A U.S. extradition case involving a former Salvadoran colonel is resurrecting memories involving the U.S. anti-communist crusade during the Cold War and cold-blooded murders that came with it.
According to an article in last Sunday’s New York Times, in November 1989 soldiers from the Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvador Army entered a Jesuit university and murdered six priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter.
The justification? The priests were considered to be communists and, in the eyes of El Salvador’s right-wing, U.S.-supported military dictatorship, that made them fair game to be murdered. Presumably, the women were considered “collateral damage” or maybe just inconvenient witnesses.
After all, don’t forget that the murders occurred while the much-vaunted Cold War was being waged. The idea was that in “war,” it’s considered permissible to kill the enemy. Since the priests were suspected of having ties to the leftist forces that were opposing the country’s pro-U.S. military dictatorship, that effectively made them enemy combatants in El Salvador’s civil war and, therefore, subject to being killed with impunity.
Sound familiar? It should. Because that’s the same reasoning that undergirds America’s much-vaunted “war on terrorism.” All that is needed to take out someone in the “war on terrorism” is a conclusion by the military or the CIA that the person is a “terrorist.” Once that conclusion is arrived at, it is considered permissible to murder the person, including American citizens. That’s, in fact, why American citizens Anwar al Awlaki and his 16-year-old son are now dead. Since the murders were committed by the national security establishment, the U.S. federal courts have absolutely refused to interfere, just as the federal courts in El Salvador, until recently, refused to interfere with that nation’s Cold War murders.
The mindset shared by El Salvador’s military dictatorship and the U.S. national security establishment is not a coincidence. Guess who supported and allied with El Salvador’s military dictatorship during the time that it murdered those Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and their daughter.
You guessed it! The U.S. government!
Take a wild stab at how much U.S. taxpayer money went into the coffers of those military brutes during El Salvador’s civil war. $4 billion!
That’s not all. Guess who trained the Atlactl batallion. Yep, the U.S. government did, specifically the U.S. army at Ft. Bragg.
Back then, murdering suspected communists wasn’t considered any big deal. The idea was that the only good communist was a dead communist.
Recall, for example, the 1973 coup in Chile which the U.S. government instigated in order to install another pro-U.S. military dictatorship, one headed by army strongman Gen. Augusto Pinochet. After Pinochet took power, he proceeded to round up, incarcerate, torture, or rape some 30,000 innocent people and to murder 3,000 innocent people, all with the full support of the foreign government that installed him into power — the U.S. government, operating specifically through the national-security branch, i.e., the Pentagon and the CIA.
Now, I say “innocent” because the only “crime” that these people had committed was believing in communism or socialism. Even though I’m a libertarian and, therefore, have a deep animosity toward any form of collectivism, I happen to believe that people have the fundamental, God-given right to believe in any ism they want, including communism and socialism.
Therefore, in my books, those 33,000 victims who were arrested, tortured, raped, or murdered by Pinochet and his goons hadn’t committed any crime whatsoever. But in the eyes of proponents of the Cold War, they were enemy combatants — communists — who were subject to being taken out without notice, hearing, trial, or due process, just like suspected terrorists today.
By the way, Pinochet’s murder of former Chilean official Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington, D.C., was guided by the same Cold War mindset that guided the members of the Atlacatl battalion. Since Letelier had served in the administration of Salvador Allende, the self-avowed communist-socialist whom the people of Chile had elected to be their president, that made him fair game for the car-bombing that took his life. Presumably, his young American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, who was killed at the same time, was considered collateral damage.
Interestingly enough, Justice Department officials at that time considered Letelier’s assasination to be an illegal murder, rather than a justified killing under the Cold War mentality.
Interestingly enough, some U.S. officials living today are having a similar change of heart on the Cold War murders in El Salvador. According to the Times’ article, the Justice Department is now pushing for the extradition to Spain of former Salvadoran Col. Inocente Orlando Montano Morales, who was serving as vice minister of defense during the time of the murders, to stand trial for the murder of the Jesuit priests and the two women. Montano was living in Boston but in 2011 was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of immigration fraud and is currently residing in a federal penitentiary.
Not surprisingly, some Cold War dead-enders are complaining bitterly over this change of direction. According to the Times,
Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs under President Ronald Reagan, and Edwin G. Corr, a former American ambassador to El Salvador, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that Salvadoran military officials were American allies and that American officials today were forgetting “the circumstances in which they acted, and the debts owed to those who made American successes around the world possible.”
What successes? Maybe they’re referring to the successes in killing communists all over the world as part of their much-vaunted Cold War against America’s World War II partner and ally (and Nazi Germany’s avowed enemy) the Soviet Union. Presumably, that would include Vietnam, where they killed millions of Vietnamese people and sacrificed 58,000 American soldiers, all for nothing.
I would be remiss if I failed to point out that today U.S. officials, including those in the Pentagon, are doing everything they can to align the United States with the communist regime in Vietnam — yes, the same regime that defeated the U.S. national-security establishment in the Vietnam War and killed those 58,000 plus American soldiers. (See “Obama’s Coziness with Vietnam’s Communists” by Jacob G. Hornberger and “Defense Secretary Panetta Seeks Closer U.S. Ties to Vietnam During Visit” by William Wan in the Washington Times.)
Or maybe Abrams and Corr are referring to the following:
The Reagan administration viewed the right-wing Salvadoran regime as a bulwark against the formation of a leftist government that might have aligned itself with the Soviet Union.
Yikes! Not a leftist government! Oh, my gosh! Just think — if a leftist government had been permitted to take over in El Salvador — maybe one similar to that of Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson — why, that could have meant the end of the United States!
Or just think — what if El Salvador had aligned itself with the Soviet Union, like Cuba did! Oh, my gosh, surely the dominoes would have begun falling and today Americans would undoubtedly be speaking Russian or communist.
The truth is that it was all Cold War malarkey, whose only real success was in keeping the national-security establishments in high cotton, not only in places that were run by right-wing, pro-U.S. military dictatorships, like Chile, Argentina, and El Salvador, but also right here in the United States.
Ask yourself: What difference would it have made if El Salvador or, for that matter, any other country, had aligned itself with the Soviet Union during the Cold War? It wouldn’t have made one iota of difference. You see, that was the big scare that they used to justify the revolutionary transformation of the federal government into a national security state. “The dominoes are falling! The communists are coming! Look under your beds!”
But it was always a bogus concern, one that President John F. Kennedy himself finally had come to realize at that time he was assassinated, which was precisely why he himself was reaching out to both the Soviet Union and Cuba in secret negotiations to end the Cold War, which U.S. national-security state officials knew full well would likely have spelt the death knell of the entire Cold War national-security establishment. (See FFF’s ebooks Regime Change: The JFK Assassination by Jacob Hornberger, The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger, and JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.)
Finally, let’s not forget that the U.S. government turned leftist and socialist all on its own accord, which American conservatives now support, as reflected by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schooling, education grants, and other socialist programs, all of which just happen to form the heart of the socialist systems in Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere.
The Justice Department is right to cooperate with foreign governments to bring accused Cold War state murderers to justice. Too bad Justice Department officials have not yet extended their reasoning to U.S. national-security state personnel who have murdered and tortured people as part of their much-vaunted “war on terrorism.”