So spake the Dark Lord:
Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador [as in Iraq today]. We had -- guerrilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead, and we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress.
The human drive for freedom, the determination of these people to vote, was unbelievable. And the terrorists would come in and shoot up polling places; as soon as they left, the voters would come back and get in line and would not be denied the right to vote.
And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections.
Since Cheney is using El Salvador as a similar example to Iraq leading up to the January elections, it may be worth thinking a little more about what that involved. During the Reagan and Bush I administrations, the United States supported the government and military of El Salvador in their counterinsurgency war led by the Faribundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN). In that counterinsurgency, we at least had a pretty good idea who the leading group was in the insurgency.
Back in 2002, Mark Engler observed of a planned Bush stopover in El Salvador on a Latin American trip (Brewing Poverty and Violence In El Salvador by Mark Engler AlterNet.org 03/28/02):
El Salvador, in particular, provides a case study in how Bush's version of economic "modernization" has failed the poor.
Geography has never been George W.'s strong suit, but one might expect him to try being sensitive to El Salvador's human rights concerns, given that a U.N. Truth Commission blamed the right-wing governments supported by his father for 90 percent of the approximately 80,000 murders committed through the country's civil war. Instead, President Bush's visit falls on the day normally reserved for commemoration of Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination. The army's death squads gunned down Romero, a stalwart defender of the country's poorest citizens, during a mass on March 24, 1980.
Ten years after the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords ended more than a decade of bloody conflict, U.S.-supported policies continue to impede progress toward human rights. Rather than atoning for its sponsorship of Cold War crimes, the United States has overseen a type of economic transformation that punishes the same communities most victimized during El Salvador's time of violence. Under the supervision of the IMF and World Bank in Washington, DC, the conservative Salvadoran governments of the 1990s hacked social services and sold off state enterprises in telecommunications and utilities to private interests.
The report of the UN Truth Commission to which Engler refers is available at:
From Madness to Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador: Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, The Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, United States Institute of Peace Web site, officially published by the UN 03/29/04. Equipo Nizkor also makes the report available on their site.
Human Rights Watch commented on the Truth Commission's report:
El Salvador's Truth Commission represents the first time since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following World War II that foreign, rather than national figures, investigated past episodes of violence in a sovereign country. The report they issued in March 1993 confirmed what human rights organizations in and outside El Salvador had reported for a decade: that the Salvadoran armed forces and death squads bore principal responsibility for the murder, disappearance and torture of Salvadoran civilians.
Just so we're keeping up with the sides here, the "Salvadorean armed forces and death squads that "bore principal responsibility for the murder, disappearance and torture of Salvadoran civilians" were Our Side, Reagan's side, Bush I's side, Cheney's side. The Dark Lord's model for the new, free, democratic Iraq?
Following are the remarks in the Senate on 03/23/93 by Oregon's Mark Hatfield, one of the last of that once-thriving breed known as "moderate Republicans." (Today we have only things like Arnold Schwarzenegger playing one, with the happy cooperation of our pitiful press corps.) Hatfield said:
The members of the Truth Commission, former Colombian President Belisario Betancur; Reinaldo Figueredo Planchart, former foreign minister of Venezuela; and Thomas Buergenthal, professor of law at George Washington University, have boldly and bravely identified by name the military leadership responsible for atrocities such as the assassination of Archbishop Romero, the killing of four American churchwomen, and the murder of six Jesuits, their cook and her daughter. The Truth Commission has confirmed what many of us have believed for a long time: that the U.S. was bankrolling the Salvador military at a time when it was killing with impunity.
Those who continue to defend the United States role in the Salvadoran civil war take several lines of defense. Many involved in Latin American policy through the 1980's claim ignorance of what was happening around them. Others skip over the bloody history, preferring to argue that the cost of uninvolvement would have been greater. I cannot accept either excuse in light of the truth. For a decade the United States was willing to allow its policy to be shaped by the dictum that the `ends justify the means.' This misguided policy must be abandoned.
One has to wonder if Dark Lord Cheney's unexpected comparison of Iraq to El Salvador may have been a Freudian slip telling more than he intended about what the current Bush administration idea of "democracy" in client states is about. Hatfield continued:
In 1990, under supervision of Congressman Howard Berman and Congressman George Miller and me, the caucus staff evaluated the Salvadoran high command and the record of documented human rights abuses carried out by their troops. The staff found that 14 of the 15 officers in El Salvador's primary commands rose to their positions despite the abuses. And in none of the over 50 violent cases listed in the reportswas justice served. No officer was brought to trial.
In 1991 Congress began withholding some military aid to El Salvador. But just last year the U.S. Government continued to argue against the complete withdrawal of our support from the Salvadoran military ...
The "last year" he referred to was 1992, the last full year of the George H.W. Bush administration, when Dark Lord Cheney was the Secretary of Defense.
Perhaps it is the presence of John Negroponte as the American proconsul in Baghdad that reminded the Dark Lord of El Salvador (David Lytel, What Reagan Taught Bush, American Prospect online 06/09/04:
Reagan's ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte, now in charge of the reconstruction of Iraq, gave American moral and financial support to Roberto d'Aubuisson and his ARENA Party in El Salvador, a barely veiled political arm of the death squads that terrorized the country in the name of democracy and freedom.
The Big Pundits may not have paid much attention to Cheney's El Salvador reference, but some listeners did: Comparación de Cheney ofende a los salvadoreños de Jazmín Ortega La Opinión 10/07/04.
Pero entre quienes recuerdan la guerra civil salvadoreña, entre 1981 y 1992, fue precisamente el respaldo del gobierno norteamericano lo que intensificó las hostilidades. ...
The article quotes Angela Sanbrano, executive director of the Centro de Recursos Centroamericanos (CARECEN):
"Me gustaría recordarle al vicepresidente que la guerra civil en El Salvador comenzó precisamente porque [al pueblo] se le negó el proceso democrático y al presidente [Napoleón] Duarte, elegido democráticamente”, afirmó.
Las guerrillas, calificadas de “terroristas” por Cheney, “fueron un producto de la frustración extrema ante la imposibilidad de la democracia”, dijo Sanbrano.
[I would like to remind the vice president that the civil war in El Salvador started precisely because [the people] were denied the democractic process and President [Napoleón] Duarte, elected democratically," she declared.]
[The guerrillas, described as "terrorists" by Cheney, "were aproduct of the extreme frustration in the face of the impossibility of democracy," said Sanbrano.]
Guillermo Martínez criticized the scanty attention to Latin America in the first presidential debate and the Cheney/Edwards match-up: Un continente olvida [A forgotten continent] La Opinión 10/07/04. He observes that foreign policy issues like the Iraq War, the GWOT(global war on terrorism) North Korea and nuclear proliferation are more urgent problems at the moment than any Latin American issues.
But he also points to the crisis in Haiti and the need for a workable, enforceable treaty on immigration between Mexico and the US are also important problems that are worth discussing in such forums. And he says:
México y Venezuela son dos de los mayores proveedores de petróleo a Estados Unidos. Brasil busca crear su propia esfera de influencia en América del Sur. Soldados estadounidenses brindan entrenamiento y ayuda al gobierno de Colombia en su lucha contra terroristas, guerrilleros y narcotraficantes. Fidel Castro en Cuba y Hugo Chávez en Venezuela no esconden su desprecio por el presidente Bush ni su deseo de crear una alianza en contra de Estados Unidos en América Latina. Hay tela para cortar.
[ Mexico and Venezuela are two of the biggest suppliers of oil to the United States. Brazil is seeking to create its own sphere of influence in South America. American soldiers offer training and support to the government of Columbia in its fight against terrorists, guerrillas and narcotics trafficers. Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela do not conceal their contempt for President Bush nor their desire to create an alliance against the United States in Latin America. It's an awkward situation.]
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