Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

138 • DEATH SQUADSaccounted for. As late as August 2002, mass graves were being foundand exhumed, including one in Rabinal, a city of 60,000, in whichas many as 800 people were believed to have been buried followingdeath squad executions.El Salvador had death squad activity during the 1970s, involvingsuch groups as the rural militia ORDEN. This group was declareddisbanded in November 1979, but in fact its members appear to haveentered newer death squads such as the White Warriors’ Union andthe Maximiliano Hernández Martínez Anti-Communist Brigade.From 1979 until 1982, killings by Salvadoran death squads sometimesexceeded 800 people each month and included among theirvictims Archbishop Oscar Romero y Galdamez, killed on 24 March1980, and four American church workers on 4 December 1980. On28 March 1998 the four Salvadoran ex-soldiers convicted for thiscrime stated that they had killed the nuns on orders from their militarysuperiors. The families of the slain nuns filed wrongful deathlawsuits against the commanding officers of the four guardsmen on12 May 1999. This death squad activity created much controversyregarding the Reagan administration’s support of the Salvadorantransitional regime against the Farabundo Martí National LiberationFront (FMLN) leftist insurgency, since it was clear that manyof the leaders and members of the death squads were themselvesmembers of the Salvadoran military and police. By the mid-1980s,however, the murder rate had dropped to less than 100 killings permonth and by late 1988 was about 16 killings per month, a figurethat may be accounted for by ordinary murders rather than deathsquad activity.Currently in Colombia, paramilitary groups, such as the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), Colombia Without Rebels, andseveral neighborhood vigilante groups, have been involved in killingsuspected rebels, leftists, migrant workers, and vagrants. WhatColombians refer to as “social cleansing” accounted for as many as2,000 murders in the period 1988 to 1993. One of the most notoriousAUC actions was the 18–19 February 2000 attack on the town of ElSalada in the eastern Colombian state of Bolívar, in which around70 people were murdered over a two-day period for supposed collaborationwith left-wing guerrillas. The AUC also robbed and rapedothers in the town of roughly 1,300, whose remaining citizens fled interror. In Peru a retired Peruvian general indicated in December 1996