When reporting on a nation’s civil war erases the truths of a beautiful people

This is connected to my previous post on Roberto Lovato's recently published book on El Salvador.  It is abundantly true that anti-Salvadoran rhetorical, policy, and political campaigns erase the basic truth of a beautiful people deserving of so much more than what this world has offered.

Thanks to Dr. Gabriella Gutiérrez Muhs for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

When reporting on a nation’s civil war erases the truths of a beautiful people

Roberto Lovato October 1, 2020Updated: October 1, 2020, 10:42 am

News reports of unidentified men in camouflage bearing semiautomatic weapons shooting at BLM protesters or shoving them into unmarked government vans elicit a predictable response in me: My eyes, arms and other body parts sometimes shake involuntarily. The triggers and twitches of El Salvador’s terror taking their toll. Still.

Such memories from my experiences in the Salvadoran Civil War of the ’80s and early ’90s are the reason why, nearly three decades after I first read the phrase “terror is the given of the place,” from Joan Didion’s book “Salvador,” I can still relate to her words.

My  tremors come from the dubious distinction of having been pursued by semiautomatic-bearing Salvadoran escuadrónes de la muerte in El Salvador during the civil war, and in Los Angeles after the war. These paramilitary death squads hunted down those of us fighting the fascist military dictatorship that slaughtered entire towns of women, children and elderly people. I, a curly-haired Salvadoran kid born in San Francisco, had grown fed up with stories of astonishing terror in my parents’ homeland. So I decided to go there and fight the source of the terror: the escuadrónes who, along with the Salvadoran military, were responsible for 85% of the estimated 75,000 to 80,000 deaths during the war, according to the U.N. Truth Commission. I survived, but the terror quakes in me with unpredictable frequency.

At the time of its publication in 1983, the book by my fellow Cal Bear Didion signaled that we Salvadorans had made it: The private world of my parents’ homeland finally entered the public realm of my classrooms. I spent hours in my Berkeley apartment searching for, but not really finding, the deeper meaning of Didion’s using “Exterminate all the brutes!” and other Joseph Conrad quotes, but they sounded deep. “Tattered” didn’t begin to describe my heavily highlighted copy of a book that the Atlantic magazine credited (in bold caps) with telling the world that “EL SALVADOR HAS TRULY BECOME THE HEART OF DARKNESS.” And even though it felt weird doing so, I tried to fit my own Salvadoran experience to the elegant contours of Didion’s words. My efforts failed.

Today, when I read that “terror” phrase — the most oft-quoted phrase about my parents’ homeland (and about Salvadorans, generally) — the writer in me marvels before the luminescent power of words to carry and generate new meaning from, during and beyond the darkest of times.

Sometimes, however, the electricity of words can have a Frankenstein effect, making monsters of an entire people. Sadly, Didion’s writings about us forgot a foundational fact of Salvadoran life: our humanity.

Should there be an American literary canon?

Journalist and author Roberto Lovato in front of Joel Bergner’s 2004 mural “Un Pasado que aún vive,” which is based on stories from the Salvadoran Civil War.Photo: Alexis Terrazas

It took me a few years, but I eventually shook off the hypnotic effect of Didion’s prose. Today, I see her Salvadoran writing as an older, more liberal version of the exoticism informing both news conferences by President Trump and news reports featuring pictures of tattoo-faced Salvadoran mareros, even though these gangs stopped tattooing their faces long ago.

Similarly, the research I did for the Columbia Journalism Review on the reporting of Trump’s child separation policy — one of the biggest news stories of 2018 — found that all of the child separation stories in major media left out Central American experts — lawyers, scholars, nonprofit leaders, journalists — who could have provided a three-dimensional perspective. The only Central Americans in the story were those contained in two-dimensional images of pain and sound bites of suffering and, of course, the Kurtzian terror.

One of my missions as a California writer of Salvadoran descent is to remind English language readers of the tenderness that survives the terror.

I found the title of my book, “Unforgetting,” after reading how Hannah Arendt and other theorists of fascist terror looked to the ancient Greek concept of aletheia (unforgetting) as a way of uncovering important truths lost in dark times. The concept was perfect for the purpose of excavating the Salvadoran heart lost in the darkness of U.S-backed fascist military dictatorships.

Didion concluded that “terror is the given of the place” after spending two weeks in El Salvador. After spending more than 56 years among my Salvadoran friends and family, I concluded that love is also the given of the place — and of the people.

And I didn’t need to travel to El Salvador to understand this. I just had to inhale the ancient spirits of the dominant smell of the many gatherings my parents organized in our crowded San Francisco apartment: the salsa of Mom’s special mix of spices — pepitoria (dried pumpkin seeds), ajonjolí (sesame seeds), chile pasilla, sticks of canela (cinnamon), bay leaves and others — passed down by her ancestors over hundreds of years. Like many Salvadorans who came to San Francisco, the primary hub for Central American migrants to the U.S. in the 1950s, my grandmother, Mama Tey, came aboard a ship. This ship also carried coffee destined for the warehouses and processing plants of Hills Brothers, Folgers and other coffee companies headquartered just a 90-minute drive from where Didion was starting her writing career in her hometown of Sacramento.

Didion’s books about the Golden State make obvious that she inhabited a very different California than the one I was from, a California wholly devoid of Salvadorans and all other Latinos. In my youth, I read Didion looking for Latinos who never materialized. As an adult writer, I read her to remind myself that beautiful style is no excuse for erasing the truths of beautiful peoples.

I have always appreciated Roberto Lovato's critical writings. I'm glad that he's published a book that is about his and his country's past.  We all have much to learn from a history that rarely gets exposure in the popular press. Congratulations, Roberto, on this publication about which I just learned.

-Angela Valenzuela

In ‘Unforgetting,’ Roberto Lovato unearths the secrets of El Salvador’s past

Alexis Terrazas September 1, 2020Updated: September 2, 2020, 10:14 am

Roberto Lovato got his first primer on death inside the catacombs of Paris.

He was 10 years old, on a family vacation to France in 1973, as he and his mother descended into the underground ossuary packed with the bones of more than 6 million Parisians. A tourist attraction open to the public for centuries, the catacombs can remind us of how much history forgets the dead.

“My mom set me up for life,” the San Francisco-born author, 57, says, “by preparing me to learn about death.”

Lovato, the son of Salvadoran immigrants who settled at 25th and Folsom streets in the 1950s, unearths the bones of his own history in his first nonfiction book, “Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas.”

“Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas,” by Roberto Lovato.Photo: Harper

“Unforgetting” was released Tuesday, Sept. 1. Lovato is scheduled to talk about the book with author Myriam Gurba in a virtual event sponsored by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers on Tuesday, Sept. 8.

With the precision of a master seamstress — not unlike that of his paternal grandmother, Mamá Tey, who migrated from El Salvador with the money earned courtesy of her iron Singer sewing machine — Lovato braids a narrative that spans nine decades and weaves together El Salvador’s history of genocide, civil war, revolution and migration with his family’s own.

“It’s not easy,” Lovato says. “You first have to be willing to look at your own secrets, which, in the case of Salvadorans, means going deep into a rabbit hole that involves not just war in the 1980s, but genocide in the 1930s and a graph of consistent violence. … You’re talking about a really intense experience of war and genocide that causes pain not unlike what the Jews feel with the Holocaust.

“But unlike with the Jews in the United States, there’s nothing to commemorate the violence and the genocide perpetrated against Central Americans,” he adds, “because the ‘Nazi’ in the story is not just Salvadoran, but the United States.”

To understand the gang violence that persists in El Salvador today, Lovato directs us toward the history of U.S. involvement in the country. During the Salvadoran Civil War from 1979 to 1992, the U.S. government provided significant military funding and advice to the junta leaders, including training some of its death squads deployed to massacre dissidents. Around 75,000 Salvadorans perished during the war, most at the hands of the Salvadoran government.

Lovato reconnects with his family’s old landlord, now 102, who rented the apartment at 25th and Folsom streets to his family for 40 years.Photo: Alexis Terrazas

And when the U.S. ramped up the deportation of undocumented immigrants after the war ended, members of MS-13, El Salvador’s notorious gang, which was founded in Los Angeles, flooded El Salvador.

The inspiration behind the memoir’s title is aletheia, the ancient Greek word that translates to “unclosedness,” or truth. Lovato wields this concept, not only in an attempt to undo the culture of silencio that loomed heavy in his household growing up — for decades, Lovato’s father, Ramón, refused to unveil his own traumatic past — but also to dispel the oversimplified, violent narrative associated with his parents’ homeland.

In the book, Lovato dives deep into the context for today’s gang violence, traversing firsthand through the mass graves of victims of gangs and civil war, and pulling from his own past as a rebellious Mission District youth to reveal the complexity beneath the monster that is MS-13.

Lovato was never a member of an organized gang, but the run-ins he and his Mission “homies” had with San Francisco police as youths earned him a degree in street psychology and an understanding of what makes gang members tick. In the ’90s, Lovato worked at the Central American Refugee Center in Los Angeles, where many of his clients were MS-13 members and their families.

Lovato stands in front of Joel Bergner’s 2004 mural, “Un Pasado que aún vive,” which is based on stories from the Salvadoran civil war. The mural is one of many in the Mission District’s Balmy Alley.Photo: Alexis Terrazas

“The rhetoric is one thing, and the reality is another,” Lovato says. “Most gang members in El Salvador are little kids. Most of them are not killers. They are salvageable with the right treatment. But unfortunately, the government — like some of our families — has the attitude of treating us like dogs. And the gangs, and I would have to share that because that was my reality, would say, ‘You treat me like a dog, I become a wolf.’”

But as much as pain is part of Lovato’s story, so are love and hope.

“I had one of the great love affairs in my life in the middle of war,” Lovato says, recalling his romance with a guerrillera, or freedom fighter, in El Salvador. A year before the war ended, Lovato linked with a politico-military organization in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which mounted attacks against police and military units that were supported by the U.S. Lovato and his partner even evaded death squads together.

“Amidst the terror, there’s always tenderness,” he said.

Lovato takes an escapulario, a Catholic garment that was a gift from his mother, out of his wallet.Photo: Alexis Terrazas

Lovato’s book is a brave examination of the oft-erased history of Salvadorans, including those like him who grew up in San Francisco. But it’s also a call for justice and change.

“I want people to know our story, in the hopes that people would better understand what it means to be from the Mission, what it means to be Salvadoran, and what it means to be from the United States,” Lovato says. “… Nations are a set of myths that are put out for people to not question the existing power structure. … I decided I would question and then I would fight the power structures. And I’ve never looked back. And the Mission taught me that.”

“Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas”
By Roberto Lovato
Harper
(352 pages; $26.99)

“The Real American Dirt: Roberto Lovato in conversation with Myriam Gurba”: 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 8. Free. Hosted on Zoom. To register, visit http://bit.ly/lovato-gurba

• Alexis TerrazasAlexis Terrazas is the editor-in-chief of El Tecolote, a free bilingual newspaper in the Mission District that celebrates 50 years in 2020. Twitter: @AlexisGTerrazas

Why is El Salvador so dangerous? 4 essential reads," by Beth Daley

 Catesby Holmes, of "The Conversation," provides a quick synopsis here for folks to acquire an understanding of gang violence in Central American that has resulted in thousands of families fleeing for their lives to the U.S.-Mexico border.  In 2016 alone in El Salvador, the country registered a staggering 81.2 murders per 100,000, making it, as stated in this piece below, the "deadliest place in the world that’s not a war zone." I doubt that much has changed given the level of corruption related to gangs' increased political power, that includes their ability to provide political backing to politicians that, as a consequence, sustain, if not institutionalize rampant violence on the streets of El Salvador and other places like Honduras and Guatemala.

It may come as a surprise to you the truth that these violent gangs have their literal origins in the U.S., dating back to the 1980s in Los Angeles. Not only did the gangs become transnational as a result of migration patterns, but the police response in both the U.S. and El Salvador was similar. 

Termed the "mano duro" (firm hand) approach of rounding up and imprisoning thousands of gang members both in the U.S. and El Salvador may have been symbolically good for "tough-on-crime" politicians, but it had the collateral impact of not only bringing gang members into contact with others who had been previously imprisoned, but it also hardened gang members' attitudes toward police.

Another excellent article to read in order to get a more complete picture is this piece— also from "The Conversation" and authored by Jose Miguel Cruz—from May 8, 2017 is titled, "Central American gangs like MS-13 were born out of failed anti-crime policies."

It's unfortunate that our country failed to properly address gang violence to begin with by addressing the underlying conditions like poverty, subtractive schooling, segregation, low wages, and so on that marginalize and alienate youth in schools and in society. The punitive response that ignored such factors only increased their levels of marginalization and in the long run, their power in the streets of many Central American cities that account for increased migration to the U.S. from these places in recent years.

-Angela Valenzuela

Transnational gangs like MS-13 are a major driver of violence in El Salvador, 

but they are far from the only problem. Jose Cabezas/Reuters

by Catesby Holmes

International Editor, The Conversation US

Editor’s note: This is a roundup of material from The Conversation archive.

The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that it will eliminate the Temporary Protected Status that gave provisional U.S. residency to Salvadoran migrants after a 2001 earthquake. Some 200,000 Salvadorans now have until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States, obtain a green card or be deported.

According to a Jan. 8 DHS statement, the decision was made “after a review of the disaster-related conditions upon which the country’s original designation was based,” which determined that they “no longer exist.”

Immigration advocates have condemned the move, saying it overlooks El Salvador’s extreme violence, which has surged since the Bush administration first offered Salvadorans protective status. With 81.2 murders per 100,000 people in 2016, El Salvador is the deadliest place in the world that’s not a war zone. More than 5,200 people were killed there in 2016.

How did El Salvador become so violent? These four articles shed some light on the country’s complex crime problem. Spoiler: It’s not just about the gangs.

1. It all started in the U.S.

President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions often claim that lax immigration policies allowed fearsome Central American gangs like MS-13 to spread from El Salvador into the U.S.

The truth is quite the opposite, writes Florida International University professor José Miguel Cruz.

“The street gang Mara Salvatrucha 13, commonly known as MS-13, was born in the United States,” he explains.

Formed in Los Angeles in the early 1980s by the children of Salvadoran immigrants who’d fled that country’s civil war, MS-13 was at first just “kids who met hanging out on street corners,” writes Cruz.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the group spread into Central America. There, it has brutally deployed extortion, human smuggling and drug trafficking, terrorizing neighborhoods and helping to turn the so-called Northern Triangle – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – into the world’s deadliest place.

2. It’s not just El Salvador

El Salvador may be particularly dangerous, but it isn’t the only Latin American country facing a homicide epidemic, writes Robert Muggah, a Brazilian crime researcher.

As a whole, “Latin America is where the most murders in the world happen,” Muggah writes. Home to just 8 percent of the world’s population, the region sees over 38 percent of global homicides. Every day some 400 Latin Americans are killed.

Many factors contribute to this homicide epidemic, according to Muggah, including “the war on drugs, abundant unlicensed firearms, persistently unequal gender relations and, in Mexico and Central America, thousands of marginalized, uprooted, and sometimes convicted U.S. deportees.”

Governments have responded to rising violence by sinking money into police forces, prosecutors and prisons. It hasn’t worked, Muggah writes. Only 20 percent of murders in Latin America results in conviction. And in San Salvador, El Salvador – last year the seventh-deadliest city in the world – just 10 percent do.

3. Women can be targets

“Criminal violence, while potent, is just part of a dangerous cocktail” of crime in Central America, writes Ariadna Estévez of Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

For example, in 2015, Honduras had the highest rate of feminicide – or female murder – in the world. Environmental advocates who stand up to illegal mining and other kinds of resource exploitation in Central America are also frequent targets of violence.

Those two facts are not unrelated, Estévez warns. “It’s a common mistake to consider violence against women a private, non-political act. But women are often on the front lines of activism” she writes, because they tend to fight against activities that are “harmful to their children, homes and communities.”

Feminists across Latin America have protested the region’s high rates of violence against women. Edgard Garrido/Reuters

4. El Salvador’s government isn’t helping

José Miguel Cruz agrees that gangs like MS-13 are not the sole cause of crime in Central America. Rather, he contends, they are “largely a symptom of a far more critical issue plaguing the region – namely, corruption.”

According to Cruz, groups like MS-13 have grown and thrived in El Salvador because the political class protects them. In August, prosecutors there showed that the country’s two main political parties had colluded with MS-13 and other gangs, paying more than US$300,000 for help winning the 2014 presidential election.

The same nexus between government and organized crime has been exposed across Central America, where political institutions routinely shield gangs in exchange for economic support and political backing in the barrios they control. Few are ever prosecuted for this crime, Cruz says.

That erodes Central Americans’ belief in the rule of law, which, in turn, makes it harder to fight violence. “Root out corruption in the Central American ruling class,” he wagers, “and the gangs and crooks will go down with it.”

The worst that we could imagine happening to those deported who were seeking asylum in the U.S. IS happening.  I'm glad to see that national LULAC, coupled with a report, "Deported to Danger: United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse,” is bringing light to this.  This is definitely blood on Trump's and this administration's hands. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Contact Tania Mercado 626-818-4462 | tmercado@skdknick.com

LULAC: Migrants Deported By Trump Administration Have Been Killed Upon Returning To Dangerous Conditions In Home Country

Nation’s Oldest & Largest Latino Civil Rights Organization Responds to the Latest Human Rights Watch Report Showing that More Than 200 People Deported from the U.S. Have Been Harmed or Killed Upon Returning to El Salvador

Washington, DC - The League of United Latin American (LULAC) responded to the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released today showing that more than 200 people deported from the United States have been harmed or killed upon returning to the dangerous conditions which they fled. In the 117-page report Deported to Danger: United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse,” HRW identifies the cases of 138 Salvadorans who were killed after deportation from the US. In addition to those killed, more than 70 others were beaten, sexually assaulted, extorted, or tortured.

LULAC National President Domingo Garcia and LULAC CEO Sindy Benavides released the following statements in response to the findings in this report:

“The blood of at least 150 innocent people is on President Trump’s hands for shutting America’s doors and sending back refugees who died because they were turned away based on a brutal immigration policy,” said Domingo Garcia, LULAC National President. “Donald Trump and all of his enablers need to look in the mirror and realize that they are responsible for the beating, torture, extortion, sexual assault and death of hundreds of people who were sent back to the places they left out of fear for their lives. This will be a stain on America’s history, much like when the U.S. refused to accept Jewish refugees traveling on the M.S. St. Louis during WWII and they were sent back to Europe to die in Nazi concentration camps.”

“The Trump Administration makes it nearly impossible for Central Americans to seek refuge here from violence and death because of the xenophobic policies put in place by this White House,” said Sindy Benavides, LULAC National CEO. “Let us not forget that America has thrived because we have always welcomed refugees and immigrants of diverse backgrounds who seek safety. LULAC is deeply concerned regarding the findings in this report and will continue to fight for the rights of those seeking asylum in our nation.”

Time for a US Apology to El Salvador

Trump has no clue—nor cares to have a clue—about our country's tawdry legacy of keeping Latin American countries destabilized through violence and oppression, including El Salvador, a country, among others, that he is now demonizing.  And how convenient...  An apology to El Salvador is long over-due.  Restoring Temporary Protective Status to 200,000 Salvadorans is the least that he and our country can do to begin to make amends.  Thanks to Pedro Pedraza for sharing.

Angela Valenzuela

#SaveTPS #ElSalvador #TPS @NACCSTejasfoco #TxEd @UNITEDWEDREAM

Time for a US Apology to El Salvador

Obama recently expressed regret for US support of Argentina’s “dirty war.” It’s time Washington did the same regarding our active backing of right-wing butchery in El Salvador.

By Raymond Bonner | The Nation

April 15, 2016

Over the ages, the United States has routinely intervened in Latin America, overthrowing left-wing governments and propping up right-wing dictators. President Obama pressed a reset button of sorts last month when he traveled to Cuba and Argentina. Now it’s time for him to visit a Latin America country that is geographically smallest but where Washington’s footprint is large and the stain of intervention perhaps greatest—El Salvador.
In Argentina, on the 40th anniversary of a military coup that ushered in that country’s “dirty war,” President Obama said it was time for the United States to reflect on its policies during those “dark days.” In the name of fighting communism, the Argentine government hunted down, tortured, and killed suspected leftists—sometimes throwing their bodies out of helicopters into the sea. “We’ve been slow to speak out for human rights and that was the case here,” Obama said.

Archbishop Oscar Romero

That failure to speak out looks benign in contrast to the active role Washington played in the “dirty war” in El Salvador in the 1980s, which pitted a right-wing government against Marxist guerrillas. The United States sent military advisers to help the Salvadoran military fight its dirty war, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid.
In Argentina, the security forces killed some 30,000 civilians. In El Salvador, more than 75,000 lost their lives during the civil war, which lasted from 1980 until the 1992 peace agreement. The guerrillas committed atrocities, but the United Nations Truth Commission, established as part of the accord, found that more than 85 percent of the killings, kidnappings, and torture had been the work of government forces, which included paramilitaries, death squads, and army units trained by the United States.

The Reagan administration often sought to cover up the brutality, to protect perpetrators of even the most heinous crimes.

The United States went well beyond remaining largely silent in the face of human-rights abuses in El Salvador. The State Department and White House often sought to cover up the brutality, to protect the perpetrators of even the most heinous crimes.
In March of 1980, the much beloved and respected Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was murdered. A voice for the poor and repressed, Romero, in his final Sunday sermon, had issued a plea to the country’s military junta that rings through the ages: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.” The next day, he was cut down by a single bullet while he was saying a private mass. (In 2015, Pope Francis declared that Romero died a martyr, the final step before sainthood.)
Eight months after the assassination, a military informant gave the US embassy in El Salvador evidence that it had been plotted by Roberto D’Aubuisson, a charismatic and notorious right-wing leader. D’Aubuisson had presided over a meeting in which soldiers drew lots for the right to kill the archbishop, the informant said. While any number of right-wing death squads might have wanted to kill Romero, only a few, like D’Aubuisson’s, were “fanatical and daring” enough to actually do it, the CIA concluded in a report for the White House.
Yet, D’Aubuisson continued to be welcomed at the US embassy in El Salvador, and when Elliott Abrams, the State Department’s point man on Central America during the Reagan administration, testified before Congress, he said he would not consider D’Aubuisson an extremist. “You would have to be engaged in murder,” Abrams said, before he would call him an extremist. But D’Aubuisson was engaged in murder, and Washington knew it. (He died of throat cancer in 1992, at the age of 48. Abrams was convicted in 1991 of misleading Congress about the shipment of arms to the anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua, the so-called “Iran/Contra” affair. He was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush, later served as special adviser to President George W. Bush on democracy and human rights, and is now a foreign-policy adviser to GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz.)

* * *

The administration knew the Salvadoran military murdered four US churchwomen in 1980—but denied the evidence.

No act of barbarism is more emblematic of the deceit that marked Washington’s policy in El Salvador in the 1980s than the sexual assault and murder of four US churchwomen—three Roman Catholic nuns and a lay missionary—in December 1980, a month after Ronald Reagan was elected president.
The American ambassador, Robert White, who had been appointed by President Jimmy Carter, knew immediately that the Salvadoran military was responsible—even if he didn’t have the names of the perpetrators—but that was not what the incoming administration wanted to hear.
One of Reagan’s top foreign-policy advisers, Jeane Kirkpatrick, when asked if she thought the government had been involved, said, “The answer is unequivocal. No, I don’t think the government was responsible.” She then sought to besmirch the women. “The nuns were not just nuns,” she told The Tampa Tribune. “The nuns were also political activists,” with a leftist political coalition (Kirkpatrick died in 2006).

In Argentina, President Obama praised two American diplomats, Tex Harris and Patt Derian, for their commitment to documenting the human-rights abuses in Argentina.
Two American diplomats in El Salvador deserve similar presidential recognition. Ambassador White, a career diplomat, lost his job and was forced out of the foreign service by Secretary of State Alexander Haig when he refused to participate in a cover-up of the Salvadoran military’s involvement in the murder of the American churchwomen. Haig told a congressional committee that the women may have been trying to run a roadblock when they were killed (Haig died in 2010; White died in 2015).
At considerable risk to his career and his life, a junior diplomat in the US embassy, H. Carl Gettinger, wasn’t deterred by the chicanery in Washington and carried out his own investigation. It was Gettinger who had learned from the Salvadoran military informant about D’Aubuisson’s role in the assassination of Archbishop Romero, and he turned to the man, an army lieutenant, to help him solve the churchwomen’s case. The lieutenant, who had so much blood on his own hands during the dirty war that Gettinger dubbed him “Killer,” gave Gettinger, and the United States, the name of the sergeant who led the operation and that of four other soldiers who had participated, a crime that senior Salvadoran military commanders had successfully covered up until then (the men were convicted in 1984).
“Carl is an unsung hero,” Carol Doerflein, who was the assistant public affairs officer in the US embassy in El Salvador at the time, told me recently.
One year after the churchwomen were murdered, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history occurred when soldiers from the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion carried out an operation in the mountainous region of northeastern El Salvador. Altogether more than 700 men, women, and children were killed in El Mozote and surrounding villages.

In 1981, the military massacred over 700 civilians at El Mozote—and Reagan’s officials dismissed it as “propaganda.”

The Reagan administration steadfastly denied there had been a massacre by government troops. Reports of the massacre, by myself in The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto in The Washington Post, were dismissed by administration officials and their right-wing supporters as “guerrilla propaganda.”
But cables and documents declassified by the Clinton administration in the early 1990s—as well as the findings of the UN Truth Commission—have confirmed the massacre in grisly detail. “As many as several hundred men, women and children were allegedly massacred by the Atlacatl Battalion during the December 10-13, 1981, El Salvadoran Armed Forces (ESAF) offensive,” the State Department wrote in a secret eight-page report to the Truth Commission. The commission removed the “allegedly.” On the morning after arriving in the area, according to the commission, the soldiers had “proceeded to interrogate, torture and execute the men.… Around noon, they began taking out the women in groups, separating them from their children and machine-gunning them. Finally, they killed the children.”
In 2012, on the 20th anniversary of the civil war’s end, El Salvador’s president, Mauricio Funes, went to El Mozote to apologize. “For this massacre, for the abhorrent violations of human rights and the abuses perpetrated in the name of the Salvadoran state, I ask forgiveness of the families of the victims,” he said, wiping away tears. He laid flowers on the monument that had been erected.
In Argentina, Obama tossed white roses into the water at a memorial to the victims of that country’s dirty war. No US official, not even a mid-level one, has ever visited the monument at El Mozote or apologized or expressed regrets about that massacre or, more broadly, for Washington’s active role in funding and encouraging El Salvador’s dirty war.

Raymond BonnerRaymond Bonner, a former New York Times correspondent who covered Central America from 1980 to 1982, is the author of Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War, which is being reissued by OR Books this month.