanders best known for actively obstructing implementation of even limited economic reform programmes. In early 1983. the American Institute for Free Labor Development cited the Cabanas department as the prime example of an area where “the philosophy and character of the local military commander" strongly influenced the progress of agrarian reform, and in which a commander “may have been quite successful in his pursuit of the war. but in the area of land reform support he might be a dismal failure”.-'’' AIFLD’s assessment provides a case in point of the relative weight given by the US military mission to the military and reform components of counter-insurgency strategy.

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Elections and Civil War

By mid-1982 Colonel Ochoa had been wholly rehabilitated in the American press: Lt. Col. Sigfredo Ochoa, an ambitious officer from the class of 1963-1964 who has been credited with clearing out rebel concentrations in Cabanas province and who is often pointed out by US officials as the most successful regional commander, once had a reputation as a rightisC"'-

The same Washington Post article describes Ochoa, Flores Lima and others as a group “relatively free of corruption, who have not been tainted by connections with rightist death squads". Ochoa's high reputation with the US military mission was due, not so much to his being free from corruption and untainted by death-squad connections but to what was seen as his successful application of counter-insurgency doctrine in Cabanas. A basic component of his operation there, to which Ochoa himself attributed much of his success, was the paramilitary network of “Civil Defense" groups in the area, in strict accordance with US counter-insurgency doctrine. These para¬ military units reported regularly to a regional intelligence/command centre, and operated at the local level under the direction and control of the regional headquarters. According to Colonel Ochoa these units were far from being the disorganized and impulsive free-lance paramilitary forces often described when authorities sought to disclaim accountability for their more violent actions. A Washington Post article of June 1982 reports on an interview with Ochoa and describes his campaign as highly organized: He likes to give chalk talks on his techniques in a special map room at his headquarters in the departmental capital of Sesuntepeque. Vast topo¬ graphic charts, an aerial photo and a kaleidoscopic array of arrows and diagrams lay out operations and occupations in his corner of the

The role of the Civil Defense forces is stressed and their tight organization revealed: A major element in his formula for success, one generally not mentioned by American advocates of the new tactics, is the most notorious adjunct of the Army, the collection of local paramilitary informers and militias called the Civil Defense... As cantonal patrols, as ‘military escorts', as the now-disbanded group called ORDEN and currently as Civil Defense units, they keep an eye on potential or imagined troublemakers and in many areas they simply eliminate them. Gesturing to a map polka-dotted with scores of green circles showing armed paramilitary groups. Ochoa says. Sometimes they commit abuses, but they are punished.'... Then he went on to his main point. All

317

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War these send us information,' he said, ‘such as where the guerrillas camp, where they move, how, what is their modus operandi, do they have foreign advisers and other intelligence necessary to exterminate insurgents.' As a result of the information he received from the Civil Defense, Ochoa staged three major operations in August and November.--'’^

The reticence of the US military advisers who praised Colonel Ochoa as a model counter-insurgent officer with respect to the role of the “Civil Defense" apparatus has significant historical precedents. In Vietnam, the rote of the paramilitary forces raised to wage irregular warfare remained largely unknown outside specialist circles. In El Salvador itself, despite the fact that US civil and military assistance programmes helped to set up ORDEN, security assistance officials, as late as 1977, claimed to have no knowledge of its existence.^^^ American support for an expanded “Civil Defense” network in the 1980s was entirely in line with the 1960s counter-insurgency doctrine already adopted and applied by the Salvadorean military. El Salvador’s paramilitary network, the nominally disbanded ORDEN and its various successors, were, like Guatemala's, already in place before the United States backed the large scale counter-insurgency programmes of the 1980s. Counter-insurgency theory expounded in Salvadorean military magazines, as has been noted, incorporates the basic tenets of US doctrine and adapts it to the particular circumstances of El Salvador. The US doctrinal concepts of “counter-organization" and “counterterror” (see Part 1) are adopted intact as the building blocks of the Salvadorean counter-insurgency efforts. Articles published in Salva¬ dorean military magazines particularly emphasize the use of“guerrillastyle organizations (counter-guerrillas)” which mimic the forms and techniques of subversive guerrilla organizations. A basic tenet is that conventional military organizations and methods cannot defeat insurgency; ... the traditional army, even when provided with very well trained troops and abundant war materiel, cannot defeat a small band of enemies (cases of Vietnam, Cuba, Cyprus, Philippines, etc.), whose leaders and men have received a rudimentary military training.--'’^

Victory over insurgent forces is seen as dependent on using the same tactics and organization as the guerrillas themselves: If we wish to confront the guerrillas successfully and defeat them in a short period of time, we must study their methods, their potential, and draw conclusions in planning our own attack. .

The organization of a network of governmental “guerrillas” (counter318

Elections and Civil War

guerrillas) is seen as legitimate and necessary to pre-empt insurgency. In "peace” time these paramilitary forces are to devote themselves primarily to intelligence gathering: .. . the mission of guerrilla forces is to support conventional and regular military operations. In our situation, given the circumstances for the use of guerrilla forces, it is useful to have established in peace time an information service in accord with future needs.--*'*^

In a more critical phase, after guerrilla warfare had broken out, paramilitary "guerrillas” were to work closely with regional data collection and command centres. Information would be moved from regional centres through conventional military intelligence channels "and eventually to the General Staff of the Armed Forces”Action could be taken against newly identified targets either by conventional forces or local "guerrilla” forces activated by the regional centres: The guerrillas can provide information (including the identification of targets and the evaluation of damage) ... to conventional Military Commanders... The information obtained by (regional intelligence and command] centers in collaboration with the military canton patrol and civilian personnel would be disseminated to guerrilla units operating in the district.-^*

In accordance with US counter-insurgency doctrine the insurgent forces' strength is that they are hidden away and supported by the mass of the people, the "fish in the sea” analogy. Remedies for "drying up the sea” prescribed by Salvadorean military doctrine are surprisingly straightforward, relying above all on "annihilation” of the guerrilla supporters and not on winning them over: We have noted that for the operation of the guerrilla the resolute support of the people is indispensable. This indicates that wherever a guerrilla is found operating with success, there are still some among the people cooperating with them and providing information. What, then, must be done? You must annihilate this source of support and their sources of information. How? By putting into action a counter-guerrilla organiza¬ tion among the same population.^^'

Most of the organizational and tactical elements prescribed by US counter-insurgency doctrine and echoed in the Salvadorean military establishments’ publications are clearly are clearly identifiable in accounts of counter-insurgency organization and operations under Colonel Ochoa’s command in the sparsely populated department of Cabanas. Ochoa’s implementation of counter-insurgency doctrine made the case of Cabanas a natural candidate to be held up as a model counter-

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Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

insurgency operation by the head of the US military mission and other United States military advisers.

“Operation Wellbeing” By early 1983, US commitment to encouraging the large scale structural reforms initiated in 1980 had been superseded by more modest Internal Defense and Development proposals (IDAD) in which geographicallylimited, high profile projects incorporating civic action programmes and population control were designed as part of an integrated counter¬ insurgency operation. Social and economic reforms that would upset the country's elites or disrupt the export economy were virtually forgotten. After the March 1982 elections and the subsequent thwarting of reform legislation the US made no major effort to have the reforms revived, despite congressional requirements for the United States President to certify that the Salvadoreans were “making continued progress in implementing essential economic and political reforms, including the land reform program” as a condition for continuing aid.-^^ The view of hardliners in the Salvadorean military, that economic and social reforms — and human_rights considerations — were an obstacle to the real business of rooting out and annihilating the guerrillas, was, to a large extent, shared by the US military mission and high ranking officials in the US defence department. In February 1983, Nestor Sanchez, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, testified on the Defense Department's position that: ... We believe that by acting as the guarantor of the political, economic, and social reforms, the High Command of the armed forces has been distracted from the principal task of fighting the guerrillas. In essence, the progress in implementing democratic reforms has been at the expense of the active pursuit of the war.-^^

The Salvadorean military's indifference to the human rights concerns of their American patrons had long been evident. In February 1982, Latin America newsletter observed that in cases such as the murder of the four missionaries the high command had been prepared to make “only minimal concessions to US public opinion on human rights issues” and described a meeting of Defense Minister General Jose Guillermo Garcia with US congressmen who brought up human rights issues ended “with the General telling his visito-rs to 'get the hell out of my office' The same source cited rising young officer Colonel Adolfo Blandon's (commander of the Second Infantry Brigade at Santa Ana) views of human rights concerns as obstacles, and asserting “that the army was having difficulty in its counter-insurgency campaigns only because it had to 'respect the civilian population'

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From early 1983 US strategy abandoned the emphasis on major schemes for reform and focused on increasing the degree to which US military advisers, and material assistance, could influence the conduct of the war. A more active pursuit of the war by commanders responsive to US direction was what policy makers felt would defeat the insurgency. General Garcia's replacement by National Guard commander Vides Casanova, at the insistence of Colonels Ochoa, Bustillo and other young officers favoured by the US military mission, illustrated this changed emphasis. ANewsweek report cited US officials who maintained that Garcia, as a military commander, was simply inadequate: 'I give him a A-plus for pushing reforms and keeping this place together.' said one senior Western official in San Salvador, 'But it was time for someone else to come in and win the war.'-^^

In spring 1983 a model, geographically-limited counter-insurgency programme incorporating civic action and new measures for population control (a faithful copy of Vietnam's “Civil Operations and Rural Development Support", CORDS, programme) was launched in the agro-industrial departments of San Vicente and Usulutan. The initial objective was to clear the guerrillas from the area and so halt the disruption of cotton and sugar production: In a first phase of the counterinsurgency operation, government troops would sweep through the area and destroy guerrilla strongholds. In a second phase the army would build up local ‘civil defense' forces (currently numbering about 2,000 in the two provinces) and involve municipal officials in a variety of economic aid and civic action projects — providing refugee relief, building wells, schools, etc. The pacification plan envisions placing US advisers from the Agency for International Development in the field to coordinate economic assistance in conjunction with a newly-formed Salvadoran National Commission for Regional Restoration.-^^

This regional pacification plan was an innovation only in so far as the first phase required committing major manpower resources to clearing the region and destroying the enemy; once cleared, an increased reliance on an expanded and strengthened paramilitary Civil Defense Groups network to assist in holding the area; and, finally, it included the well-digging, school-building trappings of civic action which make a good showing in the press. All a classic application of US counter¬ insurgency doctrine already put in practice in Vietnam. In spite of this, a major Newsweek report described it as a critical new initiative; The operation still has no code name, but the planning for it is nearly

321

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War complete. Sometime during the next few months, 10,000 or more government troops will attack rebel strongholds in the east-central breadbasket of El Salvador. The first phase of the operation will be a classic ‘search and destroy' mission, aiming at defeating the guerrillas or driving them away. Then civic-action teams from several government ministries will launch an ambitious ‘pacification program. With the help of civilian US advisers, they will rebuild homes, roads and bridges, start redistributing land to the peasants and furnish the region with electricity, water, schools and medical facilities. Finally, local militia units and specially trained Army battalions will be deployed to provide lasting security, ‘This strategy is a turning point in the war.’ says a military man who has been in on the planning. ‘We will win or lose on this operation'

Newsweek reported that the plan had been under development for almost two years in Washington and at the US Embassy, although the Salvadoreans had not become involved until May 1982, being taken into the US planners' confidence rather late in the day. With the agrarian reform by then largely a dead letter, the economic objective of the pacification plan boiled down to a plan to keep the big farms producing. The parallel with Vietnam, specifically, the CORDS programme of 1967-72, was drawn from the first. Surprisingly this was not simply an extrapolation by the media but a connection made by official sources in El Salvador. The Los Angeles Times quoted a US military source as noting that “CORDS is probably the best analogy I can think of, although this plan has their own [Salvadoreans'] conceptions in it”-^*^ In a later article reporter William Tuohy stressed the potential of the new plan to bring new American advisers — military or civilian — to El Salvador and recalled that CORDS had employed nominally civilian advisers for its paramilitary activities, including the administration of the Phoenix assassination programme: Some American reporters got hold of the story before the US Embassy was ready to announce its role in the plan and again the specter of Vietnam appeared. Comparisons were made with the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support in Vietnam, the civic action plan that involved hundreds of American advisers, civilian and military, at the provincial and district level. The Vietnam plan sometimes drew only a hazy line between civilian advisers and paramilitary action: it included the Phoenix program of assassinating Viet Cong. It was suggested by some here that the nature of the Salvadoran plan would lead to the increased use of firepower in the villages, with the soldiers simply being unlikely to differentiate between guerrillas and peasants. It was also suggested that the plan would involve an increased

322

Elections and Civil War commitment of civilian US trainers who would be closer to the fighting.-™

Given the Reagan administration's notable lack of support for earlier reform programmes, the same article expressed scepticism regarding the “development" or “reform" component of the pacification plan and suggested the new proposal represented, at base, a strategic commitment by the US to a protracted, bloody war of attrition: ■Reagan seems to be giving this government an open-ended commitment, no matter w'hat he says about supporting land reform and human rights.' said a leading Salvadorean social scientist, who did not want to be identified... Tm afraid this new pacification plan will simply mean that the army will revert to low-risk tactics — bomb, shell and pursue a scorched-earth policy — and that the cost in bloodshed will be substantial,'-^'

Most US media accounts of the San Vicente proposals were, however, uncritical, and described CORDS as having been an effective means to an end in Vietnam. That US security assistance spokesmen themselves openly equated the plan with CORDS in itself confirmed that CORDS (andPhoenix) had been fully rehabilitated since congressional hearings uncovered its assassination programme in the \970s. Newsweek, for one, stressed the productive co-ordination of civic action and rural paramilitary organizations by CORDS, and implied that even Phoenix, while distasteful, had been ultimately a success in the pacification process: The mission is modeled, loosely, on a program that was conducted in Vietnam under the name of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Develop¬ ment Support (CORDS). That campaign built roads and schools, handed out "miracle rice" to the farmers and supervised half a million local militiamen: it also coordinated the ruthless Phoenix program, which more or less exterminated the Viet Cong underground. Today. CORDS is generally considered a success; when South Vietnam fell, it was to the regular-Army divisions of North Vietnam, not to the Viet-Cong guerillas. Some of the US officials who now are planning the operation in El Salvador have studied the CORDS program, and they are hoping for similar results in the quite different but hauntingly familiar, setting of El Salvador.-™

While CORDS in general and Phoenix in particular have, in the past been described as successful, their principal defenders have been former intelligence officers closely involved in their organization and direction. William Colby, for example, defended CORDS and Phoenix in 1975 in almost the same terms as d\d Newsweek in its March 1983 article on its Salvadorean counterpart:

323

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War Colby never accepted the criticism of some that Phoenix failed. Quite the contrary. The North Vietnamese won the war in a conventional military campaign. Colby said after the collapse of Saigon in April 1975, because they had lost the war in the countryside,.-^-^

This assessment is, however, challenged by top defence analysts in the US military establishment itself Analysts in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense during the war found that Phoenix, in particular, had failed to significantly damage the insurgents' infrastructure, and the Defense Departmenf s Southeast Asia Analysis Reports' statistics confirm this. In a 1982 study, defence analyst Richard H. Shultz. Jr., cites Defense Department statistics and assessments suggesting that Phoenix was a dismal failure: All through the 1968-1972 period, assessments of Phung Hoang [Phoenix] were not very positive. For example, an analysis of 1969 neutralizations concluded that these not only had ‘little impact on the strength of the infrastructure . . . but the estimated VCI [Viet-Cong Infrastructure] strength increased'. A 1971 report noted that ‘Phung Hoang has changed very little ... no one seems to be able to improve if.^74

Defense Department records for 1968, moreover, register 13,000 to 14,000 “neutralizations" (arrests and killings) of Vietnamese in 1968 but disclose that only 5,200 were considered part of the “Viet-Cong Infrastructure" and that of these, “less than 1% ... held positions of top leadership" in the VCI.-^-‘' Shultz' conclusion is that the statistics and records “... strongly indicate that the infrastructure remained intact and in place despite the tremendous allocation of allied resources and effort to pacify the countryside."-^^ Ks Phoenix had failed to “neutralize" the “Viet-Cong Infrastructure", claims that the other aspects of CORDS served to win over the rural population to the South Vietnamese government have been debunked in recent studies based on the computer tapes of the elaborate “Hamlet Evaluation System" set up by CORDS (“a fully automated procedure for quantitative evaluation of Vietnamization-Pacification at the hamlet level").-^^ One conclusion of defence analysts is that the evaluation system's data base was faulty and gave wildly optimistic assessments of the progress in “pacification" — which CORDS directors accepted uncritically; areas designed under “control" of the government were, in many cases, under no more than temporary, fragile occupation. In sum. at the time of the US withdrawal, the enemy troops and infrastructure were intact and in place in a number of provinces. The Easter offensive dealt a serious blow to pacification in 1972. demonstrating

324

Elections and Civil War conclusively that the war was far from over in the countryside. . . What impact did this process have on the events of 1975? Certainly it shows the flaws in the argument that the US strategy of 1969-1972 was successful and only a powerful strike from the north, in conjunction with tactical GVN errors, caused collapse. A more accurate explanation would attribute the swiftness of the collapse to the failure of pacification to wrest control of the countryside from the VC and consolidate its influence among the population.-^^

Defence analysts have still to publish their findings on the role the terrorism of Operation Phoenix and CORDS played in driving the rural population to side with the insurgency, perhaps the critical factor in the counter-insurgency equation. “Operation Wellbeing" was formally launched in the department of San Vicente in June 1983. and accordingto press reports was assigned 17 US military advisers and large numbers of US civilian instructors and technicians from US government agencies.-’*^ Four thousand Salva¬ dorean army troops were assigned to the operation and. following clearance operations, several thousand peasant farmers — largely members of ORDEN, according to some sources — were brought in to work the hitherto abandoned plantations.-*^” The “pacification” plan was co-ordinated for the army general staff through its “civic affairs" section, from which the top intelligence agency. ANSESAL. administers an assassination programme considerably more lethal even than Operation Phoenix — but, ultimately, as unsuccessful.

325

15. US Military Assistance: Indirect to Direct Intervention

United States military assistance to El Salvador before the October 1979 coup included the provision of material, training, counsel and doctrine, and was decisive in transforming the traditional system of 1961 to a security system designed explicitly for counter-insurgency in the 1980s. The influence of US military assistance cannot accurately be gauged by the dollar cost of the Military Assistance Program (MAP), which, despite the presence of large numbers of United States army and air force advisers in El Salvador throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, was extremely modest. MAP costs from 1950 through 1979 were only $7.4 million,^*' far less than comparable figures for any neighbouring Central American republics, except Costa Rica (Guatemala, during the same period, received almost $28 million; Honduras, nearly $9 million).^*^ Despite the low budget an extensive training programme for officers, technical personnel and troops was provided under MAP and the International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). The extent of the training and advisory program inside El Salvador, by members of the Military Group itself, was to some extent concealed by the Defense Department’s accounting techniques. Personnel costs for the Military Group came neither from the MAP budget nor the Foreign Assistance Act, but from the Defense Department’s general budget; consequently, the quantities of trainers in the Military Groups (or MilGroups) did not receive the scrutiny given to other aspects of the military assistance programme. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense William Lang described the arrangement when asked in 1969 congres¬ sional hearings to elaborate on the budget request for $21.4 million for military assistance in Latin America in 1970, and provisions for between 500 and 700 personnel in the military advisory groups; Q. Mr. [Wayne] Morse: Does the support for those 700 people constitute part of the $21.4 million you are talking about. . .? A. Mr, Lang: No: the support for the MilGroups is provided from two sources: The countries themselves pay for certain costs of the MilGroups, and the US service budgets support other direct costs of the military

326

Indirect to Direct Intervention groups. This under a special congressional authorization that goes back to the 1920s.’**^

The MilGroup personnel costs were, in fact half again the full budget congress had been requested to approve for 1970 military assistance; excluding special costs incurred in the aftermath of the US occupation of the Dominican Republic, the US contributed $7.7 million towards Military Groups in Latin America that year, with only $23,700 of the sum provided from MAP funds.^*"* No figures were provided for the costs incurred by host countries, which generally provided transport and headquarters facilities. In 1970, El Salvador had a Military Group of 16 US military personnel and three civilians providing a permanent advisory and training service to the Salvadorean military. The relatively low figure of $595,000 for military assistance to El Salvador in 1970 ($336,000 of it for commodities) in no way reflects either the level of cost or influence represented by the Military Group itself The MilGroups' importance was disguised both by their independent financing and exclusion from military assistance budgets and the understatement of their functions. In 1976 congressional hearings, the Defense Department said only small MilGroups were based in Central America (“15 US military personnel in Guatemala, 10 in El Salvador and 15 in Nicaragua”), and suggested they were really little more than glorified clerks (“They are there to implement the remainder of the grant program; that is the shipments, the invoices and deliveries to the units, to assist them in getting their request in to Washington for the credit program. . .”).^*^ But by providing a permanent presence in the midst of the Salvadorean high command itself, the MilGroup could impart training and advice directly, without local or US interference. In the 1970s, several US Ambassadors complained that the MilGroup and Defense Attaches’ functioned almost as a parallel embassy, and, indeed, regularly sidestepped the Ambassador in dealings with the military governments — a problem long recognized by the Department of State. In 1977 congressional hearings ex-Ambassador Lozano complained vigorously of MilGroup diplomacy: [the problem] was getting the Salvadoran government which, of course, is military, to face up to the fact that when it wanted to deal with the United States it had to deal with the Embassy, with the civilian people in the Embassy, and they much preferred dealing with the military group. They feel more comfortable.^*^

In a second intervention, Lozano described both the close contact between MilGroups and their clients and the former's tendency to share the perceptions, and identify with the interests, of the latter, “as one of

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the dangers of having a military group in the first place”. He then pointed out the “problem” of having “our military group . . . headquartered in [El Salvador’s] military headquarters rather than in the Embassy” (“That is where they work 8 hours a day. . In the first years after the 1961 coup the permanent advisory personnel were regularly supplemented with short stay Mobile Training Teams (MTTs) with their own special training duties. Former US Ambassador to El Salvador (1961-64) Murat Williams has described the 1961 coup as the “watershed” of US military assistance to the country, after which aid included “a heavy military component” and the expanded military mission “even had a few Green Berets”.^** In March 1969 the MilGroup numbered 19 US personnel and three foreign contract staff; in accord with a general trend to reduce the size of the military mission, it was reduced to 16 Americans in 1970, 10 by 1977 289 Throughout this period the MilGroup continued to be based in the Salvadorean Army’s General Staff Headquarters. Its duties included “airborne, paratroop, and counterinsurgency training”.^^® Provision of military material was not a major part of the assistance programme after 1964, but significant grants of material were made, credits provided for arms purchases under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Program, and licenses for arms purchases issued under the Commercial Sales Program. Agreements for purchases on credit under the FMS Program totalled $3.47 million from 1955 to 1979; licensed commercial sales totalled $2.01 million. By 1977, however, El Salvador’s police and military forces were using equipment provided by a wide range of suppliers. On request, the Department of State provided March 1977 congressional hearings with a breakdown of US equipment used in El Salvador, and affirmed that approximately 70% of the total small arms in use there were non-US produced: The standard weapon of the individual army soldier is the Belgium-made G-3 ride. The US M-1 Garand rifle is primarily for the interior guard of installations and training. The standard weapon of the National Police is the .38 Smith and Wesson. US-made revolver, and US M-1 carbine. The standard weapon of the National Guard is the G-3 rifle and the machete.^^^

The army’s heavier weapons (recoilless rifles, .30 and .50 calibre machine-guns, mortars and rocket launchers) were still US-supplied. The National Police was reported to hold 200 M-1 rifles and 2,372.38 calibre revolvers; the National Guard 1,795 M-1 carbines and 30 M-1 rifles. Not detailed in the hearings were the commercial sales. Of these perhaps the most significant, if only for symbolic reasons, were sales from the years 1975 through 1978 of somewhat over 20 million rifle, revolver and submachine-gun cartridges, averaging five million annually (more than a bullet a piece for each of the nearly five million

328

Indirect to Direct Intervention

Salvadorean people). Weapons sold in relatively small quantities under licence included shotguns, rides, revolvers and submachine-guns.-'^While US commodities sales were not insignificant, El Salvador’s major purchases after 1974 included aircraft from Israel, France and Brazil. Under a 1975 contract, Israel sold El Salvador 18 refurbished French fighter bombers and trainers. France provided more jet trainers and riot tanks; by 1979 Israel had sold El Salvador 25 Arava STOF aircraft, and six Fouga Magister trainers. These and 12 Brazilian EMBRAER EMB-11 patrol aircraft, acquired in the same period, were designed explicitly for counter-insurgency warfare. In the same period Israel also sold at least 200 Uzi submachine-guns, the army death squads' favourite weapon, and 200 80mm rocket launchers.-'’-'* The United States’ last provision of aircraft, until 1980, was three C-47 transports (in 1974) and the work-horses of counter-insurgency warfare from Guatemala to Vietnam, 4 Bell Uh-IH helicopters, delivered in 1976. By mid-1977, when President Molina pre-empted an expected US decision to cut off military aid by “renouncing” it, El Salvador had largely completed refurbishing its land and air forces with the best equipment available in the world for counter-insurgency. Israel and Brazil continued to be major suppliers and some programmed US equipment transfers and training continued after the “renunciation” of aid. Previously authorized training and transfers worth $1.04 million went ahead in 1978 and in 1979, before the October coup.^^'* While only a fraction of previous levels of US military aid continued after 1977, US assistance programmes’cco«om/c aid to El Salvador rose from $6.8 million in 1977, when military aid ostensibly ended, to $10.9 million in 1978. Aid from international governmental financial bodies strongly influenced by the US more than quadrupled,^^^ rising from $23.6 million in 1977 to $101.9 million in 1978, with the bulk of funds disbursed from the Inter-American Development Bank and the InterAmerican Bank for Rural Development.-'’^ As the Salvadoreans’ major arms purchases from Israel and Brazil were in the years 1977 through 1979, it seems that the budgetary slack the major cash influx provided in 1978 more than compensated for the suspension of the relatively low credit facility the US previously provided for arms purchases. After all, the same military establishment that purchased arms ran the state agencies that received and utilized the economic credits.

After the Coup: Partners in Counter-Insurgency The mass of weaponry and supplies, and the training and advisory assistance provided by the United States after the October 1979 coup accord with a framework of counter-insurgency doctrine little changed from the 1960s, although it had been renamed the doctrine of Internal Defense and Development (IDAD). Over the previous two decades the

329

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

US assistance programme had been largely responsible for the expansion and technical reinforcement of a security system designed and adapted for counter-insurgency. Despite the novel component of reform promoted by the United States and part of the October junta, US military assistance from day one of the new regime was tailored for one purpose; putting down a burgeoning insurgency. Renewed assistance began with a six-man Mobile Training Team (MTT) flown in on 12 November 1979, their duties officially limited to training in riot control. They were accompanied by $205,000 worth of equipment (including bullet-proof vests) which ended the 20-month embargo on US military aid.^*^’ At the same time $300,000 was made available for training Salvadorean officers overseas, or in-country training by additional MTTs.^^^ Until 1981, security assistance provided by the Carter administration was restricted to what was described as “non-lethal” items, and excluded weapons or ammunition, a distinction that, in a letter to President Carter, Archbishop Romero suggested was largely academic in the Salvadorean context. (“[Assistance will] only be strengthening those who oppress the people, even if it is providing tear gas and protective jackets. This will mean more confident repression of the people.’y^^ The lethal uses of “non-lethal" assistance (such as bullet-proof vests or helicopters) became abundantly clear in accounts of counter-terror operations in the subsequent years. Thirty heavily armed men wearing army combat vests, but masked with hoods lettered ‘death squad' came to my village and seized and killed a number of peasants. They went then to the neighboring village of Santa Helena, seized Romilia Hernandez, aged 21, raped and then decapitated her. Her relatives buried her head: the rest of her body was burned by her murderers. The head had been left in front of her relatives' house. The members of the ‘death squad' were evacuated that day by a Salvadorean army helicopter.^^

In February 1980, reports reached the press of plans to deploy three 12-man MTTs for specialized training in communications, logistics, and intelligence. As the term “advisers” was reminiscent of Vietnam, the State Department spokesmen sought to distinguish the teams as “trainers”, and justified them as crucial to ensure a “clean anti¬ subversive war”. Only with massive US training, they said, could El Salvador’s military be weaned away from a “traditional” habit of dealing with dissent by naked violence.^*^' Criticism of the MTT plan, in the United States, temporarily delayed their departure;^*^^ at least four MTTs were, however, present for month-long stints in summer and autumn 1980. A crash training programme for Salvadorean officers in the Canal Zone began shortly after the October coup, using IMET funds.

330

Indirect to Direct Intervention

Declassified documents confirm that from the beginning of fiscal year 1980 (October 1979) until 24 May 1981 “the United States trained 327 Salvadorean officers”^*’-' in the secret programme. The Canal Zone training caused embarrassment and irritation to Panamanian President Aristides Royo, who denounced it as unethical, and intended “to repress a country The first detailed description of the programme was made in the “Dissent Paper on El Salvador and Central America”, the 29 page document circulated throughout official circles in Washington in 1980, and apparently the work of experts within the US foreign policy establishment who disagreed with US policy on Central America. The “Dissent Paper” said the Panama programme was “the largest ever sponsored by the US for any Latin American country in a single year'U*’-*’ and that other countries were also training Salvadoreans in co¬ operation with the United States: The most solid bloc of support for the current government and its counter¬ insurgency efforts comes from the southern cone military regimes. Among these Argentina, Chile and Uruguay provide training advisors on intelligence, urban and rural counter-insurgency, and logistics. Argentina has become the second largest trainer of Salvadorean officers after the US.^06

In April 1980, the Carter administration made its first move to provide large quantities of equipment to the Salvadorean military, winning congressional approval to “reprogramme” $5.7 million of the military assistance budget already allocated to other countries, for the provision of transport, communications equipment and such “non-lethal” devices as night-vision scopes.^*^^ The administration also requested $5 million in Foreign Military Sales (FMS) credits and $498,000 for IMET grants for 1981. Training was justified as a means to “expose officers to US military doctrine and practice as well as provide them training in internal security”.^®* Despite the announcement of a “hold” on economic and military aid pending clarification of “reports of the involvement of the Salvadorean security forces” in the murders of the three American nuns and a lay worker on 2 December 1980, there was no significant interruption in aid. Training by advisory teams inside El Salvador continued without a break, as did programmes in the Canal Zone. The only substantive effect of the “hold” was to delay some shipments of commodities. On 17 December, the hold on economic aid to El Salvador was lifted, on the grounds that significant progress had been made in investigating the murders (an inquiry had been promised). On 14 January the full gamut of military aid was reinstated, this time justified by the FMLN’s countrywide offensive. A Presidential order of 16 Januaiy sped an emergency airlift of arms, equipment and military advisers to El Salvador; in fact military advisers had been moving into El Salvador

331

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

since the first days of the month in anticipation of the offensive. Unlike MTT personnel, who were officially limited to training activities,the advisers sent in January were to be closely involved in the planning and implementation of counter-insurgency operations. Declassified docu¬ ments cited by New York-based Americas' Watch confirm that an Operational and Planning Assistance Team (OPAT) arrived in El Salvador on 7 January, before the ban was lifted, its mission described as advising “how to protect the harvest against guerrillas’’.^'^ These advisers were followed shortly afterwards by 14 trainers and technicians accompanying the six UH-1H helicopter gunships rushed to El Salvador (on lease) on the basis of President Carter’s emergency aid order. By the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration 19 military advisers — in addition to the enlarged Military Group and Marine guard contingent — were stationed in El Salvador.^" The Carter administration’s dispatch of operations advisers, gunships, and weapons in its last weeks in office set the stage for the larger projection of power to come with President Reagan in the White House. Despite misgivings on human rights, and a gradual progression from training and non-lethal commodities grants to the full panoply of lethal hardware and military advisers, there was an air of inevitability to the build-up of US security assistance to El Salvador after the October 1979 coup. Not until Reagan took office did the US military presence escalate sharply, but Reagan’s policy was not essentially different from Carter’s in the wake of the Nicaraguan revolution’s victory in July 1979. The Carter administration itself may have quietly “drawn the line in the sand” at El Salvador considerably before Reagan and Haig did so with such fanfare in the first months of 1981. In November 1980 the “Dissent Paper” outlined areas of support extended to the Salvadorean regime in the 1979-80 period and described the actions undertaken as reflecting a policy of “No More Nicaraguas”. The paper gives no classified information on the funds allocated to this policy although it concludes that the measures undertaken required “an allocation of bureaucratic and financial resources exceeding those made to any other hemispheric crisis since 1965 [when the Dominican Republic was invaded”.^'- The “Dissent Paper” also maintains that such an allocation of resources could have been made only after decisions at the very top: The Carter administration came to the conclusion that the collapse of the current civilian-military coalition government in El Salvador and its replace¬ ment by a left wing regime would constitute a threat to our strategic interests in the Caribbean basin. Policy makers also agreed that the US still has a chance of preventing such developments through the provision of overt and covert political, military, economic, technical, diplomatic and public relations assistance to the current regime. However, if this effort failed to stabilize the local situation, the US would let it be known that it is prepared to and will use military force in conjunction with others, or, if necessary, unilaterally.^'^

332

Indirect to Direct Intervention

The “Dissent Paper” authors emphatically opposed the policy of a military solution in Central America and warned that it is based on faulty data and bureaucratic considerations within the foreign establishment; We consider these activities and the policies they imply to be dangerously misguided. Current policy, as we interpret it, is based on inaccurate intelligence, and on the suppression within various bureaucracies of verified contradicting information. The options and recommendations on which policy decisions were made have been based on irresponsibly self-serving evaluations and analyses of intelligence reports available within the agencies. Critiques and dissenting views were systematically ignored. Underlying these apparent bureaucratic maladjustments one finds a fundamental lack of understanding of general conditions and trends in Central America and the Caribbean.-^''*

The “Dissent Paper” presents a picture of a foreign affairs bureaucracy with vision limited by its own institutional interests, prerogatives, and political blinkers. The President, whoever he may be, remains insulated from reality by bureaucratic hermeticism, self-interest, and inertia. In the long or the short run, the outcome is policy failure. The “Dissent Paper”, of course, is not the first to sketch such a vision of the foreign policy establishment. In February 1981, the Reagan/Haig media blitz on the “Cuban/ Nicaraguan Threat” prepared the ground for the announcement, on 5 March, that $20 million in emergency military assistance would be provided to El Salvador, under Section 506 of the Foreign Assistance Act (also used by President Carter for the $5 million emergency aid in January 1981). This authorizes the President to provide foreign countries with military material, services and training, in aggregate value not exceeding a total of $50 million in any fiscal year, once he has certified that an unforeseen emergency exists which requires immediate military assistance and that this emergency cannot be dealt with under any other law.'^’*’ In March 1981, a further $5 million was allocated by “reprogramming” FMS credits, and in June another $18 million of emergency Economic Support Funds was “reprogrammed".-^'^ The March 1981 assistance grant provided for quantities of ammunition, weapons, communications equipment and aircraft, including 9,000 M-16 rifles, 59 M60 machine-guns, five helicopter gunships, 500-lb bombs, grenade launchers, mortars and fragmentation grenades.^'^ A $66 million assistance budget — $23 million for security assistance, $40 million for related economic assistance — approved by congress for fiscal year 1982 provided for accelerated training and commodity transfers to the expanding Salvadorean military. Grants under the Military Assistance Prograrn were to total $8.5 million, IMET grants were budgetted at $1 million; and FMS credits were raised from $10 million in 1981 to $16.5 million in 1982, marked for the acquisition of a wide range of military hardware. $40 million were allotted as Economic Support Funds (ESF).^'^

333

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

In early 1982, the President authorized further grants under Section 506, justified as responding to one of the guerrillas’ most successful operations in the course of the civil war: the destruction, in a 27 January raid on the Ilopango airport, of six UH-1H helicopters, a jet trainer, five transports and six fighter planes.^'^ Within a matter ofweeks $55 million in emergency aid was released, dwarfing the $23 million military assistance approved by Congress through the regular foreign assistance channels. Of the new funds, $25 million were earmarked to compensate for the airport raid, and, in fact, enabled the US to radically upgrade this force: To replace six “Huey” helicopters, twelve were provided within a few weeks of the raid. In addition the package contained eight counter¬ insurgency jet fighters (Cessna A-37B ‘Dragonfly’) and four forward aid control spotter planes (Cessna 0-2A ‘Skymaster’) that would significantly add to the governmenfs air assault capability, as well as four transport planes especially suited to counterinsurgency conditions.^^*’ Subsequently, an additional $1,054 million was “reprogrammed” for IMET to see out financial year (FY) 1982.^^' The use of Section 506 of the Foreign Assistance Act to bypass congressional supervision and approval procedures continued in 1983, with congressionally approved funds of $26.3 million in military aid representing only a small proportion of total funds released under executive discretionary powers. There is evidence that a pre-programmed allocation of funds under Section 506 or Section 614 was a base-line for administration aid planners, even before going to Congress with conventional appropriation requests. In mid-February 1983, the administration went to Congress seeking to double approved funds. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger inadvertently remarked to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that “one way or another” the administration intended to get its $60 million in assistance for El Salvador ^22 _ extraordinary affront to congressional sensibilities. In March, however, the ante went even higher when the administration advised Congress that its supplementary military aid request to top up 1983 disbursements would be at $110 million and not $60 million. Where the money was to come from would depend very much on the degree of congressional resistance to a complex amalgam of supple¬ mental appropriations, reprogrammings, and, if necessary, appropria¬ tions from executive contingency funds under Sections 506 and 614.323

The proposed application of the $110 million illustrated the overall direction of the US aid and advisory effort after 1979. It was largely destined for the same categories of application as security assistance in the 1960s, when the security system was reoriented and restructured to deal with incipient insurgency, but scaled massively upward to deal

334

Indirect to Direct Intervention

with the shift to open civil war. Of the $110 million $15 million was allocated to ammunition and ordnance, $17 million for ground and sea transport, and $3 million for weaponry. Almost half, $45.5 million, was intended to provide training for between 5,000 and 8,000 soldiers and 1,500 officers and cadets; $24.5 million was earmarked for 10 UH-IH helicopters.^^'^ In mid-March 1981, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on “The Situation in El Salvador", Under-Secretary of State Walter Stoessel stressed the “limited” nature of US involvement there: El Salvador is not another Vietnam. Our objectives are limited: to help the government with its problems of training, equipment repair and maintenance, mobility, and resupply. . . [To do so required] a small number of personnel on temporary duty to help train the Salvadoran army and navy. .

More detailed breakdowns of each group of advisers’ tasks were cited in press reports read into the record of the 1981 congressional hearings on “The Situation in El Salvador”. Five men with “administrative duties” within the Military Group were said also to be responsible for liaison with the Salvadorean military “as well as gathering military intelligence”A group of ten advisers, some present since autumn 1980 — “to work out a plan for protecting agricultural production” — were to work on planning specific “offensive operations’. Three five-man teams responsible for training rapid response troops turned out to be Special Forces advisers. Brought up from Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone, where some 300 Salvadorean non-commissioned officers and officers were then training, these Special Forces teams were to be “in closest contact with fighting troops” and to work to train a new rapid reaction unit being organized near the town of San Andres south of the capital... a force of 1,000 or more men who can use the US helicopters to move quickly and effectively against concentrations of guerrillas.

This was the Atlacatl Rapid Response Battalion (See Chapter 10). General Ernest Graves of the Defense Assistance Agency subsequently confirmed that most members of these advisory teams were selected from Special Forces units because of their qualifications” and that their purpose “is to train this reaction force. . Specialists in counter-insurgency warfare, these five-men teams were responsible for virtually all aspects of basic training for the new Atlacatl Rapid Response Battalion in “patrolling, air mobile operations, individual soldier skills, and counter-guerrilla operations”.328 According to another source, training in tactical infantiy operations was followed

335

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

by training in “patrolling, ambushes, airmobile operations, medical subjects and demolitions”.^‘'^ In 1981, Special Forces units also trained “Salvadorean cadres to operate a National Training Center”.^^*’ Further major training activities continued in 1982, with 25 advisers responsible for training of the second “rapid reaction” battalion, the “Jose Ramon Belloso” Battalion. This was the first unit to be sent to receive part of its training in the United States. Sixty officers and sergeants received a month's training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in January 1982, and in mid-February were joined by 1,000 troops for another four months’ training.^^' This was after five five-men teams had provided initial training to the troops in El Salvador before they were off to Fort Bragg, including “M-16 markmanship, first aid, combat intelligence and communications”.^^^ By the end of 1982 a third “rapid reaction” force, the “Atonal” battalion, had completed its training.^^^ The first three US trained battalions numbered together some 3,600 men, and were subsequently characterized by the US military mission as the army's “crack” counter-insurgency forces. Although the US Department of Defense denied having trained other full battalions, press sources reported a ceremony on 12 October 1982, in the city of San Miguel, in which troops of the reportedly US-trained “Cuscatlan” battalion were sworn in, and ,another ceremony later that month in which provisional President Alvaro Magana presided over the swearingin of 700 new recruits for the “new Jaguar” battalion.^^^ Adverse US public reaction to the Fort Bragg training of the “Jose Ramon Belloso Battalion in 1982 may have led to the abandonment of further plans for training whole battalions in the United States, but the creation of major training facilities on Honduran soil soon provided an alternative, lower-profile solution. In July 1983 the newsletter Latin America described “the large training centres set up by the United States 12 km outside the Honduran city of Trujillo, on the coast”, and the arrival of the first Salvadorean troops for training: The first contingent of the 1,000 strong “Manuel Jose Arce” Battalion of the Salvadorean army has already arrived for the intensive two-to-five month training programme conducted by Special Forces instructors from Fort Bragg North Carolina. The 125 instructors under Lt. Col. John Mirus have a grueling task ahead: they are expected to groom six battalions of Salvadoreans between now and December.^^^

Doubling the army’s combat troops, within one year, with training carried out almost entirely by US advisers, was paralleled by a crash¬ training programme for an expanded officer corps. In 1980, some 300 Salvadorean officers were trained in the Panama Canal zone and, although rio figures are available on numbers of officers trained by US advisers within El Salvador, the introduction of a large military adviser contingent was followed by in-country training on a large scale. 336

Indirect to Direct Intervention Programmes to accelerate officer training included the development of a one-year curriculum at the military academy of El Salvador, launched early in 1982. The academy had traditionally followed a two year cycle.^^^ Training of officer candidates at continental US bases began in 1982, when the entire student body of the military academy received a one month course in January and February at Fort Benning, Georgia. Completion of the Fort Benning course reportedly topped off the training of 600 officer candidates; when commissioned they would double the size of the officer corps.^-^^ United States military and economic assistance was essential to finance the enormous increase in size of the Salvadorean armed forces after October 1979, and to train new officers and soldiers. The army, which stood at some 7,000 men in 1979, rose to 9,000 by July 1981 and, according to Pentagon sources, more than doubled its forces, to 19,000, by June 1982.-^-^* By March 1983 the army comprised 22,400 men, backed by the 11,000 men of the paramilitary National Guard, Treasury Police, and National Police,^-^^ and irregular forces estimated to number 50,000 or more armed men within the Civil Defense/ORDEN network. Projected army strength for 1984 is in the area of 30,000 men.^"^** Expansion of the regular army and civilian irregular forces responded in part to the military convention whereby guerrilla forces can best be vanquished by fielding overwhelmingly larger governmental forces, but also to the battlefield successes of the opposition forces. To some extent the Salvadorean armed forces were obliged to expand if only to compensate for an immense casualty and desertion rate. In 1982 alone, according to Salvadorean defence spokesmen, the armed,forces lost 1,073 men killed in action and 2,584 wounded.^'*' Further losses have been incurred by the capture (often simply surrender) of large numbers of government soldiers by the guerrillas, sometimes including complete garrisons, and a high desertion rate.^'^^

Human Rights, Internal Defence and Development The death toll of non-combatant civilians increased massively after the United States introduced large-scale military assistance programmes in 1980, and mass killings of civilians continued, year after year, as the US progressively trained virtually all Salvadorean officers, and by mid-1983, Ure than half of the army’s regular forces. The training programmes were, however, the object of a consistent public relations effort on the US govemmenf s part claiming that US training would have a civilizing influence on the massacre-prone Salvadoreans and teach them to mend their ways. At the same time, proponents of this training stressed that it would enable the trainees to rapidly crush insurgency - seemingly unaware of any contradiction between the emphasis on immediate short¬ term military results and the human rights focus. 337

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

A main argument favouring massive US training of Salvadorean troops and officers, largely accepted at face value by the news media, was that the army indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in El Salvador was not a matter of policy, but merely a question of individual excesses by over-zealous officers or by undisciplined officers and men out of the control of their superiors. Professional training by the United States, it was maintained, would instill that sense of discipline which according to this version — the Salvadorean army was lacking. Training, however, was imparted by members of the US Army Special Forces, specialists in organizing and training irregular forces for irregular warfare; perhaps not the best teachers to impart either traditional concepts of military discipline, or to excite a great deal of enthusiasm for the rules and restrictions of conventional warfare. Despite the Special Forces' background, a considerable publicity effort was made to characterize US training programmes for Salva¬ doreans has heavily human rights-oriented. Already in October 1980 the head of the US Southern Command. General Wallace Nutting, described the training as designed to enhance technical and profes¬ sional skills and including a course entitled “Human Rights Aspects in Internal Defense and Development"; which he maintained was intended to teach: “How to be nice to people while you force them to do what you want them to do. How to assert force without being brutal.”-'''*-^ He elaborated when speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in August 1982: Our training emphasizes a leadership focus on human rights and professional responsibility. We continually stress matters of military and citizenship importance to include the treatment of captured combatants and protection of non-combatants in countering guerrilla warfare. In this connection, about 11% of the cadet program of instruction at Fort Benningand about 18% of the infantry battalion program of instruction at Fort Bragg were devoted to internal defense and development [IDAD] matters and discipline.-^"”

General Nutting was. perhaps wrongly, implying that professional discipline and IDAD would enhance respect for human rights, or were even necessarily compatible. IDAD is the current, polite, term for counter-insurgency doctrine; and. in practice, counter-insurgency may clash considerably with respect for human rights. In any case, a report by the US-based human rights monitoring organization, Americas’ Watch and the American Civil Fiberties Union (ACFU) which examines the course outlines from Forts Bragg and Benning, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. suggests that General Nutting was somewhat exaggerating the emphasis given human rights in the training programme. The documents indicate that “during their entire 4-month stay at Fort Bragg" students received only two hour lectures 338

Indirect to Direct Inten'ention

entitled “Develop and Maintain Popular Support" in which students were to “discuss methods to develop and maintain popular support and undermine guerrilla propaganda”; two hours of instruction on “Care and Control of Indiginous [sic] Personnel”, which covered “care and control of civilians to include health and welfare, refugee control, and treatment of indiginous [sic] personnel”, and a one hour and 50 minute lecture on “Law of Land Warfare/Geneva Convention”.^'**’ Perhaps the most widely repeated defence of US training as useful to stop the Salvadorean killing of prisoners refers to their intelligence value (as a rationale for not killing them on the spot). In a 1983 interview with the US army commander at Fort Gulick's School of the Americas in the Canal Zone. Colonel Nicholas Andreacchio. stressed that 'some sort of human rights training' was now included in every course even if it was just a question of teaching NCOs that it was more valuable in intelligence terms to keep prisoners alive than to kill them.'*'*^

The argument does not. however, suggest that all prisoners should be formally remanded in custody, or imply that all prisoners have an equal intelligence value: children killed as a preventive measure, so that they could not grow up into guerrillas, or women making tortillas to feed guerrilla forces, have little to offer under interrogation that cannot be wrung from them in the brief period before they are killed in the field. In El Salvador, captive oppositionists have generally been interrogated immediately after capture, in local police posts or in the field, and no premium has been set on the prisoner surviving interrogation or living long after. Very important prisoners may be sent to regional interro¬ gation centres at one of the five regional military command posts, for more prolonged interrogation, but as a rule they are not accounted for as acknowledged prisoners and never come out alive. In practice. US advisers' stress on the intelligence value of prisoners may only ensure that field interrogations are more thorough and cruel before summary execution removes once and for all the threat of further resistance by the prisoner. In the final analysis. United States military training and advice can be best assessed through the behaviour of the forces trained and advised. The training in humanitarian behaviour, supposedly imparted m US courses for Salvadorean troops and officers, is hardly reflected in practice, in their treatment either of civilians or of captured combatants who may, in fact, be potential holders of hard intelligence data. While the mam concern of human rights monitors has been the killings of non-combatant civilians, and statistics on assassinations and massacres by government forces are limited to that type of murder, Salvadorean military and paramilitary forces have also routinely put to death members of the armed opposition who are captured or wounded in combat. 339

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

The generalized policy and practice of torturing and murdering prisoners in El Salvador exemplifies an area in which Salvadorean army discipline demands that its members contravene and disregard the rules of war; it does not necessarily mean that the officers or other ranks are ignorant of these rules. To resist superior orders would, however, place the recalcitments themselves at risk; counter-insurgency doctrine instills in the officer corps the conviction that counter-terror's ends justify the means, and that in counter-insurgency situations the rules of war do not apply. There is little evidence that United States training in irregular warfare teaches otherwise.

Paramilitary Expansion By mid-1983 US-assisted reorganization and training of El Salvador's armed forces had achieved a major expansion of the armed forces' total manpower and the setting up of smaller, highly manoeuvrable units, as well as the expansion and training of paramilitary forces, now called “Civil Defense" forces. In August 1983 press reports said; US military aid is pouring in. Plans are to increase the 24.000-man armed forces to 30.000 and the Pentagon is asking for an increase in the US advisory contingent from 55 to 125. A further 10.000 people are being trained in para-military civil defence.-^"**^

During 1980. the former pariahs of ORDEN underwent a metamor¬ phosis and emerged in 1981 with the new Civil Defense nomenclature. US advisers described the Civil Defense Forces as a form of self-defence militia, which, in theory, would be charged with holding territory that had been cleared by the mainforce army units. Rapid response army units would provide support to militia forces when under attack.-^’^'^ The most explicit recognition of the irregular Civil Defense/ORDEN forces' role in the conflict, and of their place in current US counter¬ insurgency doctrine, was made in February 1983 when US military spokesmen outlined to the press a pilot pacification plan to be launched later that year in the departments of San Vicente and Usulutan. Operacion Bienestar (Operation Wellbeing), a counter-insurgency plan openly modelled on the CORDS programme in South Vietnam, was to be the first phase of a "National Campaign Plan”. Official briefings on Operation Wellbeing included a direct endorsement by US military spokesmen ofthe organization of paramilitary networks as part of a US-designed strategy.-^*’'’ The military mission was already on record as having praised those regional commanders most noted for having integrated the paramilitary irregulars of the ORDEN/civil patrols network into the counter-insurgency operations of the regular army and security forces, and for making these irregulars the centre of programmes 340

Indirect to Direct Intervention

designed “to win greater civilian involvement in counterinsurgency programs".-^' And the military mission had openly advocated the use of “the guerrillas' own tactics and organization" to win the war; [The US advisers) argue that the army should adopt a more active and permanent presence in guerrilla-controlled areas, be more tlexible. operate in smaller units, and make greater use of the guerrilla’s own tactics of surprise. They have also urged the army to integrate more fully into local communities, and work in closer coordination with local rightwing paramilitaries.-^-''-

US spokesmen were reticent about the paramilitary networks before Operation Wellbeing was announced, but the civilian irregulars had been a visible partner of the Salvadorean armed forces from the new regime’s first clay in October 1979. Although ORDEN was formally dissolved by the incoming junta, it was rationalized and rehabilitated in 1980, and its units renamed “Civil Defense” patrols, committees or groups. The local political organization centred on ORDEN remained intact, but went on a war footing; where the guerrillas were active the political trappings transferred from ORDEN to Civil Defense were discarded, leaving it strictly military functions. It is in the rehabilitation of ORDEN that US influence appears to have been important. ORDEN emerged as “Civil Defense" just about at the same time Guatemala’s paramilitary network (previously concealed, and never dignified with the name or status of a separate organization) was transformed into a “Civil Defense” system. In neighbouring Honduras, which has no tradition of paramilitary organization, armysponsored “Civil Defense” groups were created soon after the US army moved in as if to stay, with 125 advisers in 1981, and some 5,000 ground troops in 1983.-’-“^-^ The term Civil Defense, suggesting local yeomen defending kith and kin, was introduced in the countries just as the US commitments in the region reached unprecedented levels. In the case of Honduras it applied to a paramilitary network created from scratch. In El Salvador and Guatemala, Civil Defense was a convenient term for existing paramilitary networks in serious need of a new image. It is inconceivable that the large military advisory contingent in El Salvador, and the possibly still larger covert advisory contingent, were uninvolved with the Civil Defense forces, but the few official US government references to this network, before Operation Wellbeing, deliberately downplay this relationship. This may be due to legislative restrictions on assistance to police or paramilitary security services. Furthermore, US government human rights reports generally blame any admitted human rights abuses on the Salvadorean police services — with which the US is nominally not involved — and not on the regular army; until 1982 a similar attitude was taken regarding the Civil Defense forces. In 1980 and 1981, the US Embassy, using the 341

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

amorphous status of ORDEN and its successor as a basis, attributed atrocities against civilians to radical right-wingers outside the control of the government. Some US officials here insist that the violence by the right is committed by lower-level extremists in the security forces or by ORDEN, a right-wing paramilitary force, originally sponsored by the government but officially disbanded 18 months ago. Many peasants insist it still operates throughout the country. . . One businessman, who said he had received death threats from the right as well as the left, scoffed at the suggestion that the government could not stop the random killing. ‘Are you kidding? he asked rhetorically, ‘ "ORDEN" IS the government'.-'’^''

While peasants, businessmen and the US military mission were well aware of the key place of civilian irregulars in the counter-insurgency campaign, this role was not acknowledged in official US pronounce¬ ments until 1983. Some declassified documents confirm, however, that the diplomats were aware of the system. A US Embassy cable of 15 January 1982 states that: ... the scope of the present struggle and the inadequacy of security force resources has led to the creation of the 'patrulleros', armed civilians who ostensibly form part of the state's security net. They have, however, become a law unto themselves in many areas... Patrulleros, nonetheless, form part of the official security structure here.-'-*’-^

Official US recognition of the Civil Defense forces’ role in Operation Wellbeing apparently opened the way for direct overt training of civilian irregular forces for “paramilitary civil defense", as announced in August 1983. The final change in the status of the ORDEN/Civil Defense forces may be their formal designation as a militia within the terms of Salvadorean law, and its formal incorporation as an auxiliary force to the army. In such a case it could be the recipient of more open and plentiful US assistance otherwise blocked by its present ambiguous status. Here again there would be a Vietnam precedent: parallel structures. Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (later Regional Defense Forces) and Self-Defense Corps (later Popular Forces) were both part of the army of South Vietnam and under military command and discipline.-^-'’^ Although from the first ORDEN, and later its successors, were set up by the armed forces of El Salvador and commanded by army officers, these links have not always been formalized. After Operation Wellbeing the situation may change.

The Mercenary Element The post-1979 expansion of the Civil Defense/ORDEN network coincided 342

Indirect to Direct Inten’ention

with the recruitment of civilian irregular forces to work directly with the regional and central intelligence and command centres. These forces could to some extent be distinguished from others because they were not local people based in their home areas, they had not necessarily been involved in the structure of ORDEN prior to the 1979 coup, and they included gunmen imported from other countries. Though there was a mercenary element in the recruitment of Civil Defense patrol members — including both cash payments and other incentives — the gunmen attached on a long-term basis to the special units of the security services included mercenaries in the more classic sense of the hired killer or “soldier of fortune”. The most credible reports on the involvement of foreign forces refer to large numbers of former Nicaraguan National Guardsmen, as well as some Guatemalan security personnel on detached service, under contract to the Salvadorean forces. Former Salvadorean army doctor Captain Ricardo Fiallos, now in exile, testified in an April 1981 US congressional hearing on his contact with former Nicaraguan guardsmen: during the time which I worked in the military hospital, I personally treated various ex-members of the Nicaraguan National Guard who were working with the Salvadorean security forces. Furthermore I viewed the medical records of at least 30 of these individuals who had been injured while collaborating with the security forces.^^^

There was, of course, some precedent of cross-border co-operation between El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua in the final years of the Somoza regime. Many Nicaraguans identified men in National Guard uniforms in the final year of the revolution as Guatemalan or Salvadorean by the way they spoke — there are some differences in vocabulary — or by the fact that they paid for purchases with Guatemalan bank notes.-^-*^*^ Shortly before the fall of Somoza. Guatemalan newspapers ran press statements attributed to the “Secret Anticommunist Army a government “death squad — announcing the presence of five anti¬ communist commandos of 20 men each fighting in Nicaragua at the side of the National Guard in defense of the Somoza government”.^ Similarly, in the first year of the Salvadorean conflict, Guatemalan security personnel were reportedly “loaned to their counterparts, and there was frequent cross-border travel of top officers between Guatemala City and San Salvador. Although generally not publicized, some secret flights could not be concealed; in April 1980. for example, a secret flight by Salvadorean Chief of Staff General Gilberto Balmore Escamilla was revealed when the plane crashed near Guatemala City, killing him and top aides Major Fernando Salazar Mena and Captain Freddy Roberto Ascencio.'^ The United States appears to have covertly promoted and collaborated in regional co-operation through the interchange of paramilitary forces. The November 1980 “Dissent Paper” identified as a US policy objective the deployment of paramilitary (irregular) forces and cross-border 343

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

co-operation between Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. (“Strengthening counterinsurgency capabilities ol armed forces [through] establishing and/or improving communication and cooperation among armed forces and paramilitary organizations in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras”. The same document refers to irregular forces, including “mercenaries (a term left undefined), organized in late 1979 and 1980 to assist Salvadorean security forces. Presumably this force was a project sanctioned by both the United States and the Guatemalan military: A paramilitary strike force made up of former members of the Nicaraguan National Guard, anti-Castro Cubans, Guatemalan military personnel and mercenaries has been formed in the past year. Spokesmen for this contingent have expressed their intention to intervene in El Salvador ‘when the situation requires if. . . It should be noted that US intelligence has kept informed of the plans and capabilities of the paramilitary strike force in Guatemala. US intelligence has been in contact with Nicaraguan exile groups in Guatemala and Miami and it is aware of their relationship with Cuban exile terrorist groups operating in the US... their mobility and their links with the US — it seems reasonable to assume — could not be maintained without the tacit consent (or practical incompetence) of at least four agencies: INS, CIA, FBI and US Customs.-^^-

The claims in the “Dissent Paper” gained some substantiation when, in Eebruary and March 1982, the Washington Post published extensive verbatim extracts from National Security Council records regarding a $19 million budget allocation for a Reagan Administration “covert action” plan suspiciously similar to that described in the “Dissent Paper” as underway in 1980.-^^-^ The Washington Post reported President Reagan's approval, in November 1981, of a plan to raise both local and United States irregular or “paramilitary” forces for “paramilitary and political operations and intelligence gathering” in Central America, Although generally considered in the context of terrorist measures to destabilize the present Nicaraguan government, the leaked texts refer explicitly to a wider field of action,-^^ The paramilitary aspect of the government plan required the “formation and training of action teams to collect intelligence and engage in paramilitary and political operations in Nicaragua and elsewhere”. There is some evidence of the presence of US mercenaries in El Salvador — that is, contract irregular warfare specialists not officially part of the US armed forces. Opposition sources claimed that five American “mercenaries” were killed in combat in August 1980 in the departments of Cabanas and Morazan, and that on 17 December 1980 a US ex-police sergeant and adviser on investigation techniques was killed.^^^ In an extensive article in his home-town newspaper, ex-Marine 344

Indirect to Direct Intervention

Lawrence Bailey described the involvement ot American and European “mercenaries" in security duties, including killings, in El Salvador; Bailey says he is part of a team ot 40 American mercenaries, a small contingent among hundreds of mercenaries Irom around the world present in El Salvador... He is paid $1,600 a month to smuggle guns into the country, guard plantations against takeover by the rebels, and kill it necessary to protect the interest ot El Salvador s landholding class, he said. Elis group of mercenaries works tor wealthy Salvadoran tamilies living in Miami, he said. The tamilies left El Salvador when the current hostilities began in 1979 but they continue to control events at home, Bailey said . . . the Miamians are using the mercenaries to aid the government in crushing support for the guerrillas, Bailey said. ‘We're a third force,' he said.-'^^

The article also contains his account of having accompanied a helicopter-borne special task force on a rural operation planned from the beginning as a massacre: ... he and two other mercenaries piled into a helicopter gunship with the soldiers and headed to a small village north of San Salvador. The soldiers had a list — names of civilians who had been listening to communist propaganda or supporting the guerrillas, he said. As the mercenary watched, some of the suspected sympathizers were dragged out of their huts already dead. Others were herded together outside. The soldiers made them kneel down, then shot them point blank in the backs of their necks, he said. ‘Shot them in the village square, by the way, not the jungle. Shot them where everyone could see them. Something about a show of force.' More than 30 died in the massacre, the mercenary said. Afterwards, the soldiers went home and got drunk, he said.-^^*^

While the role of former or “on loan" members of LIS and other armed forces in “contract" work cannot be discounted as an element of the present Salvadorean security system, more importance should be accorded to training and organization of paramilitary forces by US Army Special Forces advisers, although little documentary evidence has become available on this. In the Vietnam war. as noted earlier, classified documentation on the Special Forces described their primary task as providing “training, operational advice and assistance to indigenous paramilitary forces" they had previously “organized, trained and equipped".'^'^ Despite the precedents ol the Vietnam experience and the indisputable importance of paramilitary irregulars to the current Salvadorean conBict. further research is required to determine the real extent of US assistance to this sector of the security system. 345

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

US Military Advisers and Political Signals The number of military and civilian advisers in El Salvador is, of course, an important indicator of the level of United States commitment to a military solution of the current conflict. The acknowledged figure of 54-56 advisers is, moreover, a large show of force for this small country. The Reagan administration’s deployment of the large advisory contingent early in 1981 also had an important symbolic impact, coming, as it did, after a year in which some 10,000 non-combatant civilians had been selectively murdered by army and security services. Former agrarian reform official Leonel Gomez told a congressional hearing that sending advisers moved the United States from indirect to direct involvement in the army’s policy of terrorism: Your Administration has in effect said that it agrees that the army has the right to destroy all those organizations and people who want the army to share power. It signals that it does not matter that the army must kill the civilian supporters to get to the guerrillas.-^^”

Former Ambassador White expressed similar sentiments, pointedly accusing the Pentagon of carrying on its own bilateral relations with the Salvadorean military and sending all the wrong signals. The official proscription of a combat role for US military advisers’in El Salvador is one of the fundamental arguments by which the US government dilutes its own responsibility for the actions of Salvadorean forces. When Flouse Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Clement J. Zablocki asked the Department of State in October 1982 whether the Salvadorean military has “ceased its summary executions of prisoners taken in combatsituations, and if so, what evidence exists of this change of practice”, he was told that the restrictions on the activities of advisers were such as to keep them even from knowing what was going on in the counter-insurgency war: The War Powers Act enjoins US military personnel attached to the Embassy from observing, first hand, the activities of the Salvadorean Armed Forces during military operations. Therefore, the Embassy must rely on information provided to us by the armed forces and also press releases that list the numbers of prisoners taken in combat.-^^'

The Department of State did add brightly that some change might be occurring, since the army reported 22 prisoners taken in August, and three more in September, against a previous record of virtually no prisoners living through interrogation. (This contrasts with the FMFN’s credible announcement in January 1984 that 1,778 members of government forces had been taken prisoner in 1983. most ofwhom have now been turned over the International Committee of the Red Cross.p^346

Indirect to Direct Inten’entiort

Despite the ban. American newsmen have repeatedly found US advisers in the field breaking these rules; on several occasions advisers appeared on television in the act of doing so. In February 1982. the US Cable News Network filmed three advisers — one a Lieutenant-Colonel — carrying M-16 rifles and other equipment in a combat zone. In the resulting panic the Embassy stated that the three had been “repairing a bridge", and not in combat. The Lieutenant-Colonel was, however, recalled to the US and the two other advisers were reprimanded for breaking regulations by cariying offensive weapons. A second filmed incident, broadcast on 23 June 1982. raised further public and congressional doubts on the role ot the US advisers: ... CBS News that day filmed two US trainers in a combat area some forty miles southeast of San Salvador, and interviewed Salvadoran soldiers who stated that the ten US trainers in the area had participated in combat. According to CBS and the New York Times, soldiers reported that the Americans had fired 81-millimeter mortars at nearby guerrilla positions. US officials have denied this allegation.-’^-'

The combat area referred to was a border area where massacres of civilians and of refugees trying to cross the Lempa River have been reported. According to the Washington Post's account; CBS said one its crew saw 'at least two American advisers wearing combat fatigues at the Lempa River camp in an area of persistent fighting. 'The minute they spotted our camera they disappeared into the farmhouse they were using for a barracks. CBS said. According to Salvadoran soldiers at a guard post directly across the river, there are 10 Americans based at the camp, and they are taking part in combat operations, fighting side by side with Salvadoran forces.' the network said.'^''

According to the same source the State Department said it would ask the Embassy to look into the charges. In addition to the CBS Lempa River expose, other evidence has revealed US advisers' close involvement in the organization of joint Honduran and Salvadorean operations in border areas, and in the interdiction of refugee movements out of El Salvador. A July 1982 Americas Watch/ACLU report noted the progressive militarization of the Honduran/Salvadorean border between November 1981 and May 1982, coinciding with an increase in US military personnel on the ground there; The apparent purpose is the creation of a zone without international observers and organizations, from which operations may be launched against the insurgents in northern Salvadoran provinces.-

347

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

The rush of US army advisers to Honduras — from four only in 1981 to at least 100 in 1982 — also led to reports of their direct involvement in the harassment of refugees in camps in southern Honduras, in which refugees and relief workers have been killed outright or “disappeared", or turned over to Salvadorean authorities by Honduran military personnel: In August 1981. a team led by Captain Michael Sheehan, based at Santa Rosa de Copan. was seen in La Virtud camp by numerous international and Honduran volunteers. In an interview with theA'cu' York Times that month. Sheenan said that the National Security Council had approved a Green Beret presence in Honduras to support the military effort against Salvadoran guerrillas. Discussing refugees. Sheehan said: They have no human right.s.'-’^^

The presence of some advisers in combat zones has been revealed only after they have been wounded. Sergeant Jay T. Stanley, a US army Special Forces adviser, was wounded while on board a Salvadorean helicopter in a combat zone, as was another US adviser, at about the same time, in the same area. As a consequence "two warrant officers and one master sergeant were relieved of their duties”.-^^^ Evidence suggests that the exceptions to the norm are not cases in which US advisers break the rules on combat, but those in which they are caught doing so. Clearly, the advisory mission is anxious to get the advisers out of the barracks and into the field. In March 1983. Newsweek reported the decentralization of the advisory contingent: Soon some advisers may be moved out of San Salvador, not to battlefields but to local brigades where they can promote aggressive patrolling and other small-unit tactics. 'You can't beat guerrillas by marching battalions up the white lines on the road in the middle of the day.' insisted an official in Washington. 'Unless we can get some of our guys out of the capital and into the regional headquarters where the decisions are made, we can't make any headway.''^*'*

In the provincial headquarters advisers are largely out of range of the press, apparently the principal obstacle to them assuming a larger, operational role, despite the much publicized legal restrictions on their function. At present, the combat role of US military advisers does not appear to be a major factor in the Salvadorean civil war, although this may change in the near future. The current programme for training aircraft pilots, bombardiers and gunners may already serve to conceal US airwarfare specialists' direct participation in operations (while accom¬ panying trainees). But it is the potential for an expanded use of airpower in the war that may entail further, large-scale, direct involvement of US 348

Indirect to Direct Intervention

personnel. US combat services can most readily be hidden when involving aircraft, particularly when landing facilities in neighbouring Guatemala and Honduras can be used. Michael Klare. at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, has written of the potential escalation of the US role in the region, and cited a congressional source as saying that the US would probably take “direct military action” through air rather than ground support if the Salvadorean army appeared near to collapse.-^^'^ The use of air power to bomb the Salvadoreans into submission might well provoke a final general uprising and the victory of the revolutionaries, just as, arguably, it did in Nicaragua, when President Somoza, in desperation, turned to aerial bombardment and rocket attacks on Nicaraguan cities in September 1978. Large-scale bombings would, in any case, further prove the moral bankrupcy of the present regime and of the United States' foreign policy.

US Assistance and Intelligence Major military advisory resources were committed to the Salvadorean intelligence apparatus from early in 1981, and possibly considerably before. Declassified information confirms the presence of intelligence advisory teams after 2 March 1981, when the Reagan administration acknowledged the need to “train Salvadoran personnel in communica¬ tions, intelligence, logistics, and in other professional skills designed to improve their capabilities to interdict infiltration and to respond to terrorist attacks”.^*0 By mid-March this included a contingent of six advisers to augment the Military Group itself, with the collection of military intelligence as part of its responsibilities, and a group of five forming an Operational and Planning Assistance Team (OPAT) to work with the five regional military commands in the planning and improvement of intelligence, communications, and logistics, and to serve as a liaison between regional and national commands. Intelligence work may also have been part of the task of a second fiveman OPAT, based at army general staff headquarters in San Salvador, “to work with senior Army commanders ... to establish communica¬ tions links and coordination between army units in the five military districts.”^^^ According to press reports, this latter OPAT organized a “war room " to provide central co-ordination for the Salvadoran army, national guard, national police, and rural police , and instructed the Salvadoreans “how to gather reports of guerrilla activity, evaluate them and coordinate military responses”.^*^^ In the second half of 1981, this same OPAT performed a variety ol functions: completing the establishment of a functioning war room^^ (or “Combined Operations Center”), a “Joint Communications Center and a “National Logistics Center , as well as carrying out an 349

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

Intelligence Survey for the establishment of a Tactical Intelligence Schoor.'^*^-^ A four man “Operations Planning Assistance Augmentation Team” worked in rotation in the five Brigade headquarters on regional communications, operations and logistic centres. Another five-man OPAT team worked simultaneously in the five zones “assisting in the integration of operations' intelligence functions and “to extend command and control communications nets from Brigade to Battalion level. . United States military intelligence training was institutionalized in September 1981. when a three-man “Technical Intelligence Team" was sent “to establish a tactical intelligence school for the Salvadoran Army, including basic intelligence processing and analysing, interro¬ gation. counter-intelligence, and refugee handling”.-^^^ A four-man “Technical Intelligence School Team” subsequently helped run the school, working “to assist the Salvadoran armed forces in the day-to-day operation of the tactical intelligence school. While some information has been declassified regarding the military advisers officially detailed to advise in the intelligence field, information on other advisory and operational intelligence assistance is largely undocumented. Press reports in March 1983 estimated intensive work by the CIA. to develop its Central American resources after the outbreak of full-scale civil war in January 1981. had cost an estimated $50 million, and stated that CIA sources said there are “at least 150 agents” operating in El Salvador.^*^* For its part. Time, in March 1982. reported the beginning of a CIA build-up under the Carter administration: During the Carter Administration, the CIA began beefing up its network of agents in Central America and shifted its focus from tracking Soviet infiltration efforts to reporting on local politics... In El Salvador, the CIA station chief was quite close to the right-wing security forces, which clouded his judgement; he was replaced in 1980. but Reagan Administra¬ tion officials complain that they inherited a network that had poor contacts with the leftist guerrillas. Nonetheless, a senior CIA official insists: ‘We are building up our assets, and, while not the best, our resources are pretty good now'.... The quality of information has greatly improved over the past few months. Yet even when the information is giltedged, Washington is not always eager to listen if the details do not mesh with policy.-^**^

While US press reports emphasize the CIA's role in acquiring intelligence for United States policy makers, without reference to CIA work in assisting Salvadorean intelligence officers, the latter may well represent the greatest investment in agency resources. Intelligence assistance by military advisory staff and officials of US intelligence agencies may be complemented by other assistance programmes not overtly security related. In particular, projects related 350

Indirect to Direct Inten'ention

to population control measures, by facilitating registration and census programmes or the implementation of the universal identity card system, have added to the data base and operational capability of the Salvadorean intelligence system. A programme already suggested as having an underlying intelligence function, which on the surface seems laudable, is a system for voter registration to be introduced lor the planned 1984 Presidential elections. A projected expenditure of up to $8 million was announced by Reagan Administration officials in May 1983 as the United States government’s contribution to the 1984 elections, including a major voter registration drive, and the creation of “a central registry that would use computers to maintain an accurate roll of voters”.-^*^*’ Although the election programme is to be handled by the AID — “the fund will be distributed as development assistance aid" —the application of a computerized population registry- to intelligence purposes is only to be expected. Information on the election proposals was published in some press reports in the context of simultaneous confirmation of initiatives by the CIA to improve its data collection as a means to support the electoral process: At an additional, undisclosed cost, administration officials said Wednes¬ day. the Central Intelligence Agency plans to intensify its collection of intelligence information about the guerrillas to help the Salvadoran military to block any efforts to disrupt the voting. The administration decided to make the investment, according to officials, in hopes that the elections could become a turning point in the Salvadorean civil war.^'^-

Data processing assistance to create a comprehensive electoral register is only one area in which “development aid can be turned to population control and intelligence purposes without ringing congres¬ sional alarm bells. For example, if the Salvadorean intelligence apparatus has access to the data base of the US-funded agrarian reform programmes — as it must be expected to — logically, it would use whatever capabilities it provided in its everyday work of rooting out suspected leftists. A printout of leaders of registered peasant organiza tions and co-operatives, agrarian reform beneficiaries or claimants, is just one way these systems might be applied to targetting candidates for “neutralization”. The electoral registry proposals could be considerably more useful to the intelligence system, particularly if they incorporated data from the universal identity card system already in force. Given the background of mass assassination and summary execution of suspect population sectors — defined by their union membership, the village they live in, etc. — any projects involving the development of a new data base on particular population sectors must be looked at with suspicion as a potential tool in a programme of murder. 351

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

Information on US assistance to the Salvadorean intelligence apparatus, the nerve centre of the army high command, and the heart of its “counter-terror” political murder programme, has emerged only gradually since 1979. Most assistance that has come to light breaks down into relatively technical categories; provision of a better population control system, or deployment of US army intelligence or operations advisory teams to impart specific skills. Evidence of a higher level of involvement in, or responsibility for, the formulation of El Salvador's policy of political murder has been more elusive, the major proven link between the US and Salvadorean “counter-terror” the substance of US counter-insurgency doctrine itself Only recently has evidence emerged that the US government may have exercised direct control over the top Salvadorean army officers who controlled the country after October 1979, and who led the armed forces to adopt the option of mass “counter-terror” as the main thrust of its counter¬ insurgency programme. In March 1984 a source first described only as a former high-ranking Salvadorean officer revealed to members of the US congress and the press that the US government — through the CIA — paid a retainer to. and effectively employed, top military figures in the post-October 1979 governments. Identified by Newsweek as former ANSESAL chief Colonel Roberto Eulalio Santibahez,^'^^ the source maintained that top members of the army high command, notably Defense Minister Colonel Jose Guillermo Garcia (1979-83), Deputy Defense Minister Colonel Nicolas Carranza (later ANTEE chief and head of the Treasury Police), National Guard chief Colonel Eugenio Vides Casanova (197983) (now a general and Minister of Defense) and intelligence officer Major Roberto D'Aubuisson had been personally responsible for the development and administration of El Salvador’s “death-squad” assassination programme.^'^'^ In a striking parallel with Guatemala's presidential security agency, where the army high command supervised targetting of subjects for elimination. Colonel Santibanez described the direct participation of the army’s commanders “in selecting death squad victims”, and Vides Casanova's added role in covering up the executions of four American missionaries in 1980: Defense Minister Eugenio Vides Casanova is personally directing a cover-up in the slayings of four American churchwomen in 1980, and his cousin, a colonel, ordered the murders. 'National Guardsmen at the airport spotted the women,’ he said, 'and they radioed for instructions_ The word came down to eliminate them. It came from Colonel Oscar Edgardo Casanova, who was in charge in that zone.'^*^^

Details on the precise relationship between the US government and the army’s leaders after October 1979 are provided by Colonel Santibanez only in one case. He maintained that Colonel Nicolas 352

Notes to Part 4

Carranza “was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency”, and had “received more than $90,000 a year from the CIA” tor the past five to six years.-^'^^ Such revelations by defectors or retired security officials must always be considered with healthy scepticism. Santibahez was, himself deeply involved in the dirty-work of counter-insurgency as chief of ANSESAL, and his motives for revealing his erstwhile colleagues’ American connection are questionable. The claims themselves, however, ring true, and if confirmed, would mean a whole new level of involvement and complicity, of the US government in El Salvador's agony of state terror.

Notes to Part 4 Chapter 13 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7

8

9

Devine. Frank. El Salvador: Embassy Under Attack (Vantage: New York. 1981) p. 120. Ibid.. Devine insists that rumours that Vaky and Bowdler had asked Gen. Romero to resign were incorrect. Latin America Weekly (2 November 1979. Bowdler. the Trouble-shooting Bureaucrat") discusses William Bowdler's background. Dunkerley. The Long War. p. 129. cites Presidential press spokesman Hodding Carter as later confirming that Vaky and Bowdler had urged Gen. Romero s resignation. Fernando Flores Pinel. "El Golpe de Estado en El Salvador: Un Camino hacia la Democratizacion". in Estudios Centroamericanos. October-November 1979. p. 891. Flores Pinel gives as his source the Agencia de Comunicacion Internacional. Embajada de Estados Unidos. San Salvador bulletin, September 1979, pp. 26-7. Dunkerley, op. cit.. p. 129. See Panorama Centroamericano. December 1977; Roberto Eulalio Santibanez. a member of the same tanda or graduating class of the military academy, and Romero's chief of ANSESAL. as well as Roberto Escobar Garcia and four others, were promoted at the same time. For a chart outlining appointments of army officers to Salvadorean government autonomous agencies, including ANTEL. from July 1972 to November 1978, see Carlos Andino Martinez. "El Estamento Militar en El Salvador , in Estudios Centroamericanos. July-August 1979. Col. Garcia served as Director Presidente of ANTEL from March 1974 and was replaced in July 1977 by Col. Juan Antonio Martinez Varela. Cols. Vides Casanova and Carranza served as ANTEL deputy directors representing the Ministry of Interior for much of the same period. Carolyn Forche, "Anatomy of Counterrevolution: The Road to Reaction in El Salvador", in The Nation. 14 June 1980, reports that Col. Gutierrez has served as manager of ANTEL. t • For the chronology of Gen. Romero's Bights and reports of the coup see Tomas Guerra. El Salvador: Octubre Sangriento (Centro Victor Sanabna: San Jose. Costa Rica. 1981). p. 13. , • t- , jIbid pp 13-14 The "Crdnica del Mes" (Monthly Chronicle) in Estudios Centroamericanos. October-November 1979. p. 1005. reports the co-ordinated actiori of about 400 young officers as the mechanism by which Gen. Romero was ousted "without a shot being fired" and that all loyalist garrison commanders were detained as they came in" on the morning of the 15th. It seems unlikely, however, that any garrison commander could have been caught by surprise that morning and unaware that Romero would promptly join his family outside the country. 353

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Carolyn ForchC The Nation, 14 June 1980. Cited from full text in Tomas Guerra, op. cit.. p. 16. In its documents section Estudios Centroamericanos. December 1979, provides the text of the later proclamation alone. Ibid. London-based Latin America Weekly Report (2 November 1979) notes that Roman Mayorga. Rector of the Jesuit-run Central American University, a member of the junta from 22 October, had drafted “the junta's radical statements released so far”. Tomas Guerra, op. cit. Ibid. Carolyn Forche. op. cit. Dunkerley, op. cit., pp. 138-9: “The new government led by the junta... contained five soldiers, four members of the aperturista sector of the landed bourgeoisie, six figures close to UCA [the Central American University], and ten members proposed by the Foro Popular with a further five suggested by it and accepted by the other groups." See Latin America Political Report, 31 August 1979. p. 269, on Vaky's July visit; on that occasion he spoke only with the Christian Democrats. For full text of Decree No. 9, 26 October see Estudios Centroamericanos, 19 December 1979, pp. 1109-10. Cited in Amnesty International Report: 1980, pp. 136-7. Ibid., p. 137 For full text of Decree No. 12 see Estudios Centroamericanos, December 1979, pp. 1110-

11. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

354

Ibid. See Part 1 for discussion of the 1930s CMulas Patridticas (identity cards giving the bearer certain legally defined privileges). ORDEN identity cards were issued not only to a small elite econoriiic group, but to non-elites, members of a politically defined organization under military discipline, and provided informal privileges, e.g.. access to patronage posts, or to better treatment upon arrest by the regular security services. See documents section in Estudios Centroamericanos, December 1979, pp. 1111-13. Accord No. 1 of 13 November fixes prices for basic commodities; Decree No. 14 of 6 November provides for closures. See also Higinio Alas, El Salvador, iPor que la insurreccion?. (published by the Comision para la defensa de los Derechos Humanos en Centroamerica. in San Jose de Costa Rica, 1982), p. 91. Estudios Centroamericanos, December 1979. p. 1113. Ibid., pp. 1114-15. Ibid., pp. 1116-18. Amnesty International Report: 1980, p. 132. Ibid., p. 133. Dunkerley. op. cit., p. 140; according to Dunkerley, popular organizations’ association with the different guerrilla groups generally allied the ERP with the Ligas, the FPL with theBloque Popular, and theResistencia Nacional (which broke away from the ERP in 1975) with FAPU. Tomas Guerra, op. cit.. pp. 27-8, reports an ERP comminique of 20 October declaring a “recess" in its “insurrectionary activities", a measure they described as “giving the junta a chance"; actually the ERP apparently called a retreat to lick its wounds, as their launching of the insurrection had been a severe failure. See Estudios Centroamericanos, October-November 1979. for a selection of communiques issued by the popular organizations in October 1979 (Documents section), and for indepth analysis of the popular organizations' role in the period. Alas, El Salvador iPor que la insurreccion?, p. 217 and Eugenio C. Anaya. “Cronica del Mes", in Estudios Centroamericanos, October-November 1979, p. 1007. Alas, op. cit., p. 217. Ibid., also Dunkerley. op. cit., p. 141. Amnesty International, “Update on El Salvador", 29 December 1979; by midNovember the popular organizations had abandoned their vigils in churches and the mothers' committee had abandoned the Plaza Libertad.

Notes to Part 4 35. 36. 37.

Ibid. Alas. op. cit., p. 90. Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador, unpublished typescript; report on human rights violations, 15 October to 31 December 1979, 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Estudios Centroamericanos. December 1979, p. 1089. 42. Gen. Medrano was ORDEN’s founder. 43. Carolyn Forche, op. cit. 44. Estudios Centroamericanos. December 1979. p. 1089. 45. For full te.xt see Estudios Centroamericanos. January-February 1980, p. 117. 46. Ibid., p. 119 47. Alas, op, cit., p. 223. 48. WOFA, "Fact Sheet on Roberto D'Aubuisson", 19 May 1982. 49. Alas. op. cit.. pp. 230-1. 50. Ibid., p. 223. 51. Dunkerley. op. cit.. p. 145. 52. Alas. op. cit., p. 226. Archbishop Romero, analysing the events the following Sunday, concluded that the demonstrators had remained peaceful, despite the attack with insecticide, until Tired upon by National Guardsmen from the National Palace; some demonstrators then sought to defend their fellows with pistols and subsequently participated in “acts of repudiation" including damage to private property. Such rioting as did occur broke out after the demonstration was dissolved, much as in the aftermath of the 28 February 1977 massacre following the presidential elections, believed fraudulent. 53. Dunkerley. op. cit.. p. 156. citing The Guardian (Fondon). 20 March 1980. 54. In a 18 February letter to Carter. Archbishop Romero charged that the escalation of government violence in the first weeks of 1980 was directly linked to the provision of military assistance and called on Carter to stop additional military aid on Christian grounds. See Alas. op. cit.. pp. 228-9 for the text; see also WOFA. “Fatin America Update". March-April 1980. 55. See Alas. op. cit.. pp. 224-5 for the text of the sermon, and pp. 225-7 for the text of the letter. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., pp. 236-3 for text. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Statement of 30 March 1980. published in Eco Catolico. 13 April 1980. 61. Alas. op. cit.. pp. 141-4 includes a list of the member organizations. 62. Ibid., pp. 144-5; the representatives were Salvador Cayetano Carpio of the FPL; Joaquin Villalobos of the Partido Revolucionario Salvadoreho and the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (PRS. ERP); Ernesto Jovel of the Resistencia Nacional (RN) and Shafick Flandel of the Partido Comunista Salvadoreho (PCS). 63. 64. 65.

Dunkerley. op. cit.. p. 157. Alas. op. cit.. pp. 261 and 266. American Civil Liberties Union and Americas Watch.Report Human Rights in El Salvador. January 1982. p. 76, note 2, citing Socorro Juridico, 4 June 1981,

66. 67.

Ibid., pp. 279-80. Lawrence R. Simon andJamesC. Stephens. Jr.,f/Ro/vat/or, LandReform, I980-8L OXFAM/America (Boston), 1982, p. 5. . ■ r Ibid., p. 7. "Compensation of Phase I estates is to be paid solely in agranan reform bonds, of 20, 25 and 30 year maturity. Former proprietors will be allowed to keep landholdings up to the legal ceiling — 100 to 150 hectares depending on the class of

68.

land."

355

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

356

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 17. citing US AID. 8 August 1980 Memorandum. See ibid.. Chapter 6. for an extensive critique of the “Land to the Tiller" programme. Ibid., p. 18. citing Norman Chaplin. “Difficulties with the Implementation of Decree 207 (“Land to the Tiller") in El Salvador's Agrarian Reform Program". AID. Washington (nd). Entitled "US Policy and the Marxist Threat to Central America", prepared by C. DiGiovanni. Jr., the 15 October 1980 US Eleritage Foundation “Backgrounder" notes that despite widespread publicity on the expropriation of some large farms in "Phase I", the bulk of the nation's cash crops was concentrated in holdings of between 100 and 500 hectares, covered by "Phase II". which would probably never be implemented. These farms were said to produce some 92% of El Salvador's coffee. The “backgrounder" concluded that the agrarian reform would probably leave the country's coffee economy unaltered, and in any case, the 1980 harvest would be unaffected. DiGiovanni notes that even if "Phase III" were implemented, it would involve only land oU'marginal crop productivity" and the proposal to sell off land worked by sharecroppers (with government subsidies) was supported by many large farm owners whose land might be affected. Simon and Stephens, op. cit., p. 18, citing Jonathan Silverstone. US Government Memorandum, Weeklv Report, 8 August 1980. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 17-18. citing Prosterman. “Land Reform as Foreign Aid", in Foreign PoUcv. Spring, 1972. Ibid.’ Ibid., p. 21: “Though US AID/El Salvador optimistically reported that the junta on July 11, 1980 ordered the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock to proceed quickly with implementation, nothing has been accomplished to date... In effect, virtually nothing has been altered since April 28. 1980"; on p. 43 the same source notes that by early June 1982 only 103 definitive titles had been issued “to former tillers". Ibid., pp. 38-9. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 10-11. The authors note estimates that up to 40"4i of farm machinery in affected estates was removed in the first month after the reform act. but suggest about 25% as the appropriate figure. An AID source is cited as reporting on one estate where “the owner arrived and slipped his best farm machinery across the Guatemalan border, to another of his farms". The El Salvador Men’s Gazette of 5 May 1980 is cited as reporting that over 30% of the country's cattle had been slaughtered since the reform. Amnesty International Report 1980. p. 135. Dunkerley. op. cit.. p. 155, citing NACLA “Revolution Brews". Simon and Stephens, op. cit.. pp. 30 and 42. An AID Report of June 1980 (Agrarian Reform Organization. Annex IIA; A Social Analysis) noted that agrarian reform officials had sought “to make as few modifications as possible in the administrative and labor structure of the hacienda enterprise," in order to maintain production and “preserve continuity in the farm operation". “They have tried to retain as many of the former management and service employees as possible. The colonos are being dispatched on labor assignments around the farms more or less as had been done in the past. The same hacienda hierarchy, the same rules and restrictions, and the same system of salaries (for employees) and daily wages (for colonos) have been kept in place with few modifications. All this is |was| wise, and indeed necessary, to preserve

Notes to Part 4 continuity in the farm operation. . (Cited in American Civil Liberties Union/ Americas Watch. Report on Human Rights in El Salvador. January 1982, p. 43). 89. Computing the total AID contribution to the agrarian reform process involves assessing assistance under different budget lines, from Food for Peace to grants for "Public Sector Employment". A December 1981 AID Report, "Agrarian Reform in El Salvador", prepared by consultants Checchi and Co., reported AID support for the agrarian reform at $9.9 million in grants and loans in FY 1980; $50.7 million in FY 1981 and a projected $51.8 million for FY 1982 (cited in Simon and Stephens, op. cit.. p. 36). The same source (p. 37) cites an AID audit of ISTA's handling of agrarian reform funds, and found large sums had been paid under the category "security", with payments made to the military by the new co-operatives "in exchange for not repressing them". "The auditors found that roughly one third of a $21,000,000 fund for peasant cooperatives 'had been improperly spent or was unaccounted for'". 90. For monthly death tolls, see Dunkerley. op. cit.. p. 155. 91. Simon and Stephens, op. cit., p. 11. 92. Ibid, 93. US congressional hearings on "The Situation in El Salvador". 1981. pp. 98-9. citing Washington Star. William McWhirter. "Duarte discouraged. . .". 8 April 1981. 94. Simon and Stephens, op. cit., p. 41. 95. See Part 3. 96. Hearings on "The Situation in El Salvador", op. cit., p. 117. 97. Laurie Becklund in the Los Angeles Times, 18 December 1983, "Death Squads: Deadly 'Other War' ". 98. Latin America Weekly Report. 16 May 1980. 99. Latin America Regional Reports. 24 October 1980. 100. Simon and Stephens, op. cit.. p. 10. 101. Latin America Regional Reports. 30 April 1982. 102. Ibid. Set 3\so Noticias de el Salvador. No. S. 1981 (London), quoting Captain Juan Francisco Mena Sandoval's statement on Radio Venceremos describing the purging of his fellow reformist officers, saying some were obliged to accept scholarships to study abroad "that is what was done with Major Lemus. Major Samayoa. Captain Roman Barrera. Major Alfaro. Captain Castillo Cienfuegos and many others ... [or bribed] like Captain Carranza, Captain Poso. Captain Vega Valencia, Major Carrillo and Lt. Villacorta. [Others were forced to flee into exile] such as Lt. Vladimir Cruz and Captain Alejandro Fiallos ... after repeated threats and the machinegunning of their homes and their vehicles. When all else failed the honest members of the army were murdered, as happened with Captain Amilcar . . . who was murdered by the direct order of Col. Carlos Lopez Nuila, presently the Director of the National Police". In January 1981 Captain Mena Sandoval himself led a revolt at Santa Ana's Second Infantry Battalion headquarters and defected to the insurgents with his men. 103. Dunkerley. op. cit.. p. 169. 104. Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights (New York). Justice in El Salvador: A Case Study. 1 February 1983. 105. Ibid., p. 8. 106. Ibid., p. 9. 107 American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., p. 192. The same source reports that the "hold" "did not affect the activities of US military personnel in El Salvador at that time ... or the training of Salvadoran officers underway in the United States and in Panama; it meant essententially that unspent portions of EY 108.

1981 aid would not be committed". Hearings on “The Situation in El Salvador". 1981, see “Notes on meeting with

Secretary Muskie on December 22 1980", p. 205. 109.

Dunkerley. op. cit.. p, 173. Dunkerley notes that Ralael Mentjivar had predicted this meta morphorphosis of the junta as early as November 1979.

357

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115.

116.

117.

118.

119.

120. 121.

358

Hearings on "The Situation in El Salvador", op. cit.. p. 188. Ibid., p. 162. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 183-4, A detailed, well documented record of the investigation and non-investigation of the case has already been referred to, published by Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights on 1 February 1983, New York, as Justice in El Salvador: A Case Study. Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, op. cit., pp. 26 and 29, citing a letter dated 22 November 1982 from L. Craig Johnstone, Director of the Office of Central American Affairs of the Department of State to Michael Posner of the Lawyers Committee, and Department of State "Report on the Situation in El Salvador” of 21 January 1983. Ibid., p. 41. The Lawyers Committee has been informed by the FBI in response to a suit under the Freedom of Information Act that as of March 1982 it had 180 documents, comprising about 600 pages which are relevant to the case, but which have not been made available. AIFLD was created under AFL-CIO official sponsorship, but with assistance of AID. the State Department. W. R. Grace, ITT, Exxon. Shell. Kennecott, Anaconda, IBM and other multinational corporations (see Simon and Stephens, op. cit.. p. 22). Simon and Stephens add that "It has had dubious connections with repressive governments in Chile, Brazil. Uruguay and has built company unions for such operations as United Brands and Standard Fruit in Central America". The American periodical Dollars and Sense (March 1981) notes that AIFLD's official objective was to aid “in the development of free, democratic trade union structures in Latin America... In practice, that means working to counter the efforts of radical or socialist unions — a function wholeheartedly supported by the representatives of major multinational corporations who make up half of the AIFLD's board of directors. Since 1962, some 300,000 Latin Americans have been trained at AIFLD centers. Graduates are well versed in subjects such as “Recognition and Analysis of Extremist Propaganda” while topics such as collective bargaining receive less attention. Up until 1967 the CIA channeled funds into AIFLD through fictitious foundations. Today major funding comes from the State Department's Agency for International Development (AID)”. New York Times Service. International Herald Tribune. 8 October 1982. Bernard Weinraub, “Details emerging after Salvador soldiers confess in deaths of AFL-CIO aides”. Latin America Regional Reports. 1 May 1981, and Time. 18 October 1982. According to Time. Christ, who had fled to Miami, was picked up by FBI agents three months after the murders. “He was held for five months in a federal prison in Miami, then released on bail while his lawyers fought extradition to El Salvador. A US judge ordered charges dropped last June on grounds of improper arrest procedures by the FBI... no formal extradition proceedings have been reopened by the Salvadoran government at this time.” See quotation from Boston Globe. 17 March 1982. in WOLA,"Fact Sheet on Roberto D'Aubuisson”. 19 May 1982. Radio 'Venceremos on 6 June 1981 (Foreign Broadcasting Information Service. 8 June 1981) named Major Moran as one of the principal National Guard officers responsible for “assassinations”; Pacific News Service cited Jorge Pinto, former editor of Salvadorean opposition newspaper El Independiente. as naming Major Mario Denis Moran (as well as 'Victor Hugo Valencia, former chief of political investigations of the National Police, and Lt. Oscar Serrato. aide to former National Guard Intelligence chief Roberto D’Aubuisson) as key figures in a special operations group known as "Los Torogoces" based in National Guard headquarters in San Salvador under its then-Director Col. Vides Casanova. (Reprinted in El Salvador Report (London). July-August 1982. p. 2).

Notes to Part 4 122.

123. 124. 125. 126.

ri rj

7. 8.

129.

130.

131.

132.

Latin America Weekly Report {London). 8 October 1982. A slightly different version was given in the Albuquerque Journal. 19 May 198.L where Captain Avila's expulsion is attributed to "an August 1982 car bombing in which five people were injured. The allegetl target of the bombing was a Cuban American whom Avila believed was supplying arms to the Salvadoran guerrilla.s". Captain Avila was not the only suspected murderer sent out of the country as military attache. Captain Victor Hugo Vega Valencia brielly arrested in May 1980 and implicated not only in the murder of Archbishop Romero, but also in the November 1980 murder of top opposition leaders in El Salvador, was sent to Mexico as military attache in late 1980 (see Uno mas uno (Mexico City), l.^i October 1981. "Vincuhulo el agregado militar salvadoreho en McAico al asesinato tie Arnulfo Romero". Time. 18 October 1982. Ibid. New York Times Sendee. International Herald Tribune. 8 October 1982. Bernard Weinraub. "Details emerging. . .”. Time. 18 October 1982; "| Lt.| Lopez Sibrian. w ho denied being at the Sheraton that night was put in a line-up to be viewed by witnesses of the incident. However, before appearing he was allowed to dye his red hair black, cut it and shave". Lopez Sibrian. to some extent the scapegoat in the case, was described by official sources to the press as an eccentric individualist and notorious hothead., "known for his (laming red hair, fiery temperand anti-Communist view.s". and likely to act without superior orders. Time. 18 October 1982. Christopher Dickey. "Salvadoran Military Deeply Split", in the Washington Post. I July 1980. American Ci\ il Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit.. pp. 136-7. The May 1980 list characterized those named as "traitor Communist.s" subject to "physical elimination". The March 1981 version described those named as "bandits and terrorist criminals". "Cuban, pro-soviet extremists" and "psychopaths". The samesource points out that among those named are "members of the first and second Juntas, the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, e.x-president ol the Central Bank and other former officials. Ibid., p. 124. refers to the 3 April 1981 COPREFA communique as announcing "drastic measures" against foreign Journalists who continue to "distort the image of the Salvadoran Government and people". William MeWhirter. "Duarte discouraged as old grievances resurface in El Salvador". Washington 5wr. 8 April 1981. cited in Hearings on "The Situation in El Salvador", op. cit.. pp. 98-9. Hearings on "The Situation in El Salvador", op. cit., pp. 107-8.

Chapter 14 133. 134.

American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch. January 1982. op, cit.. p. 192. Hearings on "The Situation on El Salvador", op, cit,. p. 101. quoting Senator Charles Percy. Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations.

135. 136.

Ibid., p. 101. Ibid,, p. 102: "It would obviously have been idle for us to be supporting a government and withholding military equipment from them at a time that some ol the semi-outlaw nations of the world, such as Libya and Ethiopia and Vietnam are supplying important resources to the guerrillas, and Nicaragua is actively permitting its territory to he utilized for the transfer of goods, See, for example. American Civil Eiberties Union/Americas Watch. January 1982,

137. 138. 139. 140.

op. cit.. p. 192. Ibid. Dunkerley.op. cit.. p. 176. Latin America Weekly Report. 4 July 1980. citing a 24 June broadcast. The same source notes claims that the strike was successful were backed by Archbishop

359

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

155. 156.

157. 158. 159.

160.

161.

360

Arturo Rivera y Damas “who said in a radio interview that the movement had been generalized and the people supported the strike". Ibid. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, January 1982, op. cit., p. 192. See, for example, John Dinges, Pacific News Service, "Critical Look at Salvador White Paper", in Oakland Tribune, 17 March 1981. Ibid. Jonathan Kwitny, “Tarnished Report? Apparent Errors Cloud US‘White Paper'on Reds in El Salvador", Wall Street Journal. 8 June 1981. Ibid. Ibid. It served the same role as had another document of the same genre in 1954. to justify the invasion of Guatemala and the overthrow of its elected government. Time. 22 March 1982, “A lot of show, but no tell; the US bungles its evidence of foreign subversion in El Salvador". Time. 22 March 1982. Ibid. Ibid. New York Times, 19 February 1982, “Pathological Killer gains in El Salvador", by Warren Hoge. Ibid. Sr. Reyes Prendes, like Duarte, a former Mayor of San Salvador, was also quoted as declaring that “he and many of his friends and associates would leave the country if Mr. D'Aubuisson ended up in power". Another source is cited as suggesting that some leftists will vote for D'Aubuisson in order to provoke resistance: “They know that where you have 3.000 guerrillas today, you'll have 300,000 if D'Aubuisson gets into office". See notes 129 and 130. Statement by Col. Jaime Abdul Gutierrez in June 1981, quoted in American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, Report on Human Rights in El Salvador. 20 July 1982 Supplement, p. 154, citing Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 4 June 1981. Ibid., citing New York Times. 9 December 1981. “Salvadorean Exile Derides Elections". Ibid., p. 156. Ibid. Kenneth Sharpe and Morris BIachman,A//awi7/eraW,28 March 1982, cited in “Analysis: The Elections Everybody lost" in Mesoamerica (Costa Rica). Vol. 1, No. 4, April 1982. These are at present termed "Cedulas de Jdentidad Personal". All Salvadorean citizens over 18 are required at all times to carry these small passport wallet-size credentials bearing their photograph, signature and thumbprints. Obtained from the municipal authorities, much the same categories of personal information are required for registration as in 1932: records are retained in municipal registration offices for consultation by the security services. The equivalent 1930s “Cedula de Vecindad" (Residenfs card) became the “Cedula de Identidad Personal" (Personal Identity Card) under 1959 legislation with mandatory renewal every six years (see Decreto No. 2971, Ley de Cedula de Identidad Personal. 27 November 1959, in Diario Oficial, 2 December 1959). The most recent mandatory re-registration and reissue of cards was under the Romero regime, with new cards required as of 28 February 1979 (See “Leyendo el Diario Oficial", p. 174. in Estudios Centroamericanos, March 1979). See. for example, American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, January 1982, op. cit., pp. 62-4 which include photographs of the arrest of Manuel Alfredo Velasquez Toledo, a 22 year old student, on 3 October 1980 “because he had no identification papers"; despite having shown the photographs of his arrest by helmeted and uniformed National Guardsmen to then National Guard chief Col. Vides Casanova, his body was found with others in Apopa on 10 October with a

Notes to Part 4

162.

163. 164. 165. 166. 167.

168. 169. 170. 171.

172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177.

178. 179. 180. 181.

182. 183. 184. 185.

186.

bullet in the head. The photographs appeared in the newspaper Hoy on 5 October. See ibid., July 1982 Supplement, pp, 158-62; one source cited is Lord Chitnis of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group who carried out an independent observation mission of the elections. Ibid., p. 161. citing Lord Chitnis, "The Election in El Salvador in March 1982. Report for the Parliamentary Human Rights Group". Ibid., p. 162. citing Lord Chitnis. Ibid., pp. 165-6. Ibid. For 1982 election results see Estudios Centroamericanos. April 1982, “Resultados Electorales por Departamento"; the total given is 1,348,729 valid votes, with 130,603 disqualified votes. For 1972 see Juan Hernandez-Pico et al., op. cit.. \nAfio Politico 1972. chap. 2. See Estudios Centroamericanos, April 1982, "Resultados Electorales por Departamento". American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, July 1982 Supplement, op. cit., p. 175. Provided 'm Mesoamerica. N'prW 1982. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., July 1982 Supplement, p, 170. In any case the ban on entry in the US had not been enforced; in July 1980 D'Aubuisson quite openly entered the country and held a press conference in Washington hosted by the American Legion and the American Security Council. He then left the country without problem. As cited, for example, in ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 169. citing the Washington Post. 30 April 1982. Ibid., p. 168: "almost immediately the assembly abrogated the decree which had permitted the junta's agrarian and other economic reforms”. Mary McGrory, "Learning to Love the Mean Little Major in El Salvador", in Washington Post, 27 April 1982. Ibid. The FMLN/FDR placed itself on the record before 28 March, stating it would not attempt to disrupt the election process; some attacks on polling stations were, however, reported. Joan Didion. Salvador. (Chatto and Windus/Hogarth Press, London, 1983), p. 28. R. Bruce McColm. El Salvador: Peaceful Revolution or Armed Struggle. (Freedom House. New York. 1982). pp. 18 and 43. Mary McGrory, "Learning to Love the . . .", the Washington Post, 27 April 1982. Central Intelligence Agency, "Special National Intelligence Estimate: The Pacification Effort in Vietnam". 16 January 1969, p. 40, reproduced by Carrollton Press (1979). 355B. Noticias de El Salvador. No. 5. 1981, London, Ibid. Ibid. Reproduced in Amnesty International. AI INDEX: AMR 29/73/82. September 1982. "Assigning Responsibility for Human Rights Abuses: El Salvador s Military and Security Units". ■ • u Ibid. Captain Fiallos's sources of information are worthy of attention: “During the period in which I worked as a doctor in the military hospital I treated numerous members of the security forces. In inquiring as to the cause of their injuries, which is a normal medical procedure in the hospital, various individuals told me as other doctors that they had been injured in the act of‘eliminating civilians. For example, on one occasion, a member of the Treasury Police, in civilian dress, was brought to the hospital with a fractured tibia. I asked him how he had been injured and he told me that he and another member of his unit had received orders to eliminate a

361

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

187. 188. 189. 190.

191.

192.

193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199.

362

woman school teacher in the town of Aguascalientes whom he had been told was a subversive. In the act of pursuing the school teacher in her car, the motorcycle driven by this man and his associate struck the rear of the automobile and overturned, causing his injury. However, the other man was not hurt in the accident and murdered the school teacher before she could get out of her car. Afterwards, he brought his companion to the hospital for treatment.” Typescript, "Prepared statement of Leonel Gomez", 11 March 1981. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Leonel Gomez himself may have narrowly escaped becoming a death-squad victim; in his testimony he recounts his experience after the murder of Rodolfo Viera and AIFLD advisers Hammer and Pearlman. Gomez was arrested on 14 January, ten days after the murders, at the Presidential Palace by an army captain acting on the direct orders of a junta member, presumably Col. Gutierrez. Taken for an eight-hour interrogation session at Treasury Police headquarters he was released that evening upon signing a document declaring that he had been released unharmed. On the night of the 14th some 60 army troops travelling in two trucks surrounded and searched his house; Gomez watched the search from a hidingplace (apparently a large garbage bin) and subsequently managed to escape and seek asylum in the US. Gomez fled El Salvador just as summary executions reached unprecedented levels, with 2,664 killings of non-combatant civilians registered by Socorro Juridico in the month of January 1981. Although the "disappearance" or murder of most of the principal employees of the CDHES in 1980 and 1981 reduced their capability to maintain a fairly comprehen¬ sive register of human rights ahuse. Socorro Juridico continued to do so even after its patron. Archbishop Romero, was murdered in March 1980. In May 1982 Archbishop Rivera y Damas reestablished the Salvadorean Justice and Peace Commission, and within it a human rights office designed to continue Socorro Juridico's work and, in addition, to monitor political violence by opposition groups. Called the"Tutela Legal" (Office of Legal Protection), it replaced Socorro Juridico as the Archbishopric’s main human rights office. Socorro Juridico changed its name to Socorro Juridico Christiano and moved to offices in the Jesuit High School Externado San Jose in San Salvador. Both organizations continued to function, with the Archbishop stating in the church newspaper Onentoddn that he “by no means disavowed” the work of Socorro Juridico. All three human rights monitoring offices — Tutela Legal. Socorro Juridico/Socorro Juridico Crisriano. and CDHES — came to very similar conclusions on the scale and nature of non-combatant killings in 1982. Socorro Juridico figures cited in Americas Watch, U.S. Reporting on Human Rights in El Salvador: Methodology at Odds With Knowledge. New York, June 1982, p. 33. Socorro Juridico'^ working methods and procedures are discussed at length in a memorandum of 27 April 1982 by Heather Foote of the Washington Office on Latin America, entitled "Documentation on the Human Rights Situation in El Salvador: The Archdiocese Legal Aid Office”. The full memorandum is in the report "Review of State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1981”, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 97th Congress, Second Session, 28 April 1982 (Washington, US Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 119-27. Americas Watch, U.S. Reporting. . ., op. cit, p. 16. Ibid., pp.16-17. Ibid. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid. Amnesty International Report 1982, p. 136. A chart of Socorro Juridico's statistics for 1981 is included in American Civil Liberties Union/Americas' Watch. January 1982. op. cit.. p. 279.

Notes to Part 4 200.

220.

From an average of 582 governmental assassinations recorded for each of the first four months of the year cases dropped to 375 in May, 355 in June and 201 in July, rebounding to 508 in August, after the certification. Similarly, killings registered dropped to 372 in December. A comparative chart oiTutela Legal, Socorro Juridico and Human Rights Commission statistics for 1982 is in Americas Watch/ACLU, op. cit., January 1983, p. 16. Tutela Legal's are given as those oiSocorro Juridico for the months prior to its establishment as a separate entity. The same source (p. 18) notes the striking pattern of increases and abatements in killings over 1982 — "rises during the middle of a certification period and sharp drop-offs as certification approaches". Ibid., p. 19. Americas Watch, Human Rights in Central America: A Report on El Salvador, Guatemala Honduras and Nicaragua. April 1983, p. 4. Ibid., p. 9. Cited in American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit, July 1982, p. 120. Americas Watch, U.S. Reporting. . ., op. cit, p. 34. Susan Ornstein. “El Salvador: A Mercenary's View", in Fort Myers' News Press. 23 October 1983. Ibid. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit, January 1982, p. 177. Ibid., p. 178. Witnesses told an Amnesty International delegation present in Honduras shortly after the massacre that the death toll was relatively low because of the presence of foreign relief workers there. Amnesty International quoted one foreign witness who described the role of US military helicopters in the slaughter: "The helicopter came very low one time — almost touching the tree tops; we could see the face of the man at the machine-gun. There is no way he couldn’t have seen that he was firing at women and children." {See Amnesty International Report 1982. p. 134.) El Salvador Human Rights Committee. Report (London), September/October 1982. Ibid. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit.. January 1982, p. 201, citing testimony of Representatives Gerry Studds, Barbara Mikulski and Robert Edgar to US Congress House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, in Hearings on Foreign Assistance and Related Programs Appropriations for 1982, 97th Congress, 1st session, 25 February 1981, p. 29. Testimony of 23 February 1982, cited in American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., July 1982, pp. 26-7. Ibid. According to eye-witness Philip Bourgois, most casualties were elderly, infirm, and women burdened by children. Ibid., citing Diario Las Americas. 20 November 1981. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., pp. 28-9, citing the New York Times. 27 January 1982, "Major Massacre is reported in Salvadoran Village", and the Washington Post. 27 January 1982. "Salvadoran Peasants Describe Mass Killing . Ibid., p. 29. Dial Torgersen. “In El Salvador, ‘Substantial Control and US Supplied Helicopters . \n International Herald Tribune. 11 February 1982. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., July 1982 Supplement,

221. 222.

pp. 27-8 and 29a. Ibid. Ibid., p. 30. citing testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 8 February

201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209.

210. 211. 212.

213. 214. 215. 216. 217.

218. 219.

223. 224.

1982. Ibid., p. 219. , , Christopher Dickey. "US Tactics Fail to Prevent Salvadoran Civilian Deaths . the Washington Post. 10 June 1982.

363

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War 225. 226. 221. 228.

229. 230.

231. 232. 233.

234. 235. 236. 237. 238. 239. 240. 241. 242. 243.

244.

364

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Americas Watch/ACLU Report on Human Rights in El Salvador, 20 January. 1983, Second Supplement, Appendix D, p, 108 (US Department of State Memorandum to Americas Watch, 30 November 1982). Paul Ellman. "Long gone ... the last of the summer optimism", in The Guardian (London), 22 November 1983. Dial Torgerson. op. cit., (InternationalHerald Tribune, 11 February 1982). Torgerson was killed with reporter Richard Cross on a road near the Nicaraguan border, apparently after driving over a land mine, in June 1983. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch. July 1982, Supplement, p. 73, op. cit. Dial Torgerson, 11 February 1982. op. cit. “Dissent paper on El Salvador and Central America", DOS 11/6/80, To: Dissent Channel From: ESCATF/D Re.: DM-ESCA no. 80-3. In the “Statement of Purpose" of the paper’s introduction, dated 6 November 1980. the authors warn that the incoming Reagan administration's first crisis "may well be in El Salvador" and that “should President Reagan choose to use military force in El Salvador, historians will be able to show that the setting for such actions had been prepared in the last year of the Carter Administration. There may still be time to change course during the transition period”. The paper outlines recent policy toward Central America and proposes a “non-military, negotiated solution" to the crisis in the region. Although Carter administration spokesmen denied the paper originated in the “Dissent Channel", the information provided in the document is accurate, the analysis seems an authentic expression of inside views of the foreign policy establishment, and the proposals made are couched in the appropriate bureaucratic language. The introduction maintains that "The views articulated in this paper are shared in private by current and former analysts and officals at NSC. DOS. DOD and CIA. Employees from other agencies active in El Salvador and Central America — but normally excluded from policy debates — also contributed to these notes." “Dissent Paper", op. cit, pp. 6-7. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 19. Latin America Regional Reports, 19 January 1983, "Ochoa Mutiny: bring me the Head of Guillermo Garcia". This Week, 17 January 1983. “Garcia still in charge, but for how long?". Ibid. William Tuohy for Los Angeles Times Service, in International Herald Tribune, 23 March 1983. Deborah Mutnick, “General Garcia Finally Gets the Boot", in The Guardian (New York), 27 April 1983. The Washington Post, 21 June 1982. for example, reports that Ochoa “methodically cleaned out Cabanas. . . mountainous terrain within six months after he took it over on August 17." Later assessments of his achievement however, attributed it more to the peculiar conditions in Cabanas. Latin America Regional Reports, 18 February 1983 (“Where now for the Army?") noted that Ochoa’s tactics did not in themselves result in success: “Colonel Ochoa was often praised by the head of the US military group. Colonel Wagglestein. But Ochoa was operating in a department where the guerrilla forces and popular organizations were weak, and where rightwing paramilitaries have traditionally been strong. Elsewhere Colonel Ochoa would not have had the same impact on the guerrilla organization, which has become increasingly smooth and efficient.” The Washington Post, 21 June 1982. reports that Col. Ochoa denies his troops had

Notes to Part 4

245. 246.

247. 248.

249.

250. 251.

252. 253. 254. 255.

256.

257. 258. 259. 260. 261. 262.

carried out the raid on La Virtud camp, and said “He was not responsible ... for what troops from other commands might have done". Ibid. Christopher Dickey, "El Salvador's Young Colonels Shun Politics: They are Becoming a Force forChange Favored by the US", Washington Post Service, in the International Herald Tribune. 8 July 1982. The Washington Post, 21 June 198T White was referring to a recent massacre by the Treasury Police and the US's failure to support factions in the military opposed to continued atrocities: “They cannot do it unless we apply diplomatic pressures on them to improve. Unfortunately, we have done the opposite, with the result that we have 23 poor people dead and horribly mutilated by the worst offenders, the Treasury Police." Cited in US Congress, Hearings on “The Situation in El Salvador", op. cit., p. 103. Testimony of Capt. Mena Sandoval, reproduced in Noticias de El Salvador (Fondon), No. 5. 1981. Mena Sandoval states that the sacristan was murdered on Ochoa's direct order, and that he had also “ordered the death of all those who were taken prisoner." This is consistent with the actions of the Treasury Police in other areas in this period and with accounts of the incidents at Soyapango. This Week, Central America and Panama. “New Order gets under way ", 22 October 1979. American Institute for Free Labor Development, Statement of William C. Doherty, Jr.. Executive Director, before the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, February 2, 1983, Washington, D.C., p. 12. Christopher Dickey, op. cit. The Washington Post. 21 June 1982. Ibid. In US Congressional Hearings held in March 1977 congressman Donald Fraser questioned Mr Richard 'Violette, director of Security Assistance operations of the Department of Defense with regard to ORDEN: “Mr. Fraser: I have one last question. Mr. Violette, do you know what ORDEN is in El Salvador? Mr. Violette: I am afraid I do not. In what context is it used? Mr. Fraser: It is described, apparently, as a paramilitary force organized by the Ministry of Defense to operate in rural areas. Mr. Violette: I am sorry; 1 don't. Mr. Fraser: You are not familiar with that? Mr. Violette: No. sir. (See US Congress Hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections in El Salvador", p. 18. See above for reference to US backing for the establishment of ORDEN.) General Carlos Guzman Aguilar. “La Subversion Comunista y las Acciones Guerrilleras" in Revista de la Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor Enrique Araujo". July-December 1970. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. For a resume of the terms of the legislation on certification of progress on human rights see American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., July 1982

263.

Supplement, pp. 207-8. Institute for Policy Studies, Resource. Update No. 8, pp. 2-3. citing Testimony, 2

264.

February 1983. Latin America Weekly Report.

265. 266.

Unfolds". Ibid. Newsweek. 2 May 1983.

26

February

1982, “The

Intervention

Plan

365

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War 267.

268. 269. 270.

271. 272. 273. 274.

275.

276. 277. 278.

279.

366

Institute for Policy Studies,/Jesowrce, Update No. 8, p. 8, citing the Washington Post, II March 1983, Ihe Los Angeles Times, 13 March 1983, and New.sweek, 21 March 1983. Newsweek, “A Plan to Win in El Salvador". 21 March 1983. Institute for Policy Sudies, Resource, Update 8, p. 9, citing Los Angeles Times, 3 March 1983. William Tuohy, "US Role in El Salvador Recalls Vietnam — but there are Differences loo", Los Angeles Times Service/Intemational Herald Tribune, 23 March 1983. Ibid. Newsweek, "A Plan to Win in El Salvador", 21 March 1983. Thomas Powers, op. cit, p. 232. Richard H. Shultz, Jr., "The Vietnamization — Pacification Strategy of 1969-1972; A Quantitative Reassessment", p. 104. in Richard H, Shultz, Jr. and Richard A. Hunt (eds). Lessors'/row an Unconventional War: Reassessing US. Strategies for Future Conflicts. (Pergamon Policy Studies, Pergamon Press, New York, 1982). Ibid., citing Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Systems Analysis), OASDSA), South-East Asia (SEA) Analysis Reports. 317, pp. 66-75, and OASD-SA, “Phoenix". SEA Analysis Reports. June-July 1971, p. 2. Ibid. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., pp. 108-9. Shultz cites, among other sources, Thomas Thayer. “The Communist forces... were getting stronger and stronger. They moved their logistics support into areas of South Vietnam; they now controlled and protected it... they built roads, bridges and pipelines, and they introduced several thousand more troops. By the end of 1974 they were in the strongest position they had had since at least 1964". (Thayer in “Howto Analyse a War Without Fronts".) Shultz also takes issue with the position taken by such former American officials as Henry Kissinger, who maintained that the defeat of the 1972 offensive was a result of the success of pacification, the winning of the war in the countryside and even that it was this “victory" that “forced" the North Vietnamese to the conference table. Shultz notes that while the US did not pour in ground troops to meet the 1972 offensive, it radically escalated the use of American air power to support the South Vietnamese, increasing the number of US sorties flown against North Vietnam, e.g.. 24,0(X) in 1971. 106,000 in 1972, Shultz' conclusions are in part supported by Douglas S. Blaufarb, in “The Sources of US Frustration in Vietnam" {Lessons from an Unconventional War. op. cit., p. 153). Blaufarb, a former adviser to the National Security Council, counter¬ insurgency expert and former CIA official, takes issue with Shultz' contention that pacification in the countryside failed completely, or that it was decisive in the government's eventual defeat, but concludes that “Nevertheless, the total picture in 1972 by no means supports the official claims that were made at the time, and Dr. Shultz is correct in saying that pacification and Vietnamization in 1972 were a long way from achieving the control of the population along with its willing support that were its long-range objective." Another contribution (“American Culture and American Aims: The Case of Vietnam") in the same anthology (p. 182), by Col. Donald Vought (retired), criticizes the US military's failure ever to fully appreciate the strategy and techniques of pacification, in contrast to its experience in applying conventional warfare methods in Vietnam. According to Vought, "We lost the war in the range of conflict which fell below conventional unit operations, i.e., pacification". See, for example, ra/s Week. 15 August 1983, “Testing Time in San Vicente". During 1983 US military personnel rose far beyond the Reagan administration's selfimposed limit, a development obscured by a quiet change in nomenclature. The limit of 55 US military advisers was superseded by no longer considering officers assigned permanently to the Military Group as “advisers", even when they worked directly with the Salvadorean military. Lydia Chavez, in New York Times Service,

Notes to Part 4

280.

International Herald Tribune, 28 February 1984, “Level of US personnel in Salvador has Risen Substantially in Last Year”, confirms a total of97 US military personnel, comprising those assigned to the Military Group (71) and the defence attache s staff (26, up from 6 a year earlier). This figure excludes 23 medics, the Embassy marine guard, and 5 “so-called military communicators" at the Embassy. The defence attache s staff included two helicopter crews. Full figures on civilian staff directly associated with the San Vicente/Usulutan programme have not been revealed. This Week, 15 August 1983, “Testing Time in San Vicente".

Chapter 15 281.

282.

283. 284. 285. 286. 287. 288. 289.

290. 291. 292.

293. 294. 295.

296. 297. 298. 299.

300

Cynthia Arnson, Institute for Policy Studies, Resource, “Background Information on the Security Forces in El Salvador and US Military Assistance”. 1980. citing US Department of Defense, Defense Security Assistance Agency, Foreign Military Sales and Military Assistance Facts, Washington D.C., 1979. US Congress Hearings on “Human Rights in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador: Implications for U.S. Policy”, 1976, p. \ S5,andNACLA, US Military and Police Operations in the Third World, 1970, p. 15, citing US Department of Defense, Military Assistance Facts, 1969. pp. 16-17. US Congress. Hearings on “New Directions for the 1970's; Toward a Strategy of Inter-American Development", 1969, p. 506. Ibid. US Congress, Hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections...” op. cit.. 1976. p. 7. testimony of Richard Violette. US Congress. Hearings on “Religious Persecution in El Salvador”, 1977, p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Arnon Hader, op. cit., citing the Washington Post, 15 March, 1978. US Congress, Hearings on “New Directions...”, op. cit, p. 506; US Department of Defense Press Release, August 1971, cited in NACLA, The US Military Apparatus, 1972, p. 42; and US Congress, Hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections...”, op. cit, p. 4. Blutstein et al., op. cit., p. 208. US Congress, Hearings on “The Recent Presidential Elections. . .”, op. cit, p. 9. Cynthia Arnson, op. cit, p. 13, citing US Department of State, Report Required by Section 657 of the Foreign Assistance Act FY 75, 76, 77, 78. Cartridges were provided in the following quantities; FY 1975, 6,363, 500; FY 1976, 6, 150,040; FY “7T' (a period of transition to a new financial accounting year at end 1976beginning 1977), 2,131,000; FY 1977, 5,393,000. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 8. . . US Department of State “Country Reports”. 1980, p. 321. US economic assistance in 1979 totalled $10.6 million ($6.9 million for AID), while international financial agencies authorized $60 million. Ibid., p. 321. Cynthia Arnson. op. cit, p. 8. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit, January 1982, The Archbishop wrote to President Carter on 4 November 1979. On 29 February 1980 the Secretary General of Amnesty International, Martin Ennals, wrote the Department of State, stating its conclusion that all security forces in El Salvador “are in varying degrees implicated in abuses — including torture and summary executions”, and that further military assistance “might encourage further violation of human rights”. Both texts are cited in American Civil Liberties Union/ Americas Watch, op. cit, January 1982, pp. 189-90. Amnesty International, Political Killings by Governments, 1983, p. 17.

367

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War 301. 302.

303. 304. 305.

306.

307. 308. 309.

310. 311. 312. 313. 314. 315.

316. 317. 318.

368

American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit. January 1982, p. 189; and WOLA. Update, Latin America, March/April 1980. WOLA, Update. Latin America. March/April 1980. WOLA’s Update cites a 14 February 1980 Washington Post article by Karen de Young and an Institute for Policy Studies Report on El Salvador as upsetting plans for the quiet deployment of the three teams. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., January 1982, p. 191. Ibid. “Dissent Paper", op. cit.. p. 16. The "Dissent Paper" also warns that an increase in US involvement in the region would make Panama critically important, and describes the US position there as "precarious" as long as General Torrijos remains in control of the armed forces. General Torrijos was killed in a plane crash in 198?. According to the authors. General Torrijos "is described in our character profiles as ‘volatile, unpredictable... a populist demagogue [with] a visceral anti-American bias ... and a penchant for the bottle" ". Reference was also made to the logistical role of the Panama Canal Zone facilities: “The Latin American press has carried accusations that DOD (Department of Defense) may be using our facilities in Panama for stockpiling military supplies intended to play a key role in an eventual logistical supply air-lift to Salvadorean armed forces. We have obtained some evidence supporting these allegations". Panama was also reported to have “improved ties with the FDR/DRU coalition moderates". Ibid., p. 18. The "Dissent Paper", on p. 17, also identified Ecuador, and specifically its President, Jaime Roldos. as a problem vis-a-vis US policy on El Salvador: "Since May, President Roldos’ position on El Salvador has shifted further in favor of recognition of the FDR.” Roldos, too, died in a plane crash within the year. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit. January 1982, p. 190. Ibid. Ibid., p. 195. The authors remark that MTTpersonnel "are considered different from military advisers in that MTT's do not accompany foreign troops on military operations, and are not supposed to help plan, coordinate or otherwise advise foreign military personnel in the performance of defensive or offensive combat operations". Adherence to these official distinctions between the roles of different military units within the security assistance programme cannot however, be assumed. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid. “Dissent Paper", op. cit, pp. 8-9. Ibid. Ibid. See American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit, January 1982, pp. 218-9 for a detailed discussion of this legislation and its application to El Salvador. Section 614 of the Foreign Assistance Act according to the same source, also provides for emergency assistance: “Under 614 the President may furnish up to $250 million in any type of security assistance to a country without regard to Sections 502B. 660 or any other provision of the Foreign Assistance or Arms Export Control Acts"; see also Institute for Policy Studies. Resource. Update No. 8. op. cit., p. 11; the same source notes that Section 614 had been invoked virtually unnoticed “at least four times for El Salvador and Nicaragua in the last three years". American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., January 1982, p. 190. Ibid., pp. 194 and 203. Ibid., p. 205; the same source notes that ESF funds can be released “without congressional review to address emergencies" and can be used for purposes not including weapons purchases or training that “enhance a nation’s security", such as road or bridge building. This form of aid was formerly called “Security Supporting Assistance".

Notes to Part 4 319. 320. 321. 322. 323.

324. 325. 326.

327. 328.

329. 330. 331. 332. 333. 334. 335. 336.

337.

338. 339. 340. 341. 342.

343.

Ibid., July 1982. p. 206. Ibid., pp. 206-7. Institute for Policy Studies, Resource. Update No. 7. November 1982, p. 13. Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), Update on Latin America, March/ April 1983, p. 1. See ibid., p. 8; the same source outlines proposed economic assistance to El Salvador and other countries in the region adding up to $168 million, with $67.1 million earmarked for El Salvador. Institute for Policy Studies, Resource. Update 8, op. cit., p. 9. US Congress, Hearings on "The Situation in El Salvador”, op. cit.. p. 6. Quotations here are from US Congress, Hearings on "The Situation in El Salvador", op. cit., pp. 80-81, quoting Christopher Dickey, Washington Post. 18 March 1981. Testimony of General Graves, in ibid., p. 82. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., January 1982, p. 197. A breakdown of US advisory activities in the second half of 1981, declassified by the Defense Security Assistance Agency, reported the training of army units by one five-man unit in "basic infantry operations at the National Training Center" while two five-man groups worked in regional garrisons "to train new units of the 1200man Quick-Reaction Battalion" (in Institute for Policy Studies. Reiowrce, Update No. 7. pp. 6-11). Institute for Policy Studies, Resource. Update No. 7, pp. 6-11. Ibid. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit, July 1982, p. 213. Ibid. Institute for Policy Studies. Resource. Update No. 7, op. cit, p. 9. Ibid., p. 15. Latin America Regional Report, 15 July 1983. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit, July 1982, p. 213. For an outline of the two-year curriculum see Carlos Andino Martinez, El Estamento Militar en El Salvador", £5fw£7ios Centroamericanos. July-August 1979. p. 619. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit, July 1982, p. 214, Training at US bases was not in itself an innovation; until the interruption of major training programmes in 1977, the Plan de Estudios (Curriculum) of the Escuela Militar Capitdn General Gerardo Barrios provided for the fifth of the eight-term course of study to be dedicated to training at the Canal Zone School of the Americas; the four courses taken there included ' Sub-courses in Parachuting, Irregular Warfare, Marksmanship, and General Studies. (See Carlos Andino Martinez, op. cit). . , , ,no-. a American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., July 1982, pp. 213-4. citing State Department sources and a Pentagon spokesman. Newsweek, 14 March 1983, Reagan Sounds the Alarm . Jonathan Steele, "In a US model, let Nicaragua be Yugoslavia". The Guardian (London). 22 August 1983. mic Department of State. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1982. (US Government Printing Qffice. Washington D.C.. February 1983), p, 492. Captured soldiers have been turned over to the International Committee of the Red Cross on a regular basis; some sources maintain that prisoners returned to their units by the Red Cross are as a rule dismissed from the army as bad for morale. The good treatment of prisoners by the FMLN forces, and their release through Red Cross channels is seen as a major factor in inducing the surrender of regional garrisons, and the high desertion rate. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., January 1982, p. 191 citing the Washington Post. 9 Qctober 1980. Such assertions were reported uncritically in the news media, as in Time. 16 March 198 . T^e training of Salvadoran troops by the US began in early 1980 at Fort Gulick in Panama, where

369

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War

344.

345. 346. 347

348. 349.

350. 351.

352. 353.

354. 355.

370

the School of the Americas specializes in teaching antiguerrilla warfare. At the urging of the Carter Administration, school officials designed a special curriculum for the Salvadorans. Formally titled ‘Aspects of Human Rights in Internal Defense and Development', the three-week course offers basic training in how to search and take a prisoner, with special emphasis on protecting the prisoner’s rights. Some 250 Salvadorans took the course last year, and another 150 are expected to graduate this year. One recent visitor to a session of the course listened as an instructor asked his Salvadoran NCO ‘Even if we think that the person whose house we are going to search is a guerrilla, do we still have to establish a friendly atmosphere when we question him?' The instructor's rhetorical reply, 'Absolutely'." American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., January 1982 Supple¬ ment, p. 85, citing Nutting Testimony, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 3 August 1982. See also ibid., p. 87, for Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams' statement to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that "Respect for human rights and proper conduct toward the civilian population has been a principal part of our training of Salvadoran military personnel". Ibid., pp. 86-7. Paul Ellman. “The School that Trains Democrats and Dictators", in The Guardian, 17 May 1983. See for instance This Week, 12 July 1982. “Peace Feelers in El Salvador", “The International Red Cross had considered leaving El Salvador because of the army's apparent policy of liquidating captured rebels while in custody. Since that time, an army high command directive advised infantry units to take prisoners, and some are actually believed to be in custody." Or Congressman Tom Harkin's testimony of2 March 1982, on the findings of a congressional delegation to El Salvador. “We asked the high command about reports which were substantiated by the State Department that the Army of El Salvador, except in rare cases, does not take prisoners. The Subminister of Defense, Colonel Castillo, denied this and instead charged that the guerrillas kill their wounded so that they cannot be interrogated. There is... no question that this is a lie. The Army of El Salvador does as a matter of routine shoot the enemy wounded and execute the captured." (Quoted in American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit. July 1982, p. 220). Jonathan Steele, “In a US model, let Nicaragua be Yugoslavia", The Guardian (London), 22 August 1983. See, for example, “A plan to win in El Salvador". TVewsweeit. 21 March 1983; and Latin America Regional Reports, 25 March 1983, “Reagan’s New War Plan Finds Few Takers". See sources in ibid. LatinAmerica Weekly Report, 14January 1982, quoting Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia, then Minister of Defense, on “civilian involvement". See above, for reference to “Operation Well-Being" and the tactics of regional commanders. Latin America Regional Reports, 19 January 1983, “Ochoa Mutiny: Bring me the Head of Guillermo Garcia”. For a comprehensive overview of US involvement in Honduras, see Institute for Policy Studies, Resource, Update No. 9, “Background Information on US Security Assistance and Military Operations in Honduras", prepared by Leslie Parks with Jonathan Marshall and Michael T. Klare, 30 May 1984. A1 Kamen, “Brutal Murders Routine — Who Kills Salvadoran Civilians?”, reproduced in US Congress, Hearings on “The Situation in El Salvador”, op. cit, p. 114. The key words are “the inadequacy of security force resources", an inadequacy irregular forces are repeatedly called upon to remedy by swelling available manpower and performing counter-terrorist actions not appropriate to the regular uniformed forces. The quote is from US Embassy airgram from San Salvador to Department of State, “Subject: A Statistical Framework for Understanding Violence in El Salvador”, 15 January 1982, p. 7, cited in Americas Watch, “Methodology. . .”, op. cit., p. 28.

Notes to Part 4 356. 357. 358.

See Part I. Captain Ricardo Fiallos, statement, April 1981 (typescript). Sometimes a difference as slight as that between the words auto or carro for automobile, but quite enough to place a foreign national. 359. Excelsior (Mexico City), 12 July 1979, 360. The Guardian (London), 12 April 1980. 361. “Dissent Paper", op. cit., p. 9. 362. Ibid., pp. 12-13. 363. Don Oberdorfer and Patrick E. Tyler, “Reagan said to approve action to stem Central American Unrest", Washington Post Serv'icejnternational Herald Tribune, 15 February 1982 and Patrick E. Tyler and Bob Woodward, "US is said to approve anti-Nicaragua actions". International Herald Tribune. 11 March 1982. 364. The plan reportedly called for “support and conduct of political and paramilitary operations against the Cuban presence and Cuban-Sandinista support structure in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America". While budgetted at $19 million, the proposal emphasized that the programme "should not be confined to that funding level". (See Tyler and Woodward, op. cit.. International Herald Tribune. 11 March 1982). 365. Ibid. According to the same source, while the CIA was to "work primarily with nonAmericans in covert operations", some cases would justify “unilateral paramilitary action — possibly using US personnel — against special Cuban targets". 366. Arnon Elader. The United States and El Salvador, op. cit.. pp. 26-7; Elader cited the FDR on the August 1980 deaths, and on 1 January 1981, the Washington Post states that “at least five US citizens, ostensibly mercenaries working for rightist forces, have been reported killed in the fighting". Hader cites the Washington Post. 19 December 1980, for the killing of the US ex-police sergeant. 367. Susan Ornstein, “El Salvador: A Mercenary's View", Eort Myers News-Press, 23 October 1983. 368. Ibid. 369. Army concept team in Vietnam, Office of Joint Research and Test Activity, US Army. “Employment of a Special Eorces Group , 25 April 1966, Carrollton Press Declassified Documents Series ((R) 204B), p. 26. 370. Testimony of Leonel Gomez, op. cit. 371. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit.. January 1983, Second Supplement, Appendix D. p. 100. 372. Ibid., and. press reports. Januaiy 1984. 373. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., July 1982, pp. 215-6, citing the Aew York Times. 24 June 1982. 374. “US Advisers Lighting in El Salvador, CBS Says", AP., the Washington Post. 24 June 1982. for reference to the Lempa River massacres. 375. American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit., July 1982, p. 228. 376. Ibid., p. 229. citing the/Vew York Times. “Green Berets Step Up Honduras Role , 9 August 1981; see also Rusty Davenport. "Monitor Salvador's Border" in thcNew York Times. 23 December 1981: "During November 1981, a month of mounting repression of refugees and reliefworkers. Green Berets were in La Virtud [Refugee Camp). These personnel training border patrol units cannot have been unaware of the brutal conduct of Honduran soldiers." It should be pointed out that Honduras is a country which, at that time, had no insurgent movement, despite which the presence of the Green Berets was important, and, furtherrnore, prominent in the border areas, “in particular since the July-August 1981 decision to relocate refugees to the interior". (See the New York Times. Green Berets Step 377

378.

Up. . .". op. cit.) .T’. Institute for Policy Studies, Rcwwrce, Update No. 8, op. cit., p. 12. The same source notes that initial official US government reports on Sergeant Stanley's wounding maintained that he had not broken the rules governing trainers conduct. Newsweek. 14 March 1983.

371

Counter-Insurgency and Civil War 379. 380.

381. 382. 383. 384. 385. 386. 387. 388.

389. 390. 391. 392. 393. 394. 395. 396.

372

Latin America Regional Reports, 6 May 1983, “El Salvador: Washington Looks to the Skies”. US Department of State, Statement on Assistance to El Salvador, 2 March 1981, cited in American Civil Liberties Union/Americas Watch, op. cit, January 1982, p. 196. Ibid. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 198, citing The Baltimore Sun. 3 February 1981. Institute for Policy Studies, Resource, Update No. 7. p. 6. Ibid., pp. 6-7. Ibid., pp. 7-8. Ibid., p. 11. This Week. 28 March 1983, citing Philip Taubman, the New York Times; the emphasis ofTaubman's article, however, was that the Salvadoreans have not been responsive to CIA direction and advice. Time. 22 March 1982; “Judging Spies and Eyes”. Philip Taubman, “US Reportedly Plans to Underwrite Cost of Salvadoran Vote”. New York Times Service, International Herald Tribune. 27 May 1983. Ibid. Ibid. “Congress Talks Back”, Newsweek. 2 April 1984. See Stephen Kinzer, “Ex-Officer in Salvador Links Top Officials to Death Squads”. New York Times Service. International Herald Tribune. 5 March 1984. Ibid. Op. cix., Newsweek, 2 April 1984.

Select Bibliography

(A Bibliographic Note and more extensive Select Bibliography appears in The American Connection. Vol.ll.) Americas Watch Committee and American Civil Liberties Union. Report on Human Rights in El Salvador. Washington. DC: Center for National Security Studies. 1982. and New York: Vintage Books. March 1982. Jidv 20. 1982 Supplement to the Report on Human Rights in El Salvador. Washington. DC: Center for National Security Studies. 1982. January' 20. 1983 Second Supplement to the Report on Human Rights in El Salvador. Washington. DC: Center for National Security Studies. 1983, Amnesty International. Political Killings by Governments. 1983. “Disappearances": a Workbook. New York. 1981. Torture in the Eighties. London. 1984. Anderson. Charles W.. “El Salvador: The Army as Reformer", in Martin C. Needier, ed.. Political Systems of Latin America. Princeton: Van Nostrand. 1964. Anderson. Thomas P..Matanza. El Salvador's Communist Revolt of1932. Lincoln. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. 1981. Andino Martinez. Carlos. “El Estamento Militar en El Salvador . in Estudios Centroamericanos (San Salvador). July-August 1979. Ateneo de El Salvador. Libro Araujo. San Salvador: Imprenta Nacional. 1914. Angel. Dr Pedro Antonio. "Some Historic Information about the National Police of El Salvador", typewritten manuscript. 27 February 1962. AID Reference Center. Blutstein. Howard 1.. et. ‘d\..Area Handbook for El Salvador. Washington. DC: US Government Printing Office. 1971. Brodeur. Commander V.G.. Memorandum Match 1932. Public Aichives of Canada. Ottawa. Record Group 25. Brown. Cynthia and Fernando Moreno. “Force Feeding the Press m El Salvador". The Nation. 25 April 1981. Browning. YJ’ACid. El Salvador: Landscape and Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1971. Bustamante. Gregorio. Historia Militar de El Salvador. San Salvador. 1935 and 1951. Colby. Benjamin N. and Pierre E. Van den Berghe./.viV Country': A Plural Society in Highland Guatemala. Berkeley. Cal.. University ol California Press. 1969. 373

The American Connection: Voll Comision Especial Investigadora de Reos y Desaparecidos Politicos, (Report on the Findings of the Special Commission on Disappearances, dated 3 January 1980). San Salvador; photocopy. Curia Metropolitana de San Salvador, “Acerca de la Injusticia de la Actual forma de Tenencia de la Tierra", in Universidad, January-February 1970. Dalton. Roque. Miguel Marmot Los Sucesos de 1932 en El Salvador. San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, (EDUCA). 1972. Devine, Frank i.. El Salvador: Emba.s.sy Under Attack. New York: Vantage Press. 1981.

Uunkerley, James, The Long War; Dictatorship and Revolution in El Salvador. Elam. RoherWarncy, Appeal to Arms: The Army and Politics in El Salvador, 19311964, Ph.D dissertation. University of New Mexico, 1968. Escobar Cornejo, Maria del Carmen. Gerardo Iraheta Rosales and Lilma Dolores Lopez Alaz, “La Crisis de 1929 y sus Consecuencias en los Anos Posteriores", in Universidad (San Salvador) No. 12, 1971. Garcia, Miguel Angel, Diccionario Histdrico-enciclopedico de El Salvador. San Salvador. 1936-50. Guatemalan Army General Staff "Plan Nacional de Seguridafi y Desarrollo", signed by junta members, dated 1 April 1982. Palacio Nactional. Photocopied typescript. Anexo H, "Ordenes Permanentes para el Desarrollo de Operaciones Contrasubversivas" al Plan de Campana 'Victoria 82', 16July 1982, LEMG-1800. Palacio Nacional. Photocopied typescript. Guerra, Tomas, Octubre Sangriento. San Jose. Costa Rica: Centro Victor Sanabria, 1981. Hernandez Pico. Juan. et. a\„ El Salvador: Aho Politico 1971-1972. San Salvador: Universidad Centroamericana “Simeon Canas" 1973. Institute for Policy Studies. “Background Information on the Security Forces in El Salvador and US Military Assistance" (prepared by Cynthia Arnson). Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, March 1980. with periodic “Update" papers dated June and November 1980; January, April, and August 1981; March and November 1982. Kantor, Harry. “El Salvador: The Military as Reformists", in Patterns of Politics and Political Systems in Latin America, New York: Rand McNally, 1969. Keogh. Dermot, “The Politics of Hunger, Peasant Revolt and Massacre in El Salvador. 1932". Manuscript, University of Cork, Ireland. Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights (New York) Update: Justice in El Salvador: a Ca.se Study. (A report on the investigation into the killing of four US churchwomen in El Salvador) New York, 1 February 1983. Lemus, Jose Maria. Mensajes v Discursos. San Salvador; Ministerio de Cultura 1958. Latin America bureau (LTKR). El Salvador under General Romero. London' LAB 1979. Violence and Eraud in El Salvador. London: LAB. 1977. Lopez Vallecillos. Italo, "Reflexiones sobre la Violencia en El Salvador", in Estudios Centroamericanos (San Salvador), January-February 1976. Marroquin. Alejandro Dagoberto, Saw Pedro Nonoalco: Investigacibn Socioloigica. San Salvador. 1964. 374

Select Bibliography

“Estudio sobre la Crisis en los Anos Treinta en El Salvador", in Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, ed.. America Latina en los Ahos Treinta. Mexico City, 1977. Martinez, Ana Guadalupe, Las Carceies Clandestinas de El Salvador: Lihertadpor el Secuestro de an Oligarca. (No date or publisher.) Mendez, Joaquin, Los Sucesos Comunistas en El Salvador. San Salvador; Imprenta Eunes Ungo, 1935. Menendez, Isidro. Recopilacidn de las Leyes de El Salvador. San Salvador. 1855. reprinted in Guatemala: Imprenta Nacional, 1956. Menjivar, Rafael. "El Salvador: The Smallest Eink". in Central America: A Contemporary Crisis. EARU Studies, vol. V. No. 1. September 1982. Osegueda. Francisco R., "Observ'aciones sobre la Vida del Campesino Salvadoreno de Otros Tiempos y la del Campesino Actual", in Revista del Ateneo de El Salvador. No. 145. February 1932. Pena Kampy, Alberto. El General Martinez: Un Patriarcal Presidente Dictador. San Salvador; Editorial Cipografia Ramirez, 1972. Sanchez Hernandez. General Fidel. Discursos del Sr. Presidente de la RepiihUca. Julio 1967-enero 1972. San Salvador, 1973. “Saravia Notebook", a photocopied diary of expenses kept by Cap. Alvaro Rafael Saravia and linked to the assassination of Archbishop Romero. Schlesinger. Jorge. Revoiucion Comunista. ^Guatemala en Peiigro?. Guatemala, 1946. Simon. Eaurence. and James C. Stephens. Jr., El Salvador Land Reform 19801981. Impact Audit. Boston. Mass., USA; OXFAM America. 1982 (2nd edition). Webre, Stephen. Jose Napoleon Duarte and the Christian Democratic Party in Salvadoran Politics 1960-1972. Baton Rouge and London; Louisiana State University Press, 1979. White. AlasVdiv. El Salvador. London. Benn, 1973. Wilson, Everett Alan. The Crisis of National Integration in El Salvador. 1919-1932. Ph.D dissertation, Stanford University. 1970.

375

Index

Abbreviations used in this Index AD AID AIFLD ANDES ANEP ANSESAL ANTEL ARENA ATACES BPR CDHES CGTS CIDG CITFA CNI CNT CONDECA COPEFA COPREFA CORDS CRM DINA DRU-PM El Sal. ERP

376

Accion Democratica (Democratic Action Party) Agency for International Development American Institute for Free Labor Development Asociacion Nacional de Educadores Salvadorenos (National Association of Salvadorean Educators) Asociacion Nacional de la Empresa Privada (National Association of Salvadorean Enterprise) Agenda Nacional de Seguridad de El Salvador (National Security Agency of El Salvador) Agenda Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (National Telecommunications Agency) Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (National Republican Alliance) Asociacion de Trabajadores y Campesinos de El Salvador (Association of Salvadorean Farm Workers and Peasants) Bloque Popular Revolucionario (Popular Revolutionary Bloc) Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (Commission of Human Rights in El Salvador) Confederacion General de Trabajadores de El Salvador (General Confederation of Salvadorean Workers) Civilian Irregular Defense Groups Centro de Instruccion en Telecomunicaciones de la Fuerza Armada (Armed Forces Centre for Instruction in Telecommunications) Centro Nacional de Informacwn (National Information Centre) Central Nacional de Trabajadores (National Workers Central) (Guatemala) Consejo de Defensa Centroamericana (Central American Defense Council) Consejo Permanente de la Fuerzas Armadas (Permanent Council of the Armed Forces) Consejo de Prensa de las Fuerzas Armadas (Press Council of the Armed Forces) Civilian Operations and Revolutionary Development Support Coordinadora Revolucionariade de Masas (Revolutionary Co-ordinator of the Masses) National Intelligence Directorate DirecciSn Revolucionaria Unijicada PolitCco-Militar (Unified PoliticalMilitary Revolutionary Command) El Salvador Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army)

Index FAN FAPU FARO FBI(US) FDR FECCAS FENESTRAS FMLN FMS FPL FRTS FSLN FUDI FUSS Guat. ID AD IDB IMET INSAFI ISTA LP-28 MNR MPSC MRC MTT(s) NSAM PCN PRTC PRU(s) PRUD PUD RN SIE SNI

ucs UDN UGB UNO UNT UPT USIA UTC

Frente Amplio Nacional (Broad National Front) Frente de Accion Popular Unificada (United Front of Popular Action) Frente Agraria Region Oriental (Eastern Regional Landowners’ Front) US Federal Bureau of Investigation Frente Democratico Revolucionario (Democratic Revolutionary Front) Federacion de Campesinos Cristianos de El Salvador (Christian Peasant Federation of El Salvador) Federacion Nacional Sindical de Trabajadores Salvadorenos (National Trade Union Federation of Salvadorean Workers) Farabundo Marti Frente de Liberacion Nacional (Farabundo Marti' National Liberation Front) Foreign Military Sales Program Fuerzas Populares de Liberacion ‘Farabundo Marti’ (Popular Liberation Forces Farabundo Marti) Federacion Regional de Trabajadores de El Salvador (Salvadorean Labour Federation) Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front) Frente Unido Democratico Independiente (United Democratic Indepen¬ dent Front) Federacion de Unidad Sindical Salvadoreno (Salvadorean Federation of Trade Union Unity) Guatemala Internal Defense and Development Inter-American Development Bank International Military Education and Training Program Institute Salvadoreno de Fomento Industrial (Salvadorean Institute of Industrial Finance) Institute Salvadoreno de Transformacion Agraria (Salvadorean Institute for Agrarian Transformation) Ligas Populares 28 de Febrero (28th of February Popular Leagues) Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Move¬ ment) Movimiento Popular Social Cristiano (Popular Social Christian Move¬ ment) Movimiento Revolucionario Campesino (Revolutionary Peasant Move¬ ment) US Army Mobile Training Team(s) National Security Action Memorandum Partido de Conciliacion Nacional (Party of National Conciliation) Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores Centroamericanos (Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers) Provincial Reconnaissance Units Partido de Unificacion Democratica (Revolutionary Party of Democratic Unity) Partido de Union Democratica (Party of Democratic Unity) Resistencia Nacional (National Resistance) Seccion de Investigaciones Especiales (Special Investigations Section) National Intelligence Service Union Comunal Salvadoreno (Salvadorean Communal Union) Union Democratica Nacionalista (National Democratic Union) Union Guerrera Blanca (White Warriors’ Union) Union Nacional Opositora (National Opposition Union) Union Nacional de Trabajadores (National Union of Workers) Union de Pobladores de Tugurios (Union of Slum-Dwellers) US Information Agency Union de Trabajadores del Campo (Union of Agricultural Workers)

377

The American Connection: Voll

Abourezk, Senator James 59-61, 71 Acheson, Dean 8-9 AD 129, 292, 295 AFL-CIO 281 Agee, Philip 69-70 Agenda de Seguridad (Guat.) 204-5; (Costa Rica) 62 Agrarian Code 97, 124-6, 128, 159 agrarian reform: in El Sal.: 152, 254, 266-73; Cabanas province 316; and sales freeze 254; Heritage Foundation 268; & church, persecution of 176-81; Vietnam model 267-9; & White Warriors Union 178-9; in Guat.: & US assessment of 17-8 See also AID Aguilares 179-80, 185-7 Aguirre y Salinas, Col. Osmin 120, 127, 131-2, 187 Ahuachapan, peasant revolts 1931-2 107-8, 110-4; image of Christ, & firing squad 113-4 AID 15, 18, 54, 59-60, 63, 70, 151-2, 156-60, 192, 203, 283; & agrarian reform 267-8; & Operation Wellbeing 321; & security assistance 63 See also Public Safety Program Air Commando Squadron, US Air Force

21 Air Force of El Sal. 169, 262 air power, & US combat role 348-9 Alas, Fr. Higinio 185 Alas, Fr. Inocendo 156-7, 185 Alliance for Progress 13, 32-3, 149, 156-7 Alvarez Cordova, Enrique 176-7, 254, 266-7 Amaya, Rufina 308-9 American Civil Liberties Union 347, 388-9 AIFLD 156, 269, 279-84, 301, 316 Americas Watch Committee 302-3, 332, 338-9, 347 Amnesty International 193-4 Anderson, Thomas 109, 113, 120, 130-1, 152 ANDES 163-6, 174-5, 207, 304 Andino, Antonio 251, 260 ANEP 180 ANSESAL 175, 191, 218-22; counter¬ intelligence role 219-20; & Operation Phoenix 325; secret reorganization (1980) 221-2, 253, 272-5, 352-3 ANTEL 169, 177, 220-1, 247, 251, 274 Anti-Communist Army, Secret 343 Araujo, Arturo 98, 103, 105-7, 114; US intelligence on 105

378

Araujo, Manuel E. 98, 103 Arce, Gen. Manuel Jose 89, 91 Arellano, Richard G. 190-1 ARENA 283, 292-3, 295-7, 313;& ORDEN 293 Argentina 31, 331 army reserve (El Sal.), role of 205, 208 Arrupe, SJ, Fr. Pedro 186 assassination: US army documents on 24, 27, 43-7 See also counter-insurgency doctrine, US; & counter-terror concept ATACES 157 Atlacatl Rapid Response Battalion 307-10, 335 Avalos, Dr Ramon 260, 262, 273 Avila Avila, Capt. Eduardo Ernesto 281-3 Azmi’tia, Gen. 169 Bailey, Lawrence 305-6, 344-5 Barahona, Fr. Rafael 179 Barrera, Fr. Ernesto 194 Barrios, Gerardo 91 Bay of Pigs 10, 14, 21 berufsverbot, employment restrictions in Pan-American Union proposals 7; intelligence application 70; & US McCarran Act 7n Blandon, Col. Adolfo 314, 320 “Bomb School”, See Border Patrol Academy, US Border Patrol Academy, US 59-61; & Salvadoreans at 215 Bowdler, William 246, 252, 272 BPR 157, 178-9, 186-7, 254-6, 266, 304 Brazil: arms trade with El Sal. 329; Public Safety Program 63-4 Brodeur, Cdr. V.G. 100, 102, 110-1, 113, 115-6 Browning, David 96, 153 Bustamante Maceo, Col. Gregorio 112, 120 Bustillos, Col. Rafael 314-5, 321 Cabanas province: agrarian reform 316; clearance operations 306-8 Calderon, Gen. Jose Tomas 115-8, 128-9 Calvo, Col. Tito 130 canton patrols: & army reservists 124; & ORDEN 205-8; origin 98; reactiva¬ tion 123; regulations 123-4; & US intelligence 124 Caritas Clubs 156 Carranza, Col. Nicolas: & ANSESAL 221-2, 246-51, 272-4, 352-3; & CIA 221n, 352-3 Carrera, Gen. Rafael 89-90

Index Carter, Jimmy: arms airlift 286-8, 331-3; human rights policy 187-92, 287, 329-33;& military advisers 278, 286-8, 331-2, 335; & military security assist¬ ance 275, 278, 286, 312, 329-33, 350; & “non-lethal” assistance 330-1 Casanova, Col. Oscar Eduardo 352 Castaneda Castro, Gen. Salvador 127 CAS, as acronym for CIA 23n, 202, 205 See also CIA CDHES 302 Cedulas de vecindad See identity card systems censorship & US media 288-91, 297-8, 312-3 Central America and Panama Security Telecommunications Network 67, 204 Central American Bank for Economic Integration 151 Central American Common Market 151 Central American University Simeon Caiias 178, 250,295 Central American Workers Federation 104 Central Electoral Commission 165, 168 Central Security Corps, El Sal. 97 See also political police, El Sal. Centro Regional de Telecomunicaciones (Guat.) See Regional Telecommunica¬ tions Centre “Centralia” 42, 44 CGTS 135 Chalatenango 306-9 Chavez y Gonzalez, Archbishop Luis 175, 180, 185 Chile 121-2, 331 China 40-1 Christian Democratic Party 156, 158-60, 162-3, 165-6, 168-70, 176, 194, 247-51, 258-60, 272, 292-6; schism 261,277 church, evangelical 309 See also Roman Catholic CIA: as CAS 23n, 202, 205; & Costa Rica 62; covert actions 13-15; in Ecuador 70;&E1 Sal. 61-2, 202-3, 221n, 290, 350-3;& Guat. 61-2; & international terrorists 344; National Intelligence Estimate 298; & Public Safety Program 54-72, 202-3; & security assistance role 57-63, 71-2; Special Operations Division 45; & US Army Special Forces 25-6; & US security assistance 54-72 CITE A 220 Civic Action 32-3, 207; & Operation Wellbeing 320-5; in Vietnam 49, 322-3

Civic Affairs Intelligence Center, Section Five 221-2 Civil Defense patrols 254, 317-8, 321-3, 325;& ORDEN 325, 340-3 Civic Guard(s): El Sal. 117-20, 123; Vietnam 25 See also Regional Forces civil war: & insurgency 30, 287 Civil-Military Directorate 136-7, 149 CIDG, Vietnam 24-6, 342 Claramount Rozeville, Col. Ernesto 182-4 Clarke, Sr. Maura 275-81, 284 clergy: attacks on 91, 157, 176-81, 185-7, 192-5, 304-5; & human rights 173, 176-81, 185-7 CNI 220 CNT51 coffee culture: & communications infra¬ structure 103;& cotton culture 152-4; & Indian lands, expropriation 94-7; labour requirements 95-8; police development 95-8 Colby, William E. 26, 46-7, 71-2, 323-4 Colombia 16, 23-4, 42 colonos: defined 153;dispossession of 153 Committee of Mothers of Political Prisoners 256 Communism: anti-communist legislation 121-2, 135, 152, 158, 193-4; Central American perception 10-11; fear of 99, 102, 114-5, 200; & political war¬ fare 29 Communist Party (El Sal.) 104-5, 108-9, 114, 134-5, 157, 163, 171 “Communist Revolution” See peasant revolts (El Sal.) 1931-32 community policing 92-3 CONDECA 10, 31-2, 192 CONELCA company 251, 257 Confederation of Salvadorean Workers 200 Conference of Intelligence Officers'of the Americas 192 Conference of American Armies 10, 192 conservatism 89-91 Constituent Assembly 283-4 COPEFA 257, 260, 272 COPREFA 284-5, 293 CORDS 27,45-50, 321-5 Costa Rica: & CIA 62; & Salvadorean terrorism 281-2; Security Agency 62; US Ambassadors’ meeting 245-6; US military assistance costs 326 cotton culture 152-4, 321-2 Council on Public Order 119 counter-guerrilla organization, see counter¬ organization concept counter-insurgency doctrine: British 135;

379

The American Connection: Voll El Sal.: counter-organization concept 66-7, 209-14, 318-9; counter-propa¬ ganda 213-4; counter-terror 209-10, 212-4, 318-9; paramilitary organiza¬ tion 66-7, 209-14, 318-9; psychological warfare 66n;& US doctrine 209-10, 317-9;& rural intelligence networks 66-7; & traditional military profession¬ alism 209-10; French 35-6; Guat. 210; US: assassination in 24, 27, 45; counter¬ organization concept 23-7, 33-8, 66-7, 210; defining the enemy 28-32, 50-3; & development 13, 16-17, 32-3, 49 See also Civic Action; elites 34-6, 50-3; & ethnic minorities 24, 26, 34;genocide 42; global conflict 29-30; & human rights 37-40; pohtical warfare concepts 29; & language 25; & military profession¬ alism 209-10; operational phases 24-5, 322; scope 28; terrorism as technique 23-4, 27, 30, 29-53 counter-intelligence 58 counter-organization concept: El Sal. army’s doctrine 66-7, 209-14, 318-9; implementation, El Sal. 204-22, 317-22, 325, 337, 340-3; intelligence function 66-7, 212, 218-20, 317-8; in Nicaragua 43; & MTTs 22-3; & US Army Special Forces 22-7, 33; in US counter-insur¬ gency doctrine 23-7, 33-8, 66-7, 210 counter-terror concept: Chalmers Johnson, & Col. John Webber on 39-41; in El Sal. 175-6, 212-14, 305-6, 317-19; French experience 40;in Guat. 44; Japanese experience 40-1; targetting 45-53, 66-70, 318-19; in US counter-insurgency doctrine 22-3, 30, 32, 39-53; account¬ ability, evasion of 43-4, 49-50; & Colombia 23-4, 42; concept, defined 30/discussed 39-53; formula for “death-squads” 22-3; & genocide 42; & guerrillas, impersonation of 44; & Vietnam 24, 27, 35, 43-50, 69, 322-5; World War II experience 30 coups d’etat, El Sal. 1931: 103, 106-7, 121; 1944: 121, 129-30; 1948: 132-4; 1960: 149, 199-200, 245, 251-2; 1961: 149, 199;1972: 169-72; 1979: 149, 221, 245-50 CRM: foundation 261-2;general strike (1980) 262,287 Cuba(n): Revolution, influence of 11, 199-200, 245;& US allegations 286-91, 312-3; exile groups, & US intelligence 344 Cuscatlan Battalion 336

380

(Customs Police 198; intelligence role 219; US assistance 216 Dada, Hector 251, 260-1, 265 D’Aubuisson, Roberto 218, 221-2; & assassination of Archbishop Romero 272-3; & COPREFA 284-5; & “death squads” 260, 262, 272-4, 352; election to Constituent Assembly 283, 291-7; & Finca San Luis 272-3; & napalm 292; role in ANSESAL 218, 221 ;& ANSESAL reorganization 221-2, 272; visit to Capitol Hill 283 “death squads” 317; ANSESAL & targetting for 221-2, 352; defined 301; army’s direction 229-302; & accountability, evasion of 22-3, 49-50, 313-4; & “nonlethal” security assistance 330; organi¬ zation 218-9; & resistance, precipitation 31-2; in Salvadorean army doctrine 213-4 “death lists” 70, 284-5 See also counter¬ terror; targetting Defense Assistance Agency, US 335 Defense Attaches, US 327 demonstrations: in counter-insurgency doctrine 30-1, 194-201, 262, 287; in El Sal. 131, 173-4, 183-4, 194-201, 262, 264, 287; & political change 131, 135-7, 173-4, 183-4, 254-7, 260, 262, 264-5 Denaux, Fr. Guillermo 179-80 Department of State, US 187-94; & human rights 279, 303-4, 341-2; & Salvadorean army no-prisoner policy 346 Department of Defense, US, police assist¬ ance role 63 Derian, Patricia 190-1 Devine, Frank A. 245-6 DINA (Chile) 69 dirty warfare See Special Warfare “disappearances”, El Sal., & July 1975 massacre 173-4; Investigating Commis¬ sion 252-4 ■, & New York Times 1937 128; US citizens 190-1 Dissent Paper 331-4; on US censorship role in El Sal. 313; on US mercenaries 343-4; on US public relations & state terror 312-3 Dominican Republic 327; Public Safety Program 64 Donovan,Jean 276-81, 284 DRU-PM 265 Drug Enforcement Administration, US 71-2 Duarte, Jose' Napoleon 158, 165-6, 170, 260, 271, 274, 277-8, 291-3, 296

Index economic reform, US proposals: in El Sal.; & Alliance for Progress 149-53; & Carter administration 252, 266-71; & military solutions 275, 314-5, 320-1, 332-4; in Guat.: 17-8 Economic Support Funds Program (ESF) 333 Ecuador: & CIA 70; Public Safety Program 63-4; & Special Group (Cl) 16 educational reform, Guat.: & US view of 17 El Rosario Church 255-6 El Zapote Fort 121, 169, 220 elections, El Sal.: Constituent Assembly, 1982: 283-4, 291-8, 320; coercion 293-5; fraud 293-5; exclusion of opposition 293-4, 297;FDR-FMLN position 293-4. Municipal and legisla¬ tive: 1932: 106-S-,1964: 158;7972: 168-9;1974: 181;i976: 181. Presidential: 1931: 104-6;7967: 209; 7972; 161, 165, 168-9, 196;& coup (1972) 170;fraud 168;7977: 177, 181-6; fraud 182-3, 190/protests & mass executions 183-7/US congressional hearings 183-4; 7 952: 245 Enders, Thomas 296, 309 ERP 171-2, 182, 255 Estudios Centroamericanos 162, 257 Extemado San Jose'; massacre, FDR leaders 266 FA LANGE (El Sal.) 174-6, 178 5ee also “death squads” FAN 262, 272-3 FAPU 174, 186-7, 247, 254-6, 266 FARO 100, 178-80 Fascism, European: & Central American leaders 4-5; & El Sal.: black-shirt mihtia 128-9; & Civic Guard & Nicara¬ gua, “Blue Shirts” 5n FBI(US) 62-3, 72, 279, 282, 344 FDR 265, 274, 297 FECCAS 156-7, 172-4, 178-9, 185-7, 193 FENESTRAS 174, 176, 255 Fiallos, Capt. Ricardo Alejandro 300-1, 343 Figueroa, Col. Servio Tulio 300 Finca San Luis incident 272-4, 281 Flores Lima, Col. Rafael 274, 316 FMLN: foundation 265, 295, 297-8; general strike (1981) 297-8; offensive (1981) 286-7, 309, 331; prisoners of 346 Forche', Carolyn 251, 258 Ford, Sr. Ita 275-81, 284

Ford Foundation 15 Foreign Assistance Act, US 333-4; & police assistance 70-1 FMS 328, 331,333 Foro Popular (Popular Forum) 247, 250, 255-6 Fort Benning 337-8 Fort Bragg 20, 336, 338 Fort Gulick 335, 339 FPL 171, 260, 297 Fraser, Donald 188, 191 Freedom of Information Act 338 freedom of movement, restrictions: in El Sal.; internal passports, 122-3; by US 7, 203-4 FRTS 104-5, 114 FSLN 247 FUDI 162, 166-7, 181 FUSS 174, 176, 257 Garay, Gen. Fidel Cristino 120, 128, 130 Garci'a, Col. Jose Guillermo 247-52, 258 272-5, 277, 296, 300, 308, 313, & ANTEL 177, 247; & “death-squads” 352; as Minister of Defense 248-51, 262; ousted 313-15; & October 1979 coup 246-51 ;& reformists 272-5, 277 Geneva Conventions 339-50 genocide, as mass counter-terror 42; & 1932 massacre 112, 114-5 Gomez, Leonel 280, 301-2, 346 Gomez Gonzalez, Santiago 282 Grande, Fr. Rutilio, SJ, 180-1, 185 Graves, Gen. Ernest 335 Greece 8, 37-8 Green Berets See US Army Special Forces Grenada 290 Guatemala: counter-terror targetting 51; “death-squads” 175-6; MTT, 1962 23; paramilitary organization 318, 341, 345; Salvadorean elites in 270; & Special Group (Cl) 16-17; & US: air power 349; military assistance 326; Zacapa campaign 111 See also intelli¬ gence systems; Guat. Guerra y Guerra, Col. Rene 247, 249 guerrilla movement 163, 171-2, 182, 187, 286-91, 293-4, 297-8; army perception of “masses” & 310-11 See also under name of each group guerrillas, impersonation of 44 Gutierrez, Col. Jaime Abdul 247-51, 272-5, 277, 287, 316; & ANSESAL 221-2; & ANTEL 247, 251; & coup 1979 247-51, 316; & reformists 272-5, 277; on strike action as war 287 Guzman Aguilar, Gen. Carlos 66-7

381

The American Connection: Voll Haig, Alexander 291, 332-3 Hamlet Evaluation System 324-5 Hammer, Michael 279-84 Hardin, Herbert O. 197-200, 202-3 Harkin, Thomas 309, 311 Hernandez, Maj. Gustavo AtiUo 211 Hinton, Dean 271, 296-7 Honduras: migration to 153-5, 164; miUtarization, border area 347-8; raid, refugee camps 315; refugees seen as guerrillas 310, 314, 348; Sumpul River massacre 306; US air power 349; US military assistance & Civil Defense groups 341; US training of Salvadoreans 336; US military advisers 348; & war with El Sal. 150, 154-5, 161, 164, 182, 208, 218; in White Paper 288 House Foreign Affairs Committee 334, 346 House Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs 301 human rights, El Sal.: & US military assist¬ ance/7 94J 511970s 187-9311980s 329-33, 337-40; & 1979 junta 249-50; & military reformists 252-4; prohibition on reporting 194; & Romero’s over¬ throw 187-95; & US/citizens 187-92, 276-7, 331/foreign poUcy 5, 187-93, 287, 329-33/Intemal Defense & Development doctrine 337-40/ suspension of Public Safety Program 70-3 IDAD 320, 329, 337-8 See also counter¬ insurgency doctrine, US IDB & US human rights policy 189, 192-3, 329 identity card systems, El Sal. 122-3, 351 Ilopango airport raid 34 IMET 326, 330-1, 333-4 Immigration Police: & Public Safety Program 198; intelligence function 61, 203, 217, 219; “look out” list 276; US assistance 61, 203-4, 216-7 Indians, El Sal.: & caste war 112, 114-5; communal land/tenure 91/expropria¬ tion 94-7; communism, fear of 114-5; & genocide 112-3, 115; revolts 90n, 99-103, 108-16 See also peasant revolts INSAFI 151, 177, 246 Institute for Policy Studies 349 insurgency: in US doctrine 14, 30; & demonstrations 30-1, 194-301, 262, 287; as foreign intervention 210, 212; levee en masse 52-3; as strike action

382

30-1, 51, 200 Intelligence: communications & 64-9; covert operations 59-61, 67, 68-70; data collection and processing 64, 68-70; & US congressional hearings 64; detection function 64, 68-70; paramilitary organization & 66-7, 210, 318-9; police role 54-7; & US Military Groups 335, 349; screening for population control 48; sharing 10, 67; targetting 47-9, 67-70; & voter registration lists 108, 144, 351 See also individual intelligence & security agency Intelligence system, El Sal.: data bases 218-33, 351-2; military control 218-22; paramilitary organization & 204-8, 212, 218-20, 317-20; Presidential agencies 57,61, 204-6, 217-22; screening 48, 205, 218; US assistance 57, 61-2, 201-2, 215-8, 221n, 349-53 Intelligence system, Guat.: Presidential agencies 57, 61-2, 67, 69; screening procedures 48; US assistance 18, 61-2, 57-70; & Internal Defense Plan 17-8 Intelligence system, US: covert action: pre-1960 12/as military function 15; US presidential supervisory committees 15 See also CIA; US Army Special Forces Inter-American Bank for Rural Develop¬ ment, & US human rights policy 329 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 181, 191-3, 253; discovers secret cells 217 Inter-American Defense Board 5, 10, 193 Inter-American Defense College 29, 193 Inter-American Police Academy 201 Internal Defense, defined 15 Internal Defense Plans 15, 17-8 Internal Security Board, El Sal. 202 International Commission of Jurists 194 International Committee of the Red Cross 346 International Cooperation Administration 18, 66; National Police, survey of (El Sal.) 197-8 International Police Academy 55-6, 59-61, 201, 215; torture training allegations 70n; Sal. graduates 215-6, 218 International Red Aid 104 irregular forces, see counter-organization concept; paramilitary organization irregular warfare 33-4; in Sal. army doctrine 211 See also counter-insurgency doctrine Israel: arms trade 329;officer training 316

Index LYNX Lists 69-70 ISTA 177, 271, 279-80 Italian army, assistance 4 Jamaica, Public Safety Program 65 Japan: as counter-insurgency model 30; kidnapping 187 Jesuit Order 171, 178, 180-1; death threats to 185-7, 191, 193 Jimenez Vega, Rodolfo 182, 217 Johnson, Chalmers A. 39-41 Kaibiles 34 Kazel, Sr. Dorothy 276-81,284 Kennedy, John F. 12-15 Komer, Robert W. 45-6 Kwitny, Jonathan 288-90 La Cayetana, massacre 172-3 labour: & agricultural workers 152, 162-3; controlling, rural 92-4, 95-8, 124-6; code, El Sal. 152, 162; levies 92-4; minimum wage 254; organization 7, 104-5; self-help associations 150, 156, 165 See also names of labour organizations Labour Party, El Sal. 114 land tenure, El Sal.: communal/corporate systems 91; state intervention 94-7 land-to-the-tiller programme 267-9 Langguth, A. 60-1 Latin America, foreign ministers’ meetings 3-4 Latin American Conference of Bishops, Medellin 1968 155-6 law: Defense of the Democratic and Constitutional Order 135; Defense and Guarantee of Public Order and Security 193-4; Drainage and Irrigation 162; Industrial Promotion 151; Land Warfare 339-40 Lempa River massacres 32, 306-7; & US combat advisers 347 Lemus, Col. Jose Maria 133-7, 149-50, 196-9, 200, 245, 252, 262 liberalism 89-91 liberation theology 150, 154-6, 161, 163 Llanos, Gen. Armando 120-1 local government: alcaldes labour obliga¬ tions 92-3; elections & 1931-2 peasant revolt 106-8; colonial 90-\\conegidores in 92-3; identity card systems 122-3; Indian communities 92; law enforcement role 91, 92;municipio as basis 90-4 Lopez Sibrian, Lt. Rodolfo Isidro 281-3 Lozano, Ignacio E. 178, 188-92, 327-8 LP-28 186, 247, 254-6

Magana, Alvaro 296 Majano, Col. Adolfo 247-50, 257, 272-4, 280, 283, 293,300,316;& Finca San Luis 272-3; dropped from Junta 277 Majors’ Coup 132-4 Marines, US 305, 344 Marmol, Miguel 107-9, 112, 119, 120, 123,127 Marti", Farabundo 110 Martinez, Ana Guadalupe 182, 217 Martinez, Gen. Maximiliano Hernandez 3-4, 103, 106-8, 117-30, 175; Axis links 4; agrarian reform gestures 152; black-shirt militia 4, 129; Civic Guard 117-20; relations with army 127; failed coup 129-30; fund raising 119; as Minister of War 103, 106-7; & Pro-Patria Party 128-9; resignation 130; & 1930s’ security system 108, 117-30; US military intelligence on 4, 117-8, 121-4, 129 Maryknoll Order 171, 275-81, 284 Massacre, 1932: 99-103, 108-16, as genocide 114-6, British Consul on 101, 109, 111-2, Canadian Naval officer on 100, 102, 111, 113, 115-6, as caste war 112, 114-5, execution of suspect troops 119-20, Gen. Jose' Tomas Calderon on 115-6, Miguel Marmol on 100, 112-4, as model for 1980s 99-100, preparations for 108-10, at San Salvador Cathedral 195 Mayorga Quiros, Roman 250, 260 Medrano, Gen. Jose Alberto 162, 167, 204-8, 218, 258 Mena Sandoval, Capt. Juan Francisco 299-300 Me'ndez, Joaqui'n 111-2 Melendez, Jorge 103-6 Mene'ndez, Gen. Andres 130-2 Menendez, Col. Ascencio 127 Menjivar, Dr Rafael 171 Meo 34 mercenaries 305-6, 342-5 Merino, Col. Juan F., US military intelli¬ gence on 4 military, El Sal.: aircraft 329, 332-5, 348-9; rejection of civilian militias 129, 131-2, 197, 209; budgets 120, 127-8; canton patrol system 98; casualty figures 337; desertions 337; force levels 127, 214, 337, 340; General Staff 98, 220-2, 319; institutional interests & coups 103, 106-7, 129-30, 1324, 136, 248-50,

383

The American Connection: Voll 257-9, 272-4; nationalization 91-8; officers in security services 198; origins 90-1; police function 299-302; prestige factor in coups 136; professionalism, concepts 91, 209-10; purges 121, 182, 257-9, 272-5, 277; rehabilitations 273-4; reserve system 98; rivalry with security services 120, 127-33, 169-70;& state terror 217-22, 299-302, 2>S2\tanda system 132, 246-7, 300; training establishments 4-5, 91, 210, 220, 257; US military intelligence assesses 127-8; & US military programmes 201-2, 209-10, 278, 286-8, 326-51 See also US Military Assistance Program, El Sal.; coups d’etat; counter-insurgency doctrine, El Sal. military academy (El Sal.) 3, 5, 91, 247, 257 military missions, El Sal.: French 91; German 4; US 5, 189-90, 192, 314 military professionalism, models 91, 209 Military Youth Movement, El Sal. 247, 252, 258-9 militias, El Sal.: 90, 93, 129, 131-2, 197, 209, 342; & army, pre-1960s 129, 131-2, 197, 209; & Civil Defense patrols 322, 340-2; & civilian irregular forces 342; & Operation Wellbeing 322, 340-3 see also counter-organization, El Sal.;ORDEN MNR 247-51, 265 Molina, Col. Arturo Armando 168, 170-90, 192, 219, 267, 272; & US human rights policy 187-91 Monge, Maj. Roberto 211-4 Montagnards 26 Monterrosa, Lt.-Col. Domingo 309-11 Morales Erlich, Antonio 260-1, 274 Moran, Maj. Denis 281-3 Morazan Department, clearance operations 306-9 Morse, Wayne 326-7 Mozote massacre 302-3, 308-9 MPSC, founding of 261, 265 MRC 157 MTTs, US military: in Colombia 23-4, 42; counter-organization role 20-4; in El Sal. 201-2, 210, 328, 330-2; in Guat. 18, 23; in Eatin America 20-4; regula¬ tions 21 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreements (US) 9 narcotics, US police assistance 72, 216

384

National Campaign Plan (El Sal.) 340 National Guard, El Sal.: 97-8, 108, 120-6, 159, 163, 167, 169-70, 172-3, 179, 183, 193, 255; & army 120, 127-8; canton patrols 123; Department of Special Investigations 205-6, 217, 219; force levels 1932 120; function 97; murder of US citizens 276, 284, 352; & ORDEN command structure 207; & private employers 220; Public Safety Program assessment 197, 215-17; secret cells 217; small arms 328; torture equipment 217; US assistance 197, 201-9, 215-8; & war with Honduras 208, 218 National Guard (Nicaragua) 343 National Police, El Sal. 93-4, 97-8, 114, 121-6, 130, 163, 169, 183, 194, 328; Department of Criminal Investigations 204, 215-7; Department of Special Investigations 205-6, 215-7; & 1932 massacre 114; role in 1944 revolt 130; US assistance 201, 203-6, 215-7 National Security Council (US) 290, 344, 348 National Training Centre (Sal. Army) 336 National University of El Sal. 168, 171; massacre at 173-4, 135-6 Nicaragua: anti-Communist legislation 4; & Bay of Pigs 10; civilian irregulars (1930s) 43; Marines (US) 3, 43; revolution 31-2, 51-2, 245-8, 262; & US Military Group 327; & Puerto Cabezas airport 290/support for terrorism 344 NSAM:Wo. 124 14;7Vo. 162 \%\No. 341 14n;Wo. 56 34n, 54n;Wo. 132 54n; No. 114 54n;Wo. 146 54n Ochoa, Lt.-Col. Sigfrido 307, 313-19 official parties (El Sal.) 134-5, 158, 160-5 Oliver, Covey T. 63-4 Operacion Bienestar para San Vicente, See Operation Wellbeing Operation Phoenix 27, 44-50, 69; assessed 323-5 Operation Wellbeing 320-3; & agro-industrial production 322; & US advisory levels 322-3, 325 ORDEN 34, 38, 66-7, 172-3, 181, 183, 186-7, 192, 204-9, 218-21, 250, 253-4, 256, 293, 299, 317-8, 337; & agrarian reform 270; & ARENA 293; & civic action 207; & Civil Defense groups 317-8, 325, 337, 340-5; as counter¬ organization 212; as “death-squad”

Index

207; dissolution, ostensible 250, 253-4; ideology & political organization 206-7; recruitment 205-8; & Red League & Civic Guard 118-9; staffing 253 Organization of American States (OAS) 10, 151,312 Osorio, Col. Oscar 133-5, 152 Pan-American Union 3-4, 6-7 Panama 330-1, 336-7 paramilitary organizations: accountability, evasion of 43-4; army’s attitude to 129-32; bases for 34-6; & Civil Defense patrols 317-9, 321-2; discretionary powers 212-3; & elites 117-20, 123; in El Sal. 317-9, 321-2, 340-5/military control 36-7, 66/motivation 34-8, 212-3; screening 37/state terror, as executors of 27; US: & Army Special Forces 22-7, 33/assessment of assets 34/training 54-5 in Vietnam 7, 24, 318-9 322-5 PCN 131,’ 158, 160-5, 167-70, 177, 181-3, 187, 192, 206, 283, 293,295 Pearlman, Mark 279-84 peasants (El Sal.): coffee culture 94-7; cotton culture 152-4; labour organiza¬ tions 162-4; self-help associations 150, 156, 165; subsistence farming 94-7; wage levels 101-2, 106 peasant revolts (El Sal.) 90-1, 101-3; of 1931-2 99-116 5ee also massacre of 1932 Plaza Libertad 131, 183-4 Police Assistance, Ad Hoc Interdepart¬ mental Committee on 54-8, 62-3 police: community concept 92-3;economic structures & development 94-8; intelligence function 55-7, 63-9; role in counter-insurgency 54-7, 63-9; in El Sal.: 90-8, 121-8, 197-8, 201-4; & alienation of Indian lands 91, 94-7; army domination 198; arrests, statis¬ tics 124; function: at independence 90/in 19th century 92-3; 19th century: urban 95, 97-8/rural 95 See also: Public Safety Program; vagrancy laws; & separate police institutions political pohce: defined 56-7; in El Sal. 97, 128, 168, 203 See also : separate intelhgence agencies political prisoners, El Sal.: amnesty 136/ demand for 250; Investigating Com¬ mission 252-3; secret cells 182, 217 political warfare: defined 12, 29;Taiwan¬ ese trainine 316 See also counter¬

insurgency doctrine popular organizations (El Sal.): origins 172-4;& elections 182, 186-7, 193-5, 200; October 1979 coup 247, 254-7, 261-6 See also separate organizations population control 350-1 prisoners-of-war (El Sal.) statistics 346 Pro-Patria Party 128-9, 160; black-shirt militia 128-9; US intelhgence on 129 Prosterman, Roy 267-9, 279 PRTC 265 PRUs46-7 PRUD 134, 160 psychological warfare 44n, 66n Public Safety Program: 18, 54-72, 197-8, 201-4, 209-18; & AID 18, 54-60, 63, 70; CIA, role 57-63, 71-2; FBI, role 62-3; human rights 70-2; US army advisers, role 63;in El Sal: 197-8, 201-4, 209-10, 214-8; communications assistance 201-4; intelligence assistance 192, 203-6; bomb manufacture training 59-61, 215; security system survey (1960): 197-200, 202-3/7974 214-7 PUD 131 Reagan, Ronald 275, 278, 282, 286, 288, 297, 303, 332-4 Red League (Liga Roja) 105, 118, 207n, 209 refugees: in Honduras 310, 314-5, 348; massacre of 306-9, 347 Regalado Duehas, Ernesto 166-8, 170 Regional Telecommunications Centre (Guat.) 67, 69 Revolution of 1948 1324 Revolutionary Junta of Government, October 1979 proclamations 248-50 Rey Prendes, Adolfo 261, 293 Richardson, Ronald James 188-91 Rios Montt, Gen. Efrain 315 Rivera, Col. Julio Adalberto 149-52, 158, 162-3, 204 RN 187 Rodriguez, Col. Benedicto 183 Rodgers, Consul A.J., on revolt, Juayua lll-3;on impending revolts 109-10 Rodriguez, Maj. Manuel Alfonso on counter-organization 211-2 Rogers, WiUiam 277 Roman Catholic Church: & social justice 150, 154-6, 161-3, 176-81, 250; persecution of 91, 180, 275-84, 304-5; US churchwomen, murder of 275-9, 284,320,352 Romero, Carlos Humberto, chief of general

385

The American Connection: Voll staff lb9; Minister of Defense 171, 177;overthrow 245-50, 252, 257, 273-4, 316; as president 183, 186=95; & US human rights policy 190-3; US training of 192 Romero, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo, assassination 262-4, 272-3, 281, 296; funeral, massacre at 260, 264-5; letter to Carter 330; on persecution of the church 180, 185, 193; soldiers sermon 263-4 Romero Bosque, Pio 103-4 Salaverria family 167 Salazar Mena, Maj. Fernando 343 Salvadorean Civic Association 118 Salvadorean Coffee Board 246 Salvadorean Episcopal Conference 155 Salvadorean Intelligence Agency 205-6, 217 Samayoa, Salvador 259-60 San Antonio Abad massacre 311-12 San Carlos Fort 204, 248 San Miguel, Department of: agrarian reform proposals 1976 111 San Vicente, pacification plan 321-5 See also Operation Wellbeing Sanchez, Hernirdez, Col. Fidel 155, 158, 162, 166-70, 172, 192, 206, 221, 267 Santibahez, Col. Roberto Eulalio 221; on CIA role in ANSESAL 352-3; on “death-squad” victims selection 352 School of the Americas, US Army 192, 339 Security Service: El Sal. 204-6, 219;Guat. 62 Senate Foreign Relations Committee 271, 295-6, 335, 338 Shultz, Richard H. Jr. 26, 324 SIE 205-6, 215-7, 219 See also National Guard, National Police SNI (El Sal.) 217-9 Socorro Juridico (Legal Aid): foundation 180; government killings, statistics 266, 270, 292, 3024, 307 social mobilization & state terror 49-53, 164, 192-5 Somoza Debayle, Anastasio 245, 247-8, 289-90, 343 Somoza Garcia, Anastasio 4; Blue Shirts militia 5n; trade with Japan 5n Sonsonate: army disaffection in 1932 massacre 119; elections, suspension of 108; revolt 110-4 Soviet Union, & El Sal., US allegations 288-90 Special Forces, US Army: counter-terror, concept 23-4, 27; in El Sal. 328, 335-40,

345, 348; & “guerrilla” forces 22; human rights training 337-40; & Latin American Special Action Force 21-2; & mercenaries 337-40; & state terrorism 23-7; Vietnam, role in 24 Special Group, Counter-Insurgency (US): Internal Defense Plans & 15-18; & Latin America, assessment of 16-7; origin & charter 14; predecessors 15; special “cognizance” 16 Special Warfare 12 Special Warfare School, US Army 20 state terror: agent of social mobilization 31-2, 40-1, 192-5, 245, 254-7, 287; & authoritarian regimes 56;in El Sal.: accountability, evasion of 22-3, 43-4, 49-50, 213-4, 313;army’s role 299-302; escalation (1978) 194-5; interrogation 33940; & mercenaries 342-5; & military discipline 300, 304; policy 299-300, 305-6; & social mobilization 164, 192-5; targetting: guerrilla “masses” 310-11/for political murder 275-84, 304-13, 351-3/US citizens 275-84; US public relations role 279, 301, 312-3; victims: mutilation 103, 203/occupational breakdown 305 See also counter-insurgency doctrine, US;& counter-terror, concept Stewart, C. Allan 61-2 strategic hamlets 35 strikes: defined as “war” 262, 287; repression of 254-7, 287, 297-8 subsistence farming 94-7 subversion: in counter-insurgency doctrine 30-1; as foreign intervention 210; in Pan-American Union report 7 Sumpul River, massacres 306 Tactical Intelligence School, El Sal. 350 Taiwan, training in 316 tanda system 132, 246-7, 300 Tardencillas, Orlando 290-1 Taylor, Gen. Maxwell 14, 56 teachers’ strikes (El Sal.) 1968 163, 207; 1971 165-6 Technical Investigations Course, Public Safety Program 59-61; Sal. participation in 215 Third Civil Affairs Detachment, US Army 21 “threat assessment”, El Sal. 199-200 Todman, Terence A. 189-90 Torres, Col. Fidel 208-9 torture (El Sal.): electric shock equipment 217; & execution, as adjunct 339;

Index investigating commission (1979) 252-4; & National Guard interrogation room 182, 217; & political murder 339-40; & US police assistance programmes, suspension 70-1 See also state terror, El Sal. totalitarianism, doctrines, measures to ban 3-4, 6-9 trade unions (El Sal.) political role 1944 \30-J960 135-1 \ 19 7 7-79 1 86-7, 193, 194-5, 200 See also popular organiza¬ tions Treasury Police; assessed by Public Safety Program 198, 215-6 ;& human rights 184,216,316 Treaty of Peace and Amity 1923 129 Tres Calles, massacre 173 Tutela Legal 302-4 Ubico, Gen. Jorge 3-4, 124, 127, 131 UCS 156 UDN 165, 176, 247-51, 256, 266 UGB 178-81, 185-7, 193 unconventional warfare 34 See also counter-insurgency doctrine Ungo, Guillermo 165, 253, 260 Union of Various Trades (El Sal.) 104 United Nations 312 US Caribbean Command See US Southern Command US Army Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg 20 US churchwomen, detention & murder 276-81, 284,331 US economic assistance (El Sal.) 329, 333 US foreign policy: & Alliance for Pro¬ gress 13, 32-3; counter-insurgency doctrine 12-72; & military/security assistance 1945-60 9-11; military intervention pre-World War II 14; Mutual Defense Assistance Agree¬ ments 9; Nicaraguan revolution, influence 245-6; objectives in Latin America pre-1950 3-5; & Pan-American Union 3, 6-7;& President Kennedy 11-15; anti-subversion measures, 1945-60 5-16; War & State Depart¬ ments’ conflict 8-9 on El Sal.: Alliance for Progress 14959; Church, persecution of 178, 187-95; contradictions 275, 314-5, 320-1, 332-3-, coups: 1960 136-7/7967 149-50/ 1979 252; human rights 187-95,245-6, 252, 287, 329-33, 33740; political/ economic reforms 252, 267-9, 273-5, 283, 291, 320-1 ;& state terror 312-3

USIA 246 US military: counter-insurgency units 19-22 (See also Special Forces, US Army); & covert action 10, 14-5; Military Missions, growth of 9; para¬ military resources, development 18-9; political & irregular warfare, doctrine 18-9; training, foreign military 19-22 US military advisers; & combat 346-9; in El Sal.: in combat zones 346-8; & Carter’s actions 286-8, 331-2, 335; force levels 286-8, 332, 346; in Honduras 348; initial proposals 278; Operation Wellbeing 322-3, 325; Reagan, augmentation by 288, 332, 335-7, 346; support, for officers 313-

20 US military assistance programmes for Latin America: budgets 326-7; redirec¬ tion 13-5, 21-2; terms of reference 9 US Military Assistance Program (MAP) (El Sal.): 189-90, 192, 201-2, 209-10, 326-53; aircraft 329, 332-5, 348-9; allocations, March 1981 288; budgets 326-9, 334; commodities 327-35, 348-9; emergency airlift January 1981 286-8; & human rights policy 187-92, 287, 329-33, 337-40; intelli¬ gence 201-2, 349-53; “non -lethal” 330-2; opinion forming campaign, 1981 288-91, 298; propaganda 298; slain US churchwomen 276-7, 331; training 201-2, 326-42 See also US military advisers, El Sal. US Military Group (El Sal.): 189-90, 192, 314; intelligence role 335, 349; & military hosts 327-8 Latin America: concealed budget 326-7 US Southern Command 22, 67-8, 338 UNO 165-6, 168-70, 181-8 UNT 174 Ursuline Order 276-81, 284 Uruguay 314, 331; Public Safety Program 65 Usulutan, Department of: agrarian reform proposals (1976) 177; pacification plan 321-5 UTC 157, 172-3, 185-7 vagrancy laws 92-3, 95, 124; in Agrarian Code 125-6 Vaky, Viron 246, 252 Vance, Cyrus, US Secretary of State: & Richardson case 189;& US human rights policy (El Sal.) 188-92 Velutini, Capt. Juan F. 97-8

387 /

The American Connection: Voll Venezuela 170, 292; & Special Group 16 Vides Casanova, Col. Carlos Eugenio: Minister of Defense 314, 321; & “death-squads” 352; Director of National Guard 246-7, 300, 314; ex-president, ANTED 177 Viera, Rodolfo 279-84, 301 Vietnam: 329-30, 335, 340, 342; CORDS & Phoenix programmes 322-5; US propaganda: & elections (1967) 298/ & Tet offensive 298 Villacorta, Jorge 270-1 voter registration system (El Sal.) 351 Wagglestein, Col. John D. 307, 314 War Powers Act, US 346 Webber, Col. John 40 Weinberger, Caspar 334 Westmoreland, Gen. William 57 White, Alastair 159-61 White Paper (US) (El Sal.) 288-9 White, Robert 271-4, 216-9, 283-4, 286, 289, 296, 316, 346 World War II & Central America 3 Wright, Dave 61-2 Yarborough, Gen. William, Commander, Special Warfare Center 23-4, 42 Zamora, Mario, assassination 260 Zamora, Ruben 251, 260-1, 265

CONTEMPORARY HISTORY • HUMAN RIGHTS

THE AMERICAN CONNECTION

Volume One: State Terror and Popular Resistance In El Salvador MICHAEL McCLINTOCK These two volumes draw extensively on previously restricted United States government documents to reveal the part played by the U.S. in initiating counter-insurgency and new strategies of state terror in Central America. With the Reagan Administration's determination to continue financing and supporting the war in El Salvador as well as its destabilization of Nicaragua, Michael McClintock's work is essential for understanding these interventions. Focusing in particularon El Salvador and Guatemala, the authortraces the history of these countries' brutal state security apparatuses from theirorigins in Spanish colonialtimes, through their continual suppression ofthe peasant rebellions provoked by their highly distorted class structures and landownership patterns. He demonstrates, with impeccable documentation, howthe U.S.'s preferenceforsupporting the status quo as a bulwark against what it perceives as a Communist threat, and its consequent refusal to tolerate social reform, have not only accelerated these conflicts and converted the civilian population into the enemy, but inextricably have enmeshed the U.S. itself in more and more directways. The relevance of Michael McClintock's analysis of U.S. support and military and intelligence assistance for repressive and reactionary regimes goes well beyond Central America, and extends to all those areas ofthe Third World where the U.S. has chosen to defend its interests in ways that ultimately excite violent popular opposition and carry a heavy cost in terms ofthe violation of human rights. The author, Michael McClintock, is a seniorstaff member of Amnesty International's Research Division, and has spent several years on this investigation. ISBN Hb 086232240 5 Pb 086232 241 3