EL SALVADOR

THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
Salvadoran soldiers lectured on human rights in August 1984. The slaying of six Jesuit priests in 1989 suggested the training “didn’t amount to
anything,” says reporter Preston.
It would take the kidnapping and killing of three
American nuns and a lay church worker in December
1980 to force a suspension of U.S. military aid.
fearless critic of government repression,
who in one of his last sermons called for an
end to U.S. military aid. It was the time of
“liberation theology,” and 11 priests active
on behalf of the poor were killed in three
years, according to a history of the conflict
by William Blum. (It may be apocryphal,
but it is said that the slogan of one death
squad was, “Be a Patriot, Kill a Priest.”)
It would take the kidnapping and
killing of three American nuns and a lay
church worker in December 1980 to force
a suspension of U.S. military aid. (Four
members of the National Guard were
later imprisoned for the crime—but not
before what the 1993 United Nations
Truth Commission report labeled a coverup
by authorities.) Soon after the churchwomen’s
murder, the FMLN launched an
offensive so fierce Washington feared a
rebel victory, and the Carter administration
resumed aid.
The worst of the political violence took
place between 1980 and 1983, according
to journalists and diplomats who worked
in El Salvador at the time. “The deaths
and the bodies never stopped,” says Nickelsberg,
recalling that his housekeeper,
who walked to work, often alerted him
that the killers had been at work the night
before. The United States was both ally
and enemy, says Clifford Krauss, who covered
the El Salvador conflict for The Wall
Street Journal and The New York Times.
“I was in the U.S. Embassy when it was
attacked by the death squads in 1980,” he
says. “It was a complex relationship that
wasn’t always friendly.”
Far from ignoring the carnage, Hamilton
says that Deane Hinton, U.S. Ambassador
from 1981 to 1983, lobbied hard,
privately and publicly, for the government
to get the military and the three branches
of the national police—the National
Guard, the National Police and the Treasury
Police—under control. In April 1982,
a tough Hinton speech to the American
Chamber of Commerce made front page
news in the United States. “The gorillas of
the right are as dangerous as the guerrillas
of the left,” he told the businessmen.
“The official American community [in
El Salvador] was largely outraged by what
was happening,” Hamilton comments.
“One of the hardest things for us was
explaining away the stupid things they
were saying in Washington.” There, officials
including Reagan aide Gen. Alexander
Haig, U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick
and North Carolina Senator Jesse
Helms vigorously defended U.S. involvement
in the war and labeled allegations of
atrocities as FMLN propaganda. Helms
befriended former military officer Roberto
D’Aubuisson, founder of the right-wing
ARENA party, who is now acknowledged
as the author of much of the death squad
violence, including the murder of Archbishop
Romero. In that 1981 cable to the
State Department, he was identified as the
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