MS-13 gangsters hunted by 'Black Shadow' death squad who 'hack off hands before killing'

[Judi Lynn]

5. U.S. DECLARATIONS DURING WAR UNDERCUT BY U.N. COMMISSION REPORT (Washington Post article, 3-21-93)

By Guy Gugliotta and Douglas Farah
March 21, 1993 at 12:00 a.m. EST

. . .

For 12 years, opponents of U.S. policy in Central America accused the Reagan and Bush administrations of ignoring widespread human rights abuses by the Salvadoran government and security forces and of systematically deceiving or even lying to Congress and the American people about the nature of an ally that would receive $6 billion in economic and military aid.

Their views appeared to be vindicated last week, when a three-man, U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission released a long-awaited report on 12 years of murder, torture and disappearance in El Salvador's civil war. The commission examined 22,000 complaints of atrocities and attributed 85 percent of a representative group of them to Salvadoran security forces or right-wing death squads. It blamed the remainder on the guerrilla Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

. . .

The Reagan administration is making no apologies. Elliott Abrams, who held two assistant secretaryships in the Reagan State Department, said "the administration's record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement," and attacks on it are "a post-Cold War effort to rewrite history." He dismissed Torricelli's threat as "McCarthyite crap."

Indeed, an examination of the public record fails to turn up statements that could be described as blatant lies. In speeches, interviews and countless appearances before Congress, a parade of Reagan and Bush officials vigorously defended U.S. policy in El Salvador, asserted that human rights was a top U.S. priority and insisted that the Salvadoran government's record was one of steady improvement.

. . .

But if there is no "smoking gun," there is overwhelming evidence, both in the officials' own documents and in their public statements, that if they did not know details about human rights abuses, it was because in many cases they chose not to know. The information was there.

. . .

And again, one year later, Ambassador Deane Hinton, in a speech before the American Chamber of Commerce in San Salvador, told his audience that "since 1979 perhaps as many as 30,000 Salvadorans have been murdered, not killed in battle, MURDERED {emphasis in the original}."

"Is it any wonder that much of the world is predisposed to believe the worst of a system which almost never brings to justice either those who perpetrate these acts or those who order them?" Hinton asked. The Reagan administration disavowed his remarks, saying the speech had not been cleared by the White House.

Critiques that came from outside the administration were most often ignored or dismissed as unwelcome: "The embassy never liked to hear the bad news," said Americas Watch counsel Jemera Rone, who worked in El Salvador in 1985-90. "So they attacked the messenger."

One reason so many people found it hard to believe that U.S. officials could not have known more about rights abuses and acted more aggressively to curb them is that the United States was deeply involved in running the war, from intelligence gathering to strategy planning to training of everyone from officers to foot soldiers.


senior U.S. official admitted he and others could have known much more than they did, but "these were the guys we were working with day in and day out, and we did not want to create a hostile situation." Besides, he said, "we were here to fight the guerrillas, they were the enemy, and we did not go around investigating our friends."

Sometimes officials painted the messenger as a communist dupe or even a sympathizer. In this way Abrams, as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, dismissed reports published in The Washington Post and the New York Times of massacres by Salvadoran army soldiers of hundreds of people in the village of El Mozote in December 1981.

More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/03/21/12-years-of-tortured-truth-on-el-salvador/9432bb6f-fbd0-4b18-b254-29caa919dc98/