The nightmarish, wholesale violence so often directed at civilians that has produced the modern flood of refugees is not the special provenance of any particular political ideology. The horrors perpetrated by Cambodians upon Cambodians in the name of Marxism aren`t much different from the horrors perpetrated by Salvadorans upon Salvadorans in the name of democracy.
It is easy for Americans to excoriate the Soviets for manipulations that have caused so much upheaval and mayhem in the Third World. It is not so easy for them to assess their own nation`s manipulations in an area such as Central America, which may remain in a constant state of upheaval well into the next century.
The dominant interest of U.S. policy in Central America for the last 100 years has been to keep all foreign influence from gaining a foothold there. The region is of vital interest to the United States because about two-thirds of all U.S. foreign trade and oil imports, along with many strategic minerals, move on sea lanes through Central American waters.
To protect its interests, the United States has, by subterfuge or direct military intervention, repeatedly removed Central American governments it has deemed threatening to U.S. policy.
In El Salvador, for example, the core of traditional power has rested in the ”Fourteen Families” of conquistador descendants who comprise only 2 percent of the country`s population of 5 million. For 200 years that group has effectively controlled the nation`s government, wealth, industry, army and virtually all its productive land.
The rest of El Salvador`s population is judged to be among the five worst-fed populations in the world. The families of the oligarchy own 60 percent of the land in El Salvador, but that 60 percent represents 100 percent of the most fertile farmland. The richest farmland does not produce food, which must be imported, but valuable cash crops, such as coffee, that are exported. The other 40 percent of the land, marginally fertile at best, is farmed to exhaustion by peasants growing subsistence crops of beans and corn. From 1960 to 1980, the number of El Salvador`s landless peasantry, people who traditionally depended on agricultural work to make a
living, jumped to 65 percent from 12 percent. Because there simply were not enough jobs outside agriculture to make up for this overflow, more people became poverty-stricken and hungry, and, predictably, political unrest grew out of control.
By 1980 five relatively small and ineffective revolutionary groups in El Salvador combined forces to create the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, aimed at overthrowing the Salvadoran government and the right-wing military that keeps it in power. The result has been a long, bloody war of attrition for both sides, with no end in sight.
El Salvador`s political history is not much different from those of its Central American neighbors, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In each of those countries, the oligarchies ruthlessly hung on to power and wealth at the expense of an impoverished majority.
And in each of those countries, the United States has played a key role in shoring up the oligarchies and their right-wing dictatorships. During this century, each U.S. administration has bought into short-term, expedient methods to maintain the status quo whenever unrest has cropped up in Central America.
The overriding concern of the United States since World War II has been the suppression of leftists and leftist ideologies in Central America. How that was to be achieved was stated in brutally clear language by George Kennan, the U.S. State Department`s Soviet-affairs specialist, in 1950:
”The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but . . . we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful, since the communists are essentially traitors. . . . It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by communists.”
Thus the United States has nurtured and supported in the name of democracy some of the most cruelly repressive dictatorships in this century and probably for naught. Nearly 200,000 Central Americans have died in regional conflicts in the last 10 years, most of them civilians. The most obvious failure was the overthrow of the blood-soaked, corrupt Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua by a rebel coalition that was quickly taken over in 1979 by the Marxist Sandinista forces. But the history of U.S. support for corrupt juntas and right-wing governments is nearly endless. The failure of U.S. policy in Central America is obvious: The region bristles now more than ever with guerrilla activity.
Whenever overwhelming poverty and misery have led to grass-roots uprisings in Central America, the United States has participated overtly or covertly to smash them in the interest of keeping the region ”stable.” If the United States has had any effective long-term input in Central America, it has been in the form of stepped-up military assistance begun by President John F. Kennedy and continued by his successors.
Kennedy arrived in office to face Fidel Castro`s Cuba, the first communist regime in the hemisphere. Responding to the situation, in 1961 he created a $100 billion economic and military package for Latin America called the Alliance for Progress. It was an ambitious undertaking designed to lift Latin American nations economically while shoring up their ability to fight internal political subversion.
The alliance`s economic programs failed miserably. They simply made the rich, who were in control of their governments, richer. The military programs fared far better, even spectacularly. Small, undisciplined and poorly led and equipped Central American armies began to grow and command more of their countries` annual budgets and power. They became more professional, better equipped and better trained in up-to-date counterinsurgency warfare.
El Salvador is such a case. The Salvadoran military, enjoying the U.S. largess in the 1960s, became so powerful that it emerged as a force equal to the old oligarchy and closely allied with it. Among other contributions, U.S. military advisers in the 1960s helped the Salvadoran military design and create a grass-roots intelligence system called ORDEN. (Its name comes from the Spanish acronym for Democratic Nationalist Organization.)
ORDEN recruited spies in virtually every peasant community in the country who would inform the army of subversive activities. In a country in which corruption is endemic, peasant spies often abused the system to settle scores with old enemies. The army abused the system by using ORDEN as the basis of death squads that in two decades have murdered and continue to murder thousands of suspected enemies.
Rosa Arjelia Santo, 42, a Salvadoran who has been living in exile for seven years in Costa Rica, remembers ORDEN well. She remembers it so well she must still take medicine daily to steady her nerves.
Rosa was born, reared and married in a town called Osicala in Morazan province in southern El Salvador. Still a stronghold for National Liberation Front guerrillas to this day, Morazan, during the last few days in the summer of 1980 that Rosa lived there, was already a hotbed of guerrilla activity. Then 34, Rosa had three children and was pregnant with her fourth, though she was estranged from her husband and living in her father`s house.
The adobe house had four rooms, a red-tile roof, a patio and its own well, Rosa said. It was crowded, as it housed five of her brothers, three sisters, her father, Rosa and her three children. But because her father owned it outright along with a small plot of land, she said they had a relatively good life growing beans and corn.
Besides, the family had some minor celebrity in the area. Her eldest brother, Adrian, who lived nearby in his own home with his wife and four children, led a popular band called the Baptist Brothers. The band was made up of Adrian, two other brothers and two cousins. Adrian, 46, was the lead singer and fiddler. The Baptist Brothers wrote and sang songs, many of them with lyrics protesting the hard life and treatment of Salvadoran campesinos.
Though there was a great deal of political tension and unrest in Osicala, Rosa said that until May 31, 1980, there had been little violence or disruption. Late in the afternoon of that day, however, the violence began, and it started with Rosa`s family. About 4 p.m., Adrian`s wife came running to Rosa`s father`s house, screaming that Adrian had been abducted.
A truck filled with uniformed soldiers had stopped at Adrian`s house several minutes earlier and demanded to see him. A commercial fisherman who rose early in the morning and normally finished his day`s work by noon, Adrian was in the house. The soldiers put a shroud over Adrian`s head and threw him to the floor, accusing him of working with local guerrilla units. When the soldiers hauled Adrian off in the truck, his wife ran for help.
”We immediately went looking for him,” Rosa said. ”ORDEN had been organized in our town for some time. The people in ORDEN would put the finger on other people in the town, telling the army that they were active subversives, and the military would bring the accused people in for questioning and harassment. We thought that was what happened to Adrian, that somebody put the finger on him because the band was very, very well loved.”
Rosa`s family went to the local military headquarters to ask about Adrian. A soldier at the headquarters, a local boy serving in the army, told them he had seen Adrian brought in and then taken away in another truck. Merely asking Adrian`s whereabouts cast Rosa and her family under suspicion, and she said they were told to stop looking for him.
”Adrian was a fisherman, so he was gone from his house a lot, and he also drank a lot in the afternoons,” Rosa said. ”The military watched everybody in town closely, and they couldn`t see how he supported his family, being gone so much and drinking so much. He had once served in the army himself, so they thought that when he was away from his house, he must have been training guerrillas.”
Adrian`s body was found in a field several days later. He had obviously been tortured, his face burned, his arms broken and his eyes poked out.
”When his body was found, everybody in the town turned against the military,” Rosa said, ”even the paramilitaries, who did not like what had happened to Adrian. Afterward, we got a letter from the military begging forgiveness for Adrian`s death, but we think it was just a trick to keep us in town. We were under the constant tension of intimidation after his murder.”
Two-and-a-half months passed without further violence. Then, on Aug. 21, 1980, under cover of darkness, a large contingent of troops moved into Osicala, dividing into smaller units that scattered through the town and went to preselected houses. One of the units came to the house of Rosa`s father and broke down the door, demanding to see Adrian`s wife, who had moved in after Adrian`s death. The soldiers dragged her off, taking along her two oldest children, an 18-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl.
The next morning the townspeople found a grisly scene at the local soccer field: 20 bound bodies, including Adrian`s widow and two children, with their mouths taped shut and their throats slit. The army units stayed in town, taking over a church as their headquarters, and stepped up the daily harassment.
Rosa recalled her father`s refusal to leave the farm in search of a safer place to live.
”Why should we leave?” she said he repeatedly asked his children. ”We haven`t done anything, we`re not in anything, and nothing will happen to us.”
