The latest Pentagon strategy under consideration, according to Newsweek, for the Iraq debacle has the hairs on the back of my neck rising. They intend to re-create the Salvadoran death squads using Kurdish and Shiite militia to pursue a more "aggressive" approach to quelling the so-called insurgents.
[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek] [Newsweek article on MSNBC]
Former Honduran Ambassador John Negroponte's presence as Iraqi Ambassador only adds irony to the suggestion, despite his denials of any involvement. I worked in the solidarity movement in Oregon during the Salvadoran wars, so the suggestion of reviving the death squads brings back memories I would rather lay dormant.
The article makes no mention of a School of the Americas connection, but it seems likely the Columbus, Georgia Army operation, with its extensive experience in training indigenous military for such missions, would be called on. The hideous nature of this whole idea has me too riled up to think or write clearly, but I hope the Narcosphere will jump into the fray to help publicize and berate the proposal before it hits the ground.
The Newsweek article is fairly palatable, mentioning that conservatives feel the death squad strategy was "successful" in El Salvador "despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra" scandal.
There is a related article, a column by Christopher Dickey that expresses at least the edges of outrage at this suggestion, though he backs off from fully condemning it, and ends by only suggesting that it may not be appropriate for Iraq, and that we learned the "wrong lessons" from El Salvador. He does have an interesting comment from Joaquin Villalobos on the problem of repression: “If the generals think that with the hatred against the United States that exists in the region, with the divisions in Iraqi society, with Syria, Iran and others around, starting a dirty war is something that will give them an edge, they are totally and absolutely lost and desperate,” says Villalobos. “Invading Iraq without a post-war plan created chaos, subsequent mistakes converted the chaos into organized resistance, and if they keep blundering ahead blindly, they’ll convert the resistance into a real civil war.”
The Salvador Option
Submitted January 13, 2005 - 8:42 am by Andrew Grice (not verified)During this past year's U.S. vice presidential candidate's debate Dick Cheney answered a question about Iraq with a twisted analogy about El Salvador. Cheney raved about the perseverance of that country at war, somehow holding "democratic" elections in the midst of war. He didn't mention the torture, the death squads or the troops preventing any actual democracy. He didn't mention half the political forces in the country refusing to participate in such a fraudulent process. But he didn't have to deny those things either. No cable news talking heads would call him to account on it, just as the nightly news of 1984 wouldn't tell the truth either. The big lie of the 1980s has become an historical footnote, left unquestioned and used to promote the atrocities of the next century.
"Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador. 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." -- Dick Cheney
Does it excuse Cheney if his guarded limousine never paused by the dumping grounds for death squad victims? Or that his handlers never introduced him to people who'd been tortured, or found their loved one's bodies dead and mutilated in unspeakable ways? Does Dick Cheney get the same kind of morality pass we might give to a U.S. public so mislead as to legitimately have no comprehension of the barbarity Cheney lauds as a democratic example?
No.
But before suggesting that Cheney went to observe the "election" of Napoleon Duarte in El Salvador as a pre-scripted propaganda exercise, allow me to suggest a test. Where was Dick Cheney during that other historic 1984 election in a war torn Central American nation? If Cheney had been in Salvador as a true observer, to witness and report, surely he would have been equally interested in observing the Nicaraguan elections of that same year. But no. Instead, Cheney and the rest of the U.S. establishment stayed home. They stayed home and pretended that elections freer than Florida has known this century never happened at all. They pretended and insisted; and to this day persist in the lie that El Salvador and not Nicaragua in that year had a first democratic election in 50 some years. Such do the lies of the past form the national memories of the present.
Our blood should boil that Pentagon hacks can even debate a scheme called Plan Salvador. Decades of furious denial crumble in silence as the name itself tacitly admits the monstrous truth. The death squads weren't just tolerated by the United States. They were funded, supported and maintained as United States policy. It wasn't an uncontrollable tragedy, it was exactly what U.S. counterinsurgency war planners wanted. And now, it's a policy to be transplanted to Iraq - where perhaps dead imams wont disturb the public so much as dead priests and murdered nuns.
Let the Salvadorans decide if the amnesty granted to their own torturers and mass murders should hold or be overturned. Whatever the actions of the current ARENA government, it's not the slaughter of the past. However in the United States no amnesty was ever given for war crimes in Central America. None was needed, because nobody ever faced the prospect of serious prosecution. Perhaps they never will. But that doesn't excuse the moral duty of every conscious person in the U.S.A to cry out for justice. Our killers haven't gone into retirement, but moved on to the next victim.
People like John Negroponte (now ambassador to Iraq) and Elliot Abrams (now Senior White House Advisor on the Middle East) can't be excused for ignorance any more than Dick Cheney. They were - and are - right in the thick of criminality. They must be stopped. To be silent is to be complicit.