With an old straw hat, a soiled yellow shirt, ragged pants, and sandals, my weathered guide could easily have passed for the ignorant peasant he often claims to be. But he is far more sophisticated than he appears. Like most Salvadoran peasants in eastern Chalatenango province, he is intensely aware of the conflict at hand. […]
EASTERN CHALATENANGO, El Salvador – A helicopter gunship riddled the landscape with heavy machine-gun fire as a battalion of 200 elite army soldiers trailed on the ground behind. Two miles away, a patrol of six guerrillas kept track on the oncoming battalion, communicating…
The changes will mark the ascent to power of the Salvadoran military’s academy class of 1966, the so-called tandona, or ‘big class.’
Only last year,” said the U.S. official, was the army “willing to move more than nine to five. “I’d heard those same words two years before in the same room deep within the walls of the heavily guarded embassy in San Salvador. Transforming the Salvadoran armed forces into an effective counterinsurgency force has been a […]
The grandmother cupped her palm under Goyito’s chin and pressed down hard with her fingers on his upper jaw. “Look, this is how we did it,” she said, demonstrating how she kept the baby from crying when government troops passed by. “They wanted me to kill…
Original story found here. MR. NIELDS: Well, you put in some blanks. You said “blank” in two places. There’s nothing classified about either of these words. One of them is CIA— LT. COL. NORTH: Well— MR. NIELDS: —and the other is Southern Command. “Delicate state of transition from CIA run op to Southern Command run […]
El Salvador’s Forgotten War, by Frank Smyth, The Progressive, August 1987. This story that appeared in print was put republished online 27 years later by The Progressive on its website in December 2014 after the launch of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture during the administration led by President George H.W. Bush after […]
