EL SALVADOR

EL SALVADOR
Mourners for the murdered U.S.churchwomen December 1980.
Thousands of political assassinations in the early
years, particularly in San Salvador, were followed by
the decimation of many rural areas, mostly not by
bombardment.
THE DEAD
In This Republic of Suffering: Death
and the American Civil War, Drew
Faust traces the efforts for decades after
the war to count the dead. The count is
imprecise because of battle commanders’
inevitably poor records and the nature of
destruction of the war itself. There was so
much killing that the social fabric, North
and South, was badly torn. Her estimate
of estimates concludes that roughly two
percent of the nation’s inhabitants died as
a direct result of the war.
Wartime killing in El Salvador was
almost as great—about 1.5 percent of
the population. The United Nations estimated
75,000 killed, almost fifty percent
higher than U.S. deaths in Vietnam. In
rural areas and among the poor, everyone
knew somebody who had been killed.
However, the killing in El Salvador had
a very different quality. Rather than
soldiers killed in large-scale Civil War
battles, in El Salvador, 88 percent of the
Salvadoran losses were civilians, according
to the U.N. Peace Commission. Thousands
of political assassinations in the
early years, particularly in San Salvador,
were followed by the decimation of many
rural areas, mostly not by bombardment.
POST-WAR TRANSITIONAL
JUSTICE AND POLARIZATION
In late 1865, the Confederate commander
of the notorious Andersonville
prison, Captain William Wirz, after an
extensive trial with 140 witnesses (including
many from the Confederate side) was
found guilty of war crimes and hanged.
Some 13,000 prisoners died in Andersonville,
more than in any one Civil War battle.
The trial and Wirz remained controversial
for many decades; in 1909 a statue of him
was erected in Andersonville.
Neither Confederate General Nathan
Bedford, nor the more famous General
George Pickett (“Pickett’s Charge” at Gettysburg)
was tried. Following a battle victory
Bedford’s troups slaughtered some
three hundred black Union troops and a
dozen of their white officers. Apparently,
that was not considered a war crime.
Bedford became an early leader in the
Klu Klux Klan. Several statues of him
exist, including one in Selma, Alabama.
Pickett, a graduate of West Point and
former U.S. Army officer, fled to Canada
after Appomattox because he feared he
would be prosecuted and possibly executed
as a traitor. But in 1866 President
Andrew Johnson halted military tribunals,
and Pickett returned. In 1874 his
West Point classmate, President Ulysses
S. Grant, granted him complete amnesty.
(Pickett was first decorated during the
Mexican-American War in the Battle of
Chapultepec. In 1992 the Salvadoran
peace accords were signed in Chapultepec
Castle, the site of the battle.)
In the South, a brief political opening
for African Americans was swiftly
eclipsed by the Jim Crow laws that,
among other ills, disenfranchised blacks
for over a century until the Civil Rights
Act of 1965. In the North, for decades
during elections, Republicans from the
“Party of Lincoln” regularly “waved the
bloody shirt” to blame the South and
Democrats for the War.
In El Salvador, a broad amnesty law,
passed before the end of the war, has
largely shielded from prosecution or
civil trial the perpetrators and intellectual
authors of even the most notorious
cases of human rights abuses—the killing
of the Jesuits, the assassination of
Archbishop Romero, the massacre at
Mozote. However, continuing legal and
political actions using international law
attempt to hold perpetrators accountable.
Legal actions in the United States
resulted in two Salvadoran generals
being forced to move from their Florida
residences back to El Salvador. Efforts
to reunite Salvadoran orphans adopted
during the war by U.S. familes with their
Salvadoran relatives revealed a war-time
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