Ricardo Chavira Chicano

It is striking how media reports about the border crisis omit any mention of Washington’s role in creating the catastrophe. From 1984 to 1990, I was a Time correspondent and extensively covered Central America’s wars.

El Salvador’s conflict was the most vicious conflict. The United States became heavily involved in the war. Washington chose to fuel the war rather than search for negotiated peace. The war sparked a surge in refugees bound for the United States.

In the excerpt from my book that follows, I mention a Time story that I helped report. It was unprofessionally edited, reflecting the magazine’s conservative bias. The excerpt relates my experience in 1984; it begins with me stranded in the outskirts of a town called Metalio.

My rental car broke down, stranding me in the countryside. I flagged down one of the pick-up trucks that served as rural public transportation. When we came to an army checkpoint, a soldier ordered all of us passengers and the driver out and to present national identity cards. I told the soldier I didn’t have a card and was about to show him my US passport. He angrily pointed his rifle at my stomach.

“Get over there with the rest of them,” he said, motioning to a slope on the side of the highway.

There were about five men, face down with their thumbs tied together behind their backs. One craned his neck to look at me. He appeared terrified. The soldier ordered me to lie face down with the other men. I was sure that if I joined the men on the ground, I would be arrested and possibly tortured and killed. I told the soldier I was an American, and that was why I didn’t have a card. But I did have a military-issued card identifying me as a journalist and my passport to show. I explained the documents, and he let me get back in the truck.

Between 1984 and 1986, when I often reported on El Salvador, I would learn that the Salvadoran Army’s intelligence officials and soldiers, in fact, comprised the death squads.

Non-military vigilantes were a tiny minority.

The American and Salvadoran governments skillfully promoted the notion that death squads were shadowy vigilantes or just committed garden-variety acts of violence that had nothing to do with politics. Despite my efforts to shape the narrative, the Time story repeated this misleading version.

In reality, American military advisers and CIA agents posted to El Salvador to help direct the war were complicit in the death squad activity. The death squads were nothing more than an extension of CIA policy and Salvadoran military intelligence. The death squads, then, were an integral element of the nation’s counterinsurgency strategy.

This was to be expected. After all, the American counter-insurgency operations had long included the use of death squads. In Vietnam, the CIA coordinated the Phoenix Program, an assassination campaign aimed at destroying the Viet Cong’s civilian support structure. It was in effect from 1965 to 1972 and resulted in the assassination of between 26,000 and 41,000 suspected supporters.

There were 55 American military advisers deployed to Salvadoran military bases. From there, they essentially directed the war. The advisers were allowed to carry weapons but were not to engage in combat. The FMLN, however, charged that the advisers routinely fought alongside Salvadoran troops. In addition to the advisers, some 50 additional American soldiers supported the government’s efforts to defeat the rebels.

During the war, Washington lavished the Salvadoran government with some $4 billion in aid, most of it military. The American embassy held military briefings for journalists, usually conducted by the head of US military advisers, Army Colonel James Steele. He had served in Vietnam and was a counterinsurgency expert who would train Iraqi paramilitary forces years later. One day before a briefing, I encountered him in an embassy bathroom. He griped that it was hard getting Salvadoran troops to fight effectively. I asked him to explain. Steele said that earlier that day, he had visited an army outpost. Soldiers told him they had murdered several guerrilla prisoners. I thought the killings had upset him. But he said, “The morons didn’t even interrogate them first.”