America in El Salvador’s Crisis

This is an excerpt from What Uncle Sam Really Wants, by Noam Chomsky. WUSRW is a compilation of talks and interviews by Prof. Chomsky that took place between 1986-1991. I downloaded the file from the library section over at It explains the U.S. role in crimes against humanity committed by right-wing paramilitaries during the eighties in El Salvador.

After reading this, think about what responsibility the United States has in the humanitarian crisis on the border today. These are the destabilizing actions of the past that led to what poor Salvadorans are running from today:

1970-1990: The war of counter-insurgency in El Salvador

Noam Chomsky on the ultra-violent war of the right-wing regime in El Salvador against grassroots resistance of workers, peasants and liberation theologists – socialist clergymen and women.

The crucifixion of El Salvador

For many years, repression, torture and murder were carried on in El Salvador by dictators installed and supported by the US government, a matter of no interest in the US. The story was virtually never covered. By the late 1970s, however, the government began to be concerned about a couple of things.

One was that Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, was losing control. The US was losing a major base for its exercise of force in the region. A second danger was even more threatening. In El Salvador in the 1970s, there was a growth of what were called “popular organisations” – peasant associations, cooperatives, unions, Church-based Bible study groups that evolved into self-help groups, etc. That raised the threat of democracy.
In February 1980, the Archbishop [libcom – though nominally part of the Catholic Church, they did not receive the backing of the Vatican] of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, sent a letter to President Carter in which he begged him not to send military aid to the junta that ran the country. He said such aid would be used to “sharpen injustice and repression against the people’s organisations” which were struggling “for respect for their most basic human rights” (hardly news to Washington, needless to say).
A few weeks later, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying a mass. The neo-Nazi Roberto d’Aubuisson is generally assumed to be responsible for this assassination (among countless other atrocities). D’Aubuisson was “leader-for-life” of the ARENA party, which now governs El Salvador; members of the party, like current Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani, had to take a blood oath of loyalty to him.

Thousands of peasants and urban poor took part in a commemorative mass a decade later, along with many foreign bishops, but the US was notable by its absence. The Salvadoran Church formally proposed Romero for sainthood.

All of this passed with scarcely a mention in the country that funded and trained Romero’s assassins. The New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” published no editorial on the assassination when it occurred or in the years that followed, and no editorial or news report on the commemoration.


Peasants were the main victims of this war, along with labour organisers, students, priests or anyone suspected of working for the interests of the people]. In Carter’s last year, 1980, the death toll reached about 10,000, rising to about 13,000 for 1981 as the Reaganites took command.
In October 1980, the new archbishop condemned the “war of extermination and genocide against a defenceless civilian population” waged by the security forces. Two months later they were hailed for their “valiant service alongside the people against subversion” by the favourite US “moderate,” José Napoleón Duarte, as he was appointed civilian president of the junta.

The role of the “moderate” Duarte was to provide a fig leaf for the military rulers and ensure them a continuing flow of US funding after the armed forces had raped and murdered four churchwomen from the US. That had aroused some protest here; slaughtering Salvadorans is one thing, but raping and killing American nuns is a definite PR mistake. The media evaded and downplayed the story, following the lead of the Carter Administration and its investigative commission.

The incoming Reaganites went much further, seeking to justify the atrocity, notably Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. But it was still deemed worthwhile to have a show trial a few years later, while exculpating the murderous junta – and, of course, the paymaster.

The independent newspapers in El Salvador, which might have reported these atrocities, had been destroyed. Although they were mainstream and pro-business, they were still too undisciplined for the military’s taste. The problem was taken care of in 1980-81, when the editor of one was murdered by the security forces; the other fled into exile. As usual, these events were considered too insignificant to merit more than a few words in US newspapers.


The news wires carried a story by AP correspondent Douglas Grant Mine, reporting how soldiers had entered a working-class neighbourhood in the capital city of San Salvador, captured six men, added a 14-year-old boy for good measure, then lined them all up against a wall and shot them. They “were not priests or human rights campaigners,” Mine wrote, “so their deaths have gone largely unnoticed” – as did his story.


The Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by US Special Forces shortly before murdering the Jesuits. This has been a pattern throughout the Battalion’s existence — some of its worst massacres have occurred when it was fresh from US training.

In the “fledgling democracy” that was El Salvador, teenagers as young as 13 were scooped up in sweeps of slums and refugee camps and forced to become soldiers. They were indoctrinated with rituals adopted from the Nazi SS, including brutalisation and rape, to prepare them for killings that often have sexual and satanic overtones.

The nature of Salvadoran army training was described by a deserter who received political asylum in Texas in 1990, despite the State Department’s request that he be sent back to El Salvador. (His name was withheld by the court to protect him from Salvadoran death squads.)

According to this deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents — tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun.

In another case, an admitted member of a Salvadoran death squad associated with the Atlacatl Battalion, César Vielman Joya Martínez, detailed the involvement of US advisers and the Salvadoran government in death-squad activity. The Bush administration has made every effort to silence him and ship him back to probable death in El Salvador, despite the pleas of human rights organisations and requests from Congress that his testimony be heard. (The treatment of the main witness to the assassination of the Jesuits was similar.)





By and large, the US approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organisations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history – and it’s got a lot of competition.

From What Uncle Sam Really Wants, by Noam Chomsky.


Media Post: Why Flee El Salvador, and The French ‘Yellow Vests.”

A short post today with two important video reports from The Guardian and The New York Times showing why Salvadoran migrants are leaving their homes to apply for asylum here in the U.S. (hint: Washington’s crimes), and the latest on the French “yellow vests” movement