New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

McNALLY: Imperial Narcissism 97
Between 1980 and 1991 El Salvador experienced an armed conflict
which led to gross and extensive human rights violations,
including extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, “disappearances”
and torture. Among the victims were human rights
defenders, trade unionists, lawyers, journalists, opponents of the
government (whether real or presumed) and, for the most part,
innocent civilians who had no direct involvement in the conflict.
Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants
massacred. Children were direct victims of extrajudicial
executions (E.J.E.'s) or “disappearance”. 40
Overall, Amnesty estimates that 75,000 civilians were tortured and
executed in the conflict. The United Nations Truth Commission Report
(1983) found that the very soldiers trained by the United States were
responsible for the vast majority of these massacres and civilian deaths,
including the murders of Archbishop Romero, four U.S. churchwomen
and six Jesuit priests. The U.N. also determined that more than twothirds
of the sixty military officers guilty of the worst atrocities were
trained at the School of the Americas (S.O.A.), located at Fort Benning,
Georgia. Ten graduates of the S.O.A. participated in the appalling
massacre of about 1,000 civilians in the Salvadorean village of El
Mozote. 41 Yet none of this prevented the U.S. government from coughing
up $6 billion in aid to Salvadorean governments and their troops during
the civil war. Indeed, Washington appears if anything to have been
encouraged by these brutal tactics, many of which were learned at the
S.O.A., from C.I.A. manuals and from U.S. military advisors on the
ground. U.S. advisors even worked directly with Dr. Hector Antonio
Regalado, the infamous San Salvador dentist dubbed “Dr. Death” for his
use of pliers to extract teeth from those he tortured, before they were
customarily executed. 42
And El Salvador was no isolated case. As two intrepid reporters for the
Baltimore Sun reported in 1995, the U.S. government was intimately
involved with torturers and state-sanctioned murderers in Honduras,
particularly Battalion 316, a secret military unit that housed death
squads. Here there is another link to Iraq and the “war on terror,” since
the U.S. ambassador to Honduras at the time, John Negroponte, has
played a central role recently in Iraq and was appointed in 2005 as
Bush’s director of national intelligence. This despite the fact that, as the