This article examines the United States' role in El Salvador's brutal 12-year civil war, highlighting the military and economic aid provided, the training of military leaders, and the impact of US intervention on the conflict's outcome. It explores the motivations behind US involvement, the human cost of the war, and the lasting consequences for El Salvador, including ongoing gang violence, mass migration, and high incarceration rates.
The United States sent military and economic aid to the government of El Salvador during its bloody 12-year civil war , and trained military leaders. A reminder that the Cold War was not always “cold,” 75,000 people were killed in the war, most at the hands of the military and death squads. Some consider it less of a civil war and more of a proxy war; America’s justification for its involvement was that communism was spreading from the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
Brzezinski wrote: “We have cautioned the Archbishop and his advisors strongly against support for an extreme left which clearly does not share the humanitarian and progressive goals of the church.” He asked that the Pope intervene. Romeroto President Carter expressing his misgivings about the possibility of the U.S. sending aid to his country. The U.S. was thinking about giving military aid — a $49 million aid— to El Salvador.
Romero knew he was putting himself at risk. Two days after he sent the letter to Carter, the Catholic radio station that broadcast his weekly sermons was bombed. But he had to keep going. “I would be lying if I said I don’t have an instinct for my own preservation,” he, “but persecution is a sign we are on the right road.” He added: “We are now in the middle of a current that cannot be stopped, even if one dies.
We still don’t have all the answers about Romero’s killing, but the Carter administration got an inkling in November 1980, when a Salvadoran National Guard officera U.S. embassy political officer that Major Roberto D’Aubuisson organized a meeting a day or two before the assassination where participants drew lots to see who would carry out the killing. D’Aubuisson had beenby the U.S. at the Defense Department’s notorious School of the Americas.
In December, between 700 and 1,000 people — including children, elderly people, and disabled people — were killed at El Mozote by the elite U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion. The battalion’s leader, Domingo Monterrosa, attended the School of the Americas, like D’Aubuisson. When U.S. newspapers broke news of the massacre, the Reagan administration went to great lengths to convince the public and Congress that the story of the massacre was guerrilla propaganda.
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