Even as more than 60,000 of its people have been killed and one-fifth of its population displaced, the suffering of war-ravaged El Salvador has been eclipsed in public consciousness and popular organizing for the past several years by the U.S.-funded contra war in Nicaragua. But when Ronald Reagan leaves office with his contra war in shambles, the Bush administration will be forced to reconsider the blood-soaked country whose name, ironically, means "The Savior."
Nicaragua was Reagan's personal ideological obsession, but El Salvador has been our government's bipartisan, largely non-controversial, pet "democratic" project. And when contra-weary government officials and peace activists take inventory in Central America, they will find a U.S. policy toward El Salvador that is even more disastrous than the Reagan administration's proxy war in Nicaragua.
Determined to defeat a ragtag, unorganized, leftist insurgency of some 8,000 guerrillas in El Salvador and, thereby, to demonstrate the U.S. resolve to "stop communism," the Reagan administration created what has become the largest U.S. counterinsurgency program since the Vietnam War. The United States has poured more than $3.3 billion into El Salvador since 1980, which translates into more than $1 million a day. This makes El Salvador, a nation the size of Massachusetts, with some five million people, the fifth-largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world.
But eight years, $3 billion, and 60,000 lives later, the United States is no closer to achieving its policy goals in that country, and the situation in El Salvador has gotten only worse. The U.S.-trained, -financed, and -equipped Salvadoran army, which has grown from 12,000 to 57,000 soldiers, cannot defeat the guerrillas of the FMLN (Farabundo Marti Liberation Front). In fact, the rebels appear to be gaining strength, and recent attacks by both sides indicate that the war is escalating.
The Salvadoran economy, despite massive infusions of U.S. aid, has gone from bad to worse. Fifty percent of Salvadoran adults are unemployed, and three out of five families are unable to adequately feed themselves. Meanwhile, El Salvador's fragile political center, created so carefully by the United States, has all but dissolved.
In this increasingly polarized and desperate situation, death-squad-style killings have, once again, become a daily fact of life in El Salvador. In the early 1980s, right-wing death squads ruled El Salvador by terror. Each day the mutilated bodies of as many as 25 students, trade unionists, catechists, human rights workers, and members of cooperatives would be found in the streets and along the roadsides.
Now, after several years in the shadows, the death squads are becoming more active again. In 1987, about 12 mutilated bodies a month were found dumped along Salvadoran roads. But the 1987 total of death-squad-style killings and "disappearances" was already surpassed in just the first three months of 1988. Twenty-seven people were murdered and 22 were abducted by death squads last April alone.
Most analysts attribute the resurgence of the death squads to the ineffectiveness of President Jose Napoleon Duarte's Christian Democratic government, which has allowed military leaders and the right-wing ARENA party to assume greater control in El Salvador. Angered by Duarte's release of more than 400 long-term political prisoners and his negotiations with representatives of the guerrilla forces - as was mandated by the Central American peace agreement - these right-wing leaders enforce a policy of cold-blooded murder.
DEATH-SQUAD-STYLE KILLINGS have become so commonplace that even the Salvadoran government's own human rights commission warned recently that "the horror of the violence of the past is increasing, threatening to plunge us into a bloodbath of uncontrollable and disastrous consequences." But before such a bloodbath can be averted, U.S. policymakers must acknowledge that these "death squads" are, in fact, part of the U.S.-trained, -funded, and -equipped Salvadoran military.
A recent report on the Salvadoran death squads by the human rights group Amnesty International concluded that the use of "death squads" is an official, conscious strategy of the Salvadoran government, a policy designed to further its war effort, limit political and economic reforms, and control popular dissent. The men who kidnap innocent civilians, torture them repeatedly, and finally kill them are not private citizens acting on their own but military commanders and their subordinates.
According to Amnesty International's extensive research and documentation, "actions attributed to 'death squads' are routinely carried out by regular units of the armed forces...." The Amnesty report concluded, "The Salvadoran 'death squads' are simply used to shield the government from accountability for the torture, 'disappearances' and extrajudicial executions committed in [its] name."
Amnesty International recommended "a number of [specific] measures which the Salvadoran government needs to take to return the country to the rule of law." However, the political reality is that the Salvadoran government will make no such reforms unless forced to do so by the United States.
It should be clear by now that the United States has been unable to influence the Salvadoran government, even when it tried to buy such influence with billions of dollars in aid. Therefore, it is long past the time for the United States to try another tack: that of withholding any and all aid from El Salvador, at least until the government stops killing its people in cold blood, abides by the provisions of the Central American peace plan, and guarantees that economic aid will go to the poor peasants who need it instead of to rich officials.
That is what the vast majority of the long-suffering people of El Salvador want. They have seen what U.S. dollars have bought in their country, and they want no more of it. They know that the war in their country is not a battle for or against communism, but that it is the struggle of a people for economic and political justice.
We who have spent eight long years fighting contra aid know that the struggle for peace and justice in Nicaragua is not over. We must continue working to end the low-intensity conflict and the economic war there, and to repair the extensive damage caused by the U.S.-waged contra war.
But we must also renew the lapsed struggle for peace and justice in El Salvador, and in Guatemala and Honduras as well. We should support the nonviolent movement of Salvadoran refugees back to their homes, and we must work to stop U.S. aid to the death squads of El Salvador. Until we do, many more Salvadorans will die - and our government will be responsible.
Vicki Kemper was news editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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