Murder of Archbishop Romero
In February 1980 Archbishop Óscar Romero published an open letter to US President Jimmy Carter in which he pleaded with him to suspend the United States’ ongoing program of military aid to the Salvadoran regime. He advised Carter that “Political power is in the hands of the armed forces. They know only how to repress the people and defend the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy.” Romero warned that US support would only “sharpen the injustice and repression against the organizations of the people which repeatedly have been struggling to gain respect for their fundamental human rights.”[66] On 24 March 1980, the Archbishop was assassinated while celebrating mass, the day after he called upon Salvadoran soldiers and security force members to not follow their orders to kill Salvadoran civilians. President Jimmy Carter stated this was a “shocking and unconscionable act”.[67] At his funeral a week later, government-sponsored snipers in the National Palace and on the periphery of the Gerardo Barrios Plaza were responsible for the shooting of 42 mourners.[68]
.. Murder and rape of US nuns
.. On December 2, 1980, members of the Salvadoran National Guard were suspected to have raped and murdered four American nuns and a laywoman. Maryknoll missionary nuns Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, and Ursuline nun Dorothy Kazel, and laywoman Jean Donovan were on a Catholic relief mission providing food, shelter, transport, medical care, and burial to death squad victims. U.S. military aid was briefly cut off in response to the murders but would be renewed within six weeks. The outgoing Carter administration increased military aid to the Salvadoran armed forces to $10 million which included $5 million in rifles, ammunition, grenades and helicopters.[72]
“Draining the Sea”
.. In its effort to defeat the insurgency, the Salvadoran Armed Forces carried out a “scorched earth” strategy, adopting tactics similar to those being employed by the counterinsurgency in neighboring Guatemala. These tactics were primarily derived and adapted from U.S. strategy during the Vietnam War and taught by American military advisors.[76]
.. An integral part of the Salvadoran Army’s counterinsurgency strategy entailed “draining the sea” or “drying up the ocean,” that is, eliminating the insurgency by eradicating its support base in the countryside. The primary target was the civilian population – displacing or killing them in order to remove any possible base of support for the rebels. The concept of “draining the sea” had its basis in a doctrine by Mao Zedong which emphasized that “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”[77]
.. “This may be an effective strategy for winning the war. It is, however, a strategy that involves the use of terror tactics—bombings, strafings, shellings and, occasionally, massacres of civilians.”[78]
.. On 18 March, three days after the sweep in Cabañas began, 4-8,000 survivors of the sweep (mostly women and children) attempted to cross the Rio Lempa into Honduras to flee violence. There, they were caught between Salvadoran and Honduran troops. The Salvadoran Air Force, subsequently bombed and strafed the fleeing civilians with machine gun fire, killing hundreds
.. Atlacatl was a rapid response counter-insurgency battalion organized at the US Army School of the Americas in Panama in 1980.
.. Atlacatl soldiers were equipped and directed by U.S. military advisers operating in El Salvador[82][83] and were described as “the pride of the United States military team in San Salvador. Trained in antiguerrilla operations, the battalion was intended to turn a losing war around.”[84]
.. The November 1981 operation was commanded by Lt. Col. Sigifredo Ochoa, a former Treasury Police chief with a reputation for brutality. Ochoa was close associate of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson and was alleged to have been involved in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
.. Col. Ochoa claimed that hundreds of guerrillas had been killed but was able to show journalists only fifteen captured weapons, half of them virtual antiques, suggesting that most of those killed in the sweep were unarmed.[87]
.. he field commander said they were under orders to kill everyone, including the children, who he asserted would just grow up to become guerrillas if they let them live. “We were going to make an example of these people,” he said.[90
.. El Mozote Massacre
.. The US steadfastly denied the existence of the El Mozote massacre, dismissing reports of it as leftist “propaganda,” until secret US cables were declassified in the 1990s.[91
.. The army and death squads forced many of them to flee to the United States, but most were denied asylum.[95]
.. A US congressional delegation that on January 17–18, 1981, visited the refugee camps in El Salvador on a fact finding mission submitted a report to Congress which found that: “the Salvadoran method of ‘drying up the ocean’ is to eliminate entire villages from the map, to isolate the guerrillas, and deny them any rural base off which they can feed.”[96]
.. El Salvador’s National Federation of Lawyers, which represented all of the country’s bar associations, refused to participate in drafting the 1982 electoral law. The lawyers said that the elections couldn’t possibly be free and fair during a state of siege that suspended all basic rights and freedoms.
.. Fearful of a d’Aubuisson presidency for public relations purposes, the CIA financed Duarte’s campaign with some two million dollars.[113]
.. Nearly two weeks earlier, US Vice President Dan Quayle on a visit to San Salvador told army leaders that human rights abuses committed by the military had to stop. Sources associated with the military said afterword that Quayle’s warning was dismissed as propaganda for American consumption aimed at the US Congress and the U.S. public.[131] At the same time, U.S. advisers were sending a different message to the Salvadoran military – “do what you need to do to stop the commies, just don’t get caught“.[132] A former U.S. intelligence officer suggested the death squads needed to leave less visual evidence, that they should stop dumping bodies on the side of the road because “they have an ocean and they ought to use it“.[133]
.. After 10 years of war, more than one million people had been displaced out of a population of 5,389,000. 40% of the homes of newly displaced people were completely destroyed and another 25% were in need of major repairs
.. At war’s end, the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador registered more than 22,000 complaints of political violence in El Salvador, between January 1980 and July 1991, 60 percent about summary killing, 25 percent about kidnapping, and 20 percent about torture. These complaints attributed almost 85 percent of the violence to the Salvadoran Army and security forces alone.
- The Salvadoran Armed Forces, which were massively supported by the United States (4.6 billion euros), were accused in 60 percent of the complaints,
- the security forces (i.e. the National Guard, Treasury Police and the National Police) in 25 percent,
- military escorts and civil defense units in 20 percent of complaints,
- the death squads in approximately 10 percent, and
- the FMLN in 5 percent.[157]
.. The report concluded that more than 70,000 people were killed, many in the course of gross violation of their human rights. More than 25 per cent of the populace was displaced as refugees before the U.N. peace treaty in 1992
.. The State’s terrorism was affected by the security forces, the Army, the National Guard, and the Treasury Police;[1]:308[167] yet it was the paramilitary death squads who gave the Government plausible deniability of, and accountability for, the political killings. Typically, a death squad dressed in civilian clothes and traveled in anonymous vehicles (dark windows, blank license plates). Their terrorism consisted of publishing future-victim death lists, delivering coffins to said future victims, and sending the target-person an invitation to his/her own funeral.[168][169
.. the objective of death-squad-terror seemed not only to eliminate opponents, but also, through torture and the gruesome disfigurement of bodies, to terrorize the population.[170
.. the FMLN continuously violated the human rights of many Salvadorans and other individuals identified as right-wing supporters,
- military targets,
- pro-government politicians,
- intellectuals,
- public officials, and
- judges.
These violations included
kidnapping, bombings, rape, and killing.[158]
.. the constitution was amended to prohibit the military from playing an internal security role except under extraordinary circumstances
.. By 1993—nine months ahead of schedule—the military had cut personnel from a wartime high of 63,000 to the level of 32,000 required by the peace accords. By 1999, ESAF’s strength stood at less than 15,000
Human Rights Commission of El Salvador
.. On 26 October 1987, Herbert Ernesto Anaya, head of the CDHES, was assassinated
.. Many of the documents, from the CIA and the Defense Department, are not available
Trump Team Pushed False Story Line About Meeting With Kremlin-Tied Lawyer, Memo Shows
For nearly a year, the denials from President Trump’s lawyers and spokeswoman were unequivocal. No, the president did not dictate a misleading statement released in his son’s name.
“He certainly didn’t dictate,” said the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“The president was not involved in the drafting of that statement,” his lawyer Jay Sekulow told NBC News.
.. But in a confidential, hand-delivered memo to the special counsel, Mr. Trump’s lawyers acknowledged that, yes, Mr. Trump had dictated the statement.
.. Prosecutors are asking whether the statement was part of an effort by the president to obstruct a federal investigation.
.. it highlights a communication strategy that the White House has used repeatedly: deny facts, attack news outlets and dismiss journalism as “fake news.”
Late last year, for example, reporters revealed a White House plan to fire the secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, and replace him with the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo. Not so, Mr. Trump angrily replied, dismissing the stories as fake news. Ultimately, Mr. Trump fired Mr. Tillerson, replaced him with Mr. Pompeo and said he had been talking about doing so “for a long time.”
.. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, acknowledged as much in an ABC News interview this weekend, even as he blamed the string of false statements on faulty memory and incorrect assumptions. “This is the reason you don’t let the president testify,” Mr. Giuliani said. “Our recollection keeps changing, or we’re not even asked a question and somebody makes an assumption.”
.. But Mr. Trump’s team was asked the question, again and again, by multiple reporters. The answer was consistent. Then on Monday, Ms. Sanders refused to answer the question or address her previous denial. “I’m not going to get into a back-and-forth,” she said
.. But when approached by journalists, the younger Mr. Trump issued a statement that omitted all of that. Instead, the statement said that the meeting had primarily been about Russian adoption policy. When The Times reported that the president himself had “signed off on” the statement, Mr. Trump’s advisers pushed back hard.
“They’re incorrect,” Mr. Sekulow said on CNN.
“The New York Times is wrong?” he was asked.
“Yeah, I know, is that shocking that sometimes they make a mistake?” Mr. Sekulow said.
.. Then The Washington Post reported that Mr. Trump had not only approved it, but had personally dictated it. Mr. Sekulow responded, “Apart from being of no consequence, the characterizations are misinformed, inaccurate and not pertinent.”
.. The Times has since obtained a confidential memo to Mr. Mueller acknowledging that “the president dictated a short but accurate response to The New York Times article on behalf of his son, Donald Trump, Jr.”
.. Mr. Trump has for years held the view that fudging the facts with journalists is far from a federal offense, and has acknowledged as much in civil lawsuits. He has acknowledged practicing what he calls “truthful hyperbole,” and has waved away outright falsehoods, dismissing them as smart public relations.
.. After his firing, Mr. Tillerson delivered a barely veiled criticism of his former boss’s trustworthiness, declaring that American democracy was threatened by a crisis of integrity. “When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth even on what may seem the most trivial matters, we go wobbly on America,”
.. Mr. Trump has said he is eager to sit for an interview. He told reporters in January that he expected to do so within “two to three weeks.”
That did not happen, and his lawyers are not sure it ever will.
The Baptist Apocalypse
Such a God might, for instance, offer political success as a temptation rather than a reward — or use an unexpected presidency not to save Americans but to chastise them.
.. so far the Trump presidency has clearly been a kind of apocalypse — not (yet) in the “world-historical calamity” sense of the word, but in the original Greek meaning: an unveiling, an uncovering, an exposure of truths that had heretofore been hidden.
.. That exposure came first for the Republican Party’s establishment, who were revealed as something uncomfortably close to liberal caricature in their mix of weakness, cynicism and power worship. It came next for the technocrats and the data nerds of the Democratic Party, who were revealed as ineffectual, clueless and self-regarding ..
.. And then it came for a range of celebrated media men, from Harvey Weinstein to Matt Lauer ..
.. It has come as well for figures whose style anticipated him (Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, that whole ménage) and for figures who have deliberately attached themselves to his populist revolt. The sins of Roy Moore were more exposed by the Trump era, and now likewise the racist paranoia of Roseanne Barr.
.. a similar moral exposure has come to precisely the sector of American Christianity where support for Donald Trump ran strongest — the denominational heart of conservative evangelicalism, the Southern Baptist Convention.
.. The main case is Paige Patterson, the now-erstwhile president of a major Baptist seminary in Fort Worth, who was eased into retirement over revelations that he’d counseled abused women to return to their husbands and allegedly shamed and silenced at least one rape victim.
.. Patterson is a beginning, not an end.
.. Late last year I wrote an essay speculating about the possibility of an “evangelical crisis” in this era, driven by the gap between the older and strongly pro-Trump constituency in evangelical churches and those evangelicals, often younger, who either voted for the president reluctantly or rejected his brand of politics outright.
.. “the big story behind the story of Patterson’s fall is a high-stakes showdown between two generations of Southern Baptist leaders.” Both generations are theologically conservative, but the figures raising their voices against Patterson have been — generally — associated with a vision of their church that’s more countercultural, less wedded to the institutional Republican Party, more likely to see racial reconciliation as essential to the Baptist future and intent on proving that a traditional theology of sex need not lead to sexism.
.. Whereas Patterson’s defenders represent — again, to generalize — the more pro-Trump old guard in the Baptist world, with a strong inclination toward various forms of chauvinism and Christian nationalism.
.. It is not a coincidence that Russell Moore, perhaps the most prominent anti-Trump Baptist, provided early support to Patterson’s critics — while Robert Jeffress, whose Dallas church sets “Make America Great Again” to music, labeled the calls for Patterson’s resignation a “witch hunt.”
.. it’s wiser to regard an era of exposure like this one as a test, which can be passed but also failed. A discredited “old guard” doesn’t automatically lose power; a chauvinism revealed doesn’t just evaporate. And the temptation to dismiss discomfiting revelations as fake news, to retreat back into ignorance and self-justification, is at least as powerful as the impulse to really reckon with the truth.
.. So the question posed by this age of revelation is simple: Now that you know something new and troubling and even terrible about your leaders or your institutions, what will you do with this knowledge?
Pressed on False Claims About Muslims, U.S. Ambassador Goes Silent
“Do you now reach the conclusion that you were wrong when you stated that politicians and cars were being burned?” a reporter asked the ambassador, Peter Hoekstra, in his first news conference with Dutch journalists. “Was that a wrong remark, was it false?”
“I issued a statement, I expressed my regrets and my apology for the comments that I made,” the ambassador replied. “And I am not revisiting the issue.”
.. The ambassador repeated that he did not want to revisit the remarks and that he had expressed his regrets. He then stopped replying, looking silently around the room as journalists continued to question him
.. “Any example of a Dutch politician who is burned in recent years?” one reporter asked.
“This is the Netherlands, you have to answer questions,” another said, as Mr. Hoekstra remained silent.
“Please, this is not how it works,” another reporter said.
.. The comments were captured on video, but Mr. Hoekstra denied ever having made them in an interview last month with Wouter Zwart, a reporter with the Dutch news program Nieuwsuur.
.. “I didn’t say that. That is actually an incorrect statement,” Mr. Hoekstra told Mr. Zwart. “Yeah, we would call it fake news.” Shortly after that, in the same interview, Mr. Hoekstra denied having used the term “fake news.”