Ricardo Chavira Chicano

Salvadoran Lt. Colonel Domingo Monterrosa was the government’s and Washington’s star warrior in the war against FMLN leftist insurgents.

I spent a day with him and found him engaging and chatty. Much later I learned that he was a repugnant criminal. Here is an excerpt from my book about my encounter with Monterrosa.

He was the darling of the Salvadoran armed forces and the adversary the FMLN regarded as the most formidable. He was that and more, not the least, which was a very able propagandist, beloved by his troops. I saw the former side of him in my April 1984 interview, when he was the commanding officer of the Third Infantry Brigade of San Miguel.

Monterrosa welcomed me effusively when I arrived at his headquarters. The government was winning and had the rebels on the run, he insisted. He showed me several papers that he claimed were captured FMLN documents. They described, he said, deep concern among the rebels, who feared their struggle was stalling.

He was a graduate of the US Army’s School of the Americas, where for fifty-four years many Latin American soldiers, including Manuel Noriega, were trained. FMLN leaders regarded Monterrosa as a formidable adversary.

Abruptly, Monterrosa asked if I had plans for the day. I did not, and he invited me to accompany him to visit soldiers in a combat zone. We traveled aboard Monterrosa’s Huey helicopter.

Our destination was Cacahuatique, a mountain in Morazán the army used mainly for communications. We landed close to a group of about twenty soldiers. There were two dead, encased in body bags, soldiers killed in combat the day before. Monterrosa sighed. “Boys, of course, we are sad to lose companions,” he told the somber soldiers. “Unfortunately, this is part of the war. These men have fallen, but we are still standing ready to fight even harder.”

A few months later, the rebels told me that Monterrosa ordered the massacre of more than 900 civilians, including women and children. The slaughter took place in December 1981 in and around a village called El Mozote.

In 2011, the Salvadoran government apologized for what was the largest massacre in modern Latin American history.

Monterrosa never answered for his heinous crime. He was killed in a helicopter crash.

Historian Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the banality of evil. She was referring to Nazi mass killer Adolf Eichman.

Monterrosa was the perfect example of such evil.