Ricardo Chavira Chicano

This is an extremely long post

THE KILLERS

By Ricardo Chavira

May 27, 2025

They were affable, accommodating, and quick to smile or laugh. The two Salvadoran men I knew shared long, intimate relationships with the United States government.

These relationships facilitated the slaughter of hundreds, possibly thousands, of their fellow Salvadorans. More than $4.5 billion in American aid flowed to the Salvadoran government during the civil war. Hundreds of U.S. military advisors oversaw the 12-year conflict that cost 40,000 lives.

Today, the Washington-San Salvador partnership is enabling the illegal deportation of migrants to the Central American nation.

It is the latest expression of an alliance characterized by extreme violence and disregard for life.

Even though I spent numerous hours with José Alberto “Chele” Medrano and Lt. Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, I did not suspect the men were monsters.

I first met Monterrosa in San Miguel, where he was the commander of the Third Infantry Brigade. San Miguel is a city and department (El Salvador uses the term department to designate what are called provinces in other nations) that was fiercely contested by government troops and the insurgent Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the FMLN. It was a coalition of five leftist organizations intent on overthrowing the government.

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

The commander 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 of which was a very able propagandist, beloved by his troops. I saw the latter side of him during my April 1984 interview with him.

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 department 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.”

 The pep talk continued for a few more minutes. However, one soldier with whom I spoke afterward was angry and frustrated. “The guerrillas hit us and run away,” he said. “They won’t stand and fight. They are cowards.”

I noted that hit-and-run tactics were central to guerrilla warfare. He simply nodded.

Monterrosa gathered the soldiers in a circle and, using a stick, drew in the dirt a patrol route we would follow. Naturally, I had not planned to go out searching for rebels, but it was an opportunity to see Monterrosa in action. He directed the soldiers to divide into two groups, march in opposite directions, looking to flush out and engage guerrillas, and then meet toward the bottom of the mountain. He reminded them there would be no prisoners, making clear insurgents would be killed. 

I went with Monterrosa’s patrol. About an hour in, automatic rifle fire crackled for several seconds. I dived to the ground. Monterrosa and his soldiers just knelt on one knee and chuckled at what they said was my overreaction. I laughed good-naturedly, but even today I believe my ma- neuver was highly prudent. A prone human body was much harder to hit than one kneeling. The search for insurgents proved fruitless.

For the next two hours, Monterrosa stopped periodically to chat with farmers. He casually asked about the guerrillas. The farmers were polite but restrained. None offered any detailed information. “My dogs were barking a lot the other night,” said one. “The boys must have been passing through.”

The guerrillas were typically called los muchachos. But the rebels called each other “compañeros” or “compas.”

More than a year later, in late December 1985, I spent a week embedded with ERP combatants. We visited some of the same farms Monterrosa and I had.   The farmers happily greeted the rebels on that occasion—most offered detailed information about government troop movements. One of the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) leaders reminded the farmers that it was wise to criticize the rebels. “That way, the soldiers don’t imagine that you help us.”

A campesino said he liked giving the soldiers false information. One of the rebels endorsed that tactic, adding that providing the soldiers with some info was important. “If you never have anything to say, they will mark you as collaborators. The soldiers know we pass through here often.”

The twin outings gave me a clear picture of guerrilla warfare and the government’s challenge in countering it. The people were with the rebels and not the military.

After our return to San Miguel, I thanked Monterrosa for giving me an entire day to interview him. Heading back to San Salvador, I understood that Monterrosa certainly committed human rights in what was a brutal war. I also saw what made him a challenging opponent for the FMLN.

Several years later, I learned much more about how Monterrosa had benefited from his ties to the United States.

He graduated from the American military’s School of the Americas, a Latin American military personnel training center. Students honed military skills and were taught counterinsurgency tactics. In 1996, the Pentagon admitted that training manuals used at the school for nearly ten years advocated torture, extortion, and blackmail.

Its alums included Manuel Noriega and dozens of officers who participated in most coups and oversaw death squads.

In 1980, Monterrosa became the first commander of the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite “rapid response battalion” created, trained, and equipped by the United States. This specialized unit was one of three first-response battalions established by the Salvadoran Army with U.S. assistance after the FMLN conducted a successful offensive in January 1981.

Just two-and-a-half years before we met, Monterrosa ordered and oversaw the largest single massacre of civilians in modern Latin American history.

The El Mozote massacre occurred between December 10-13, 1981, in the village of El Mozote and surrounding areas in Morazán Department.

Between 811 and over 1,000 civilians were killed, including 533 children – nearly half of all victims were minors.

Monterrosa’s Atlacatl Batallion arrived in the area on December 10 and began rounding up civilians, some of whom had sheltered in El Mozote, a village.

Over the next few days, soldiers tortured and executed the men, raped the women, and killed them and the children. More than 500 of the victims were children, some as young as two years old.

An American military adviser accompanied Monterrosa and reportedly tried to dissuade him from carrying out the atrocity. The Atlacatl Batallion received U.S. training and funding.

For years, successive Salvadoran governments insisted the atrocity had not happened. It was denied even after a U.N. truth commission confirmed details of the massacre. 

In 1990, I went to what had been El Mozote. It was abandoned, and residents told me ghosts haunted the site.

President Mauricio Funes admitted the truth in 2012 and formally asked the Salvadoran people for forgiveness.

Salvadoran President Duarte called José Alberto Medrano, alias “El Chele,” “the father of the death squads, the chief assassin of them all.” I interviewed Medrano on March 22, 1985. Founder of ANSESAL and ORDEN, the retired military man and idol of the far-right, said that he formed the organizations as part of an ideological struggle with communists operating in the Salvadoran countryside.

“You have to understand,” said Medrano, seated on his patio, flanked by two bodyguards, “that Castro had just taken power. We struggled here to keep from becoming another Cuba.”

In truth, Medrano was a brutish killer long before the Cuban Revolution. As chief of the National Police in the early 1950s, he was notorious for preemptively killing suspected criminals before they committed a crime.

A radical anti-communist, Medrano established ORDEN, Nationalist Democratic Organization, a paramilitary network designed to surveil and neutralize dissent.

Officially a “civil defense” initiative in 1961, ORDEN operated as a clandestine arm of the government, recruiting over 100,000 peasants, ex-soldiers, and informants.

Members received military training and were incentivized with land grants, cash payments, and impunity for violence. Military officers commanded regional branches, while local leaders coordinated village-level operations, ensuring blanket countryside coverage.

ORDEN focused on intelligence gathering. It identified labor organizers, student activists, and clergy deemed sympathetic to leftist liberation theology, funneling names to security forces for detention or execution.

By the 1970s, ORDEN units participated in massacres, such as the 1980 Río Sumpul massacre. Soldiers and ORDEN members slaughtered 600 civilians, including children hacked to death with machetes. Survivors recounted infants being tossed into the air and bisected mid-flight, a tactic intended to terrorize communities.

The National Security Agency of El Salvador was another brutal Medrano creation. ANSESAL, as it was commonly known, began operating in 1965. It centralized intelligence operations, kept dossiers on suspected subversives, and coordinated activities between ORDEN, the National Guard, and the Treasury Police.

Declassified CIA documents confirm Medrano’s direct collaboration with U.S. intelligence. He was listed as a paid CIA asset, and ANSESAL received funding and training through the Agency. This partnership exemplified the U.S. strategy of outsourcing counterinsurgency to local proxies, even as their methods violated human rights.

Medrano, for years, was a malevolent murderer. Yet, in my interview, Chele implausibly claimed that he was unable to control the wanton killing of civilians that marked his career. The implication was that he did not murder but failed to prevent his underlings from doing so.

The Kennedy Administration provided him and select troops with Green Beret training. Under President Lyndon Johnson, Medrano was given a three-month tour of Vietnam to learn how counterinsurgency worked.

He said that the CIA kept Salvadoran military intelligence informed of leftists who traveled abroad, including to Cuba. “We used this information to take appropriate action.”

The military extrajudicial killings of armed rebels, Medrano argued, were necessary. “The enemy was other Salvadorans, so Geneva did not apply. The soldiers just executed those they captured.”

Medrano said he knew the FMLN wanted to kill him. “I’m an old man now, but when I was working, I damaged them a lot. They are not ever going to forget.”

As he walked me to my car without his bodyguards, I felt he was exposing himself and me to attack.

Domingo Monterrosa was killed on October 23, 1984, when his helicopter crashed in Morazán near Joateca. Days after the crash, the FMLN claimed one of their commando teams had downed the aircraft by concentrating their fire on the rotor. It was a tactic the rebels had used before, but Luers and other rebel officials on Radio Venceremos maintained that they killed Monterrosa using a well-planned trap. Monterrosa was obsessed with destroying the station and had always insisted that the station operated from Nicaragua, but it broadcast from Morazán, the site of his death.

“For many days, we had been criticizing and mocking him,” a high-level FMLN told me. He said they even suggested that Monterrosa was gay, a stinging insult in Salvadoran culture. “We calculated this would make him even more eager to destroy us.”

The rebels said they had devised an ingenious plan to lure Monterrosa in. Radio Venceremos went silent for three days, leading some military leaders to believe the station had finally been knocked out. Never had Venceremos stopped transmission. Then, the guerrillas abandoned a backup transmitter and other equipment. Monterrosa and his fellow soldiers took this as proof that Radio Venceremos was no more. The rebels, though, had hidden explosives in the transmitter, according to the official. One fuse was radio-controlled; the other activated when Monterrosa’s chopper reached a certain altitude.

 Monterrosa triumphantly flew with what he took to be Venceremos’ remains. Several other commanders were with him when he had the booby-trapped equipment loaded onto the chopper. Minutes after take-off, the aircraft exploded. While some soldiers in communication with the pilot said he reported a malfunction after take-off, eyewitnesses said the helicopter exploded, which would indicate an attack.

An official confirmed the radio carried a bomb, likely placed by a soldier.

The FMLN later said the assassination was revenge for El Mozote and to eliminate a formidable foe.

José Alberto Medrano was killed March 23, 1985. Chillingly, that was the next morning after our interview.

A guerrilla hit squad ambushed Medrano the very next morning as he drove in San Salvador. The .45 caliber pistol he always carried lay beside him. A Salvadoran newspaper photographer gleefully presented me with a photograph that showed a bloody Medrano slumped over the wheel of his vehicle.

I went to Medrano’s home to offer my condolences. But I also had an ulterior motive. I was concerned that Chele’s family might conclude that the timing of the interview and his murder were not just a coincidence. It sounds ridiculous now, but in El Salvador, with lethal violence all around, I thought it prudent to call on the family. They thanked me for my visit, and I was relieved.

My meetings with Medrano and Monterrosa were deeply disturbing as I look back on them. I was face-to-face with murderous monsters who easily disguised themselves for me. Perhaps Medrano told me the rebels wanted him dead because he sensed what was coming in a few hours.  

I do not applaud death, but it is undeniable that Medrano and Monterrosa met their demise as justice demands.