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Abstract
The United States’ intervention in the Salvadoran Civil War, 1979–92, represented the largest nation-building effort launched by Washington between the end of Vietnam and the second war with Iraq. Washington deployed US Special Forces advisers to El Salvador to prevent further human rights abuses, emphasise the importance of winning the affection of civilians, and professionalise and reform the Salvadoran military. Overall, the intervention produced mixed results, including a negotiated settlement. Despite reservations about the efficacy of US policy, lessons from El Salvador have been reapplied elsewhere, including most recently in Iraq.
Notes
1 Cynthia McClintock, Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador’s FMLN and Peru’s Shining Path (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998), 245.
2 William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: the United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1998), 270.
3 Central Intelligence Agency, Report of Investigation: Information Available to CIA Regarding the 1985 Attack on US Marines in the Zona Rosa, 18 September 1996. Available at https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000147070.pdf
4 This information is based upon journalist’s interview with a former Ranger. LeoGrande and Russell Crandall’s study of the Salvadoran Civil War mention the incident. See LeoGrande, 270 and Russell Crandall, the Salvadoran Option: the United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
5 LeoGrande, 270.
6 Some of the classic texts include Enrique A. Baloyra, El Salvador in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); James Dunkerley, The Long War: Dictatorship and Revolution in El Salvador (London: Junction Books, 1982); Tommie Sue Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador: Origins and Evolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982); Jeffery M. Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997); William Deane Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1998); Benjamin Schwartz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: the Frustrations of Reform and the Illusions of Nation Building (Santa Monica: Rand, 1991).
7 Robert Chamberlain, ‘With Friends like These: Grievance, Governance, and Capacity-Building in COIN’, Parameters (Summer 2008): 79–90; H. Hayden, ‘Revolutionary Warfare: El Salvador and Vietnam: a Comparison’, Marine Corps Gazette (July 1991): 50–54; Victor M. Rosello, ‘Lessons from El Salvador’, Parameters (Winter 1993–94): 100–108.
8 The British military historian, David French, has disputed the notion of ‘minimum force.’ As he has aptly noted, British COIN experience was ‘nasty not nice.’ See French, Nasty not Nice: British Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice, 1945–1967.’ Small Wars and Insurgencies 23.4 (October–December 2012): 744–761. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare; Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1964).
9 Thomas Schoonover, the United States in Central American, 1860–1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System (Durham & London: Duke University Press), 165.
10 Philip J. Williams and Knut Walter, Militarization and Demilitarisation in El Salvador’s Transition to Democracy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 52.
11 Robert H Holden, Armies Without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 164.
12 Douglas S. Blaufarb, the Counterinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1977), 85.
13 Jeremy Kuzmarov, ‘Modernising Repression: Police Training, Political Violence and Nation-Building in the “American Century”’, Diplomatic History 33.2 (April 2009): 191–221, 192.
14 Cynthia Arnson, ‘Beefing the Salvadoran Military Forces: some Components of US Intervention’, in El Salvador: Central America in the New Cold War, ed., by Marvin Gettleman, (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 222–3.
15 Byron Engle to Earl Sears Chief Public Safety Officer, 13 April 1964, Box 59, IPS 1/General/El Salvador Folder, 1956–60, Records of AID, Office of Public Safety Latin American Branch Country File, El Salvador 1956–1972, RG 286, NARA.
16 Quoted in Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernising Repression: Police Training, Political Violence and Nation-Building in the American Century (Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 223.
17 According to one account approximately 15–20% of cadets’ studies were dedicated anti-communist indoctrination. Don Etchinson, the United States and Militarism in Central America (New York: Praeger, 1975), 109–110.
18 Binford, 47; Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myth of the New Way of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 231.
19 J. Patrice McSherry, ‘Operation Condor as a Hemispheric “Counterterror” Organisation’, in When States Kill: Latin America, the US, and Technologies of Terror, ed. Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodriguez (Austin: University of Texas, 2005), 29.
20 Allan Nairn, ‘Behind the Death Squads: an Exclusive Report on the US Role in El Salvador’s Official Terror’, The Progressive (May 1984): 20–29, 22.
21 Department of Defence, ‘Status of Military Counterinsurgency Programmes Part V’, 18 September 1963, Archives Unbound.
22 Cited in Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: the United States in Central America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 174.
23 Aldo Laura-Santiago, ‘The Culture and Politics of State Terror and Repression in El Salvador’, When States Kill: Latin America, the US, and Technologies of Terror, edited by Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodriguez (University of Texas Press, 2005), 94.
24 Archbishop Romero to President Carter, 17 February 1980, Box 42, Part 21 C, El Salvador Human Rights Collection, NARA; El Salvador Human Rights Collection, NARA.
25 See Roger Burbach and Patricia Flynn, editors, The Politics of Intervention: the United States in Central America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984).
26 Ronald Cox, Power and Profits: US Policy in Central America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).
27 Department of State, American Foreign Policy Current Documents: 1984 (Washington: Department of State, 1984).
28 Ronald Reagan, ‘Radio Address to the Nation on Central America’, 14 April 1984.
29 This is one of LaFeber’s central arguments in Inevitable Revolutions.
30 Stephen Rabe, the Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2011), 158.
31 Minutes of a Meeting, ‘Strategy toward Cuba and Central America’, 10 November 1981, folder ‘NSC 00024 11/10/1981: Strategy toward Cuba and Central America, El Salvador’, box 3, Executive Secretariat NSC: Meeting files, Ronald Reagan Library.
32 LeoGrande, 89, 131.
33 Memo from Robert Schweitzer and Roger Fontaine to Richard Allen, NSC Meeting 25 February: SIG Paper on El Salvador’, 24 February 1981, folder ‘NSC 0004 27 February 1981 (Poland, Caribbean Basin, etc) 4/4’, box 1, Executive Secretariat NSC: Meeting Files, Ronald Reagan Library.
34 Memo, ‘Why El Salvador Isn't Vietnam’, from Richard Allen to Ed Meese and James Baker, 25 February 1981, folder ‘El Salvador’ {02/27/1981}, box 4, Roger Fontaine Files, Ronald Reagan Library.
35 Report by the Comptroller General of the United States: US Military Aid to El Salvador and Honduras’, 22 August 1985, folder ‘US Military Aid to El Salvador {and Honduras}’, box 1, Oliver North Files, Ronald Reagan Library.
36 Information Paper, ‘BG Woerner’s Briefing on the El Salvador Military Situation’, 18 November 1981, folder ‘El Salvador’, Oliver North, NSC, box 12, Oliver North Files, Ronald Reagan Library.
37 Report, ‘Fighting the Insurgency in El Salvador’, ND, folder ‘El Salvador’, Oliver North, NSC, box 12, Oliver North Files, Ronald Reagan Library.
38 National Security Archive, the Yellow Book: Electronic Briefing Book No. 486. Available at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB486/.
39 Dr. John Fishel, phone interview with the author, 10 May 2016.
40 Vides Casanova has been associated with the disappearance, rape and murder of four US churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980. In April 2015, a US federal judge deported the former Salvadoran general to El Salvador. Julia Preston, ‘US Deports Salvadoran General Accused in ‘80s Killings’, New York Times, 8 April 2015.
41 Julie Mazzei, Death Squads or Self-Defence Forces?: How Paramilitary Groups Emerge and Challenge Democracy in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 160.
42 Christine Wade, Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016), 25.
43 Ambassador William Walker, interview with the author, 17 February 2014.
44 Edwin Corr, interview with the author, Norman Oklahoma, 11 April 2014.
45 Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus, Barriers to Reform: a Profile of El Salvador’s Military Leaders (Washington: US Congress, 1990), Caleb Rossiter Files, National Archives, Washington, DC.
46 United Nations, From Madness to Hope: the Twelve Year War in El Salvador, Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, Available at: https://www.usip.org/files/file/ElSalvador-Report.pdf.
47 General Fred Woerner, phone interview with the author, 15 May 2014; John Waghelstein, phone interview with the author, 1 April 2014; Dr. John Fishel, interview with the author, 11 April 2014.
48 Colonel John Waghelstein, phone interview with the author, 25 October 2016.
49 Chris Hedges, phone interview with author, 31 May 2016; Clifford Krauss, email interview with author, 9 June 2016.
50 Quoted in Michael Childress, The Effectiveness of US Training Efforts in Internal Defence and Development: the Cases of El Salvador and Honduras (Santa Monica: Rand, 1995), 31.
51 Juan Orlando Zepeda, Perfiles de la guerra en El Salvador (San Salvador: New Graphics, 2008), 175.
52 Herard von Santos, email interview with the author, 20 October 2016.
53 Memorandum, ‘The Atlacatl Battalion and Alleged Human Rights Abuses, Section: Atlacatl’s Record and US Policy’, ‘Barriers to Reform’, El Salvador, box 2, folder ‘Barriers to Reform-Research’, Records of the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus, Caleb Rossiter Files, National Archives, Washington, DC.
54 Mark Danner, the Massacre at El Mozote: a Parable of the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 53.
55 Greg Walker, At the Hurricane’s Eye: US Special Forces from Vietnam to Desert Storm (New York: Ivy Books, 1994), 93.
56 Douglas Valentine depicts the effort as a massive assassination programme and instrument of torture. Phoenix has its defenders, such as Mark Moyar, who argue that depictions such as Valentine’s are mistaken. Dale Andrade has claimed the programme decimated the VCI leadership. One of the more routinely cited quotations offered is from General Tran Do, Communist deputy commander in the South, who admitted that Phoenix was ‘extremely destructive.’ See Douglas Valentine, the Phoenix Programme (New York: Morrow, 1990); Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997); Dale Andrade, Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Programme and the Vietnam War (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1990).
57 Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew Adam Kocher, "How ‘Free’ is Free Riding in Civil Wars? Violence, Insurgency, and the Collective Action Problem,” World Politics 59.2 (January 2007): 177–216.
58 Quoted in Andrew Cockburn, Kill Chain: the Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015), 88.
59 Whether it is Afghanistan, Colombia, or Iraq, the American infatuation with assassinating insurgent leadership has failed to produce dividends. See Cockburn, 149–150 and 246–247.
60 See US Army and Marine Corps, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency (Washington: Department of the Army, 2006).
61 John T. Fishel, email interview with the author, 21 September 2016; Herard von Santos, email interview with the author, 20 October 2016.
62 Robert Brigham’s study of the South Vietnamese Army offers a critical reappraisal of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). As Brigham notes, the South Vietnamese military’s issues were partly the result of poor training and doctrine promoted by the United States. He also notes that William Westmoreland’s decision to relegate the institution to static defence after 1965 and the transition toward Vietnamisation also severely impacted the ARVN’s morale. See, ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
63 Colonel John Waghelstein, phone interview with the author, 25 October 2016.
64 Charles Clements reportedly treated civilians with wounds consistent to the injuries produced by these bombs. See Clements, Witness to War.
65 This figure was cited by Sylvia Rosales-Fike during her testimony before the US Senate committee. United States Senate, Central American Migration to the United States, 21 June 1989, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs, 101 Cong., 87.
66 Elisabeth Wood, ‘Civil War and Reconstruction: the Repopulation of Tenancingo’, in Landscapes of Struggle: Politics, Society, and Community in El Salvador, Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Leigh Binford, eds (Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). 126–146, 128.
67 United States Senate, Central American Migration to the United States, 21 June 1989, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs, 101 Cong., 87.
68 David Haines and Karen Roseblum, editors, Illegal Immigration in America: a Handbook (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 1999), 234.
69 Haines and Rosenblum, 240.
70 Memorandum from Oliver North and Constantine Menges, ‘El Salvador: Undoing What has been Done’, Unknown Date’, folder ‘El Salvador-Death Squads Oliver North (2)’, box 18 Oliver North Files, Ronald Reagan Library.
71 Particularly galling for ARVN troops was the United States’ decision to import rice and soy sauce from South Korea. According to numerous soldiers, such actions demonstrated American contempt and a profound lack of cultural awareness. Brigham, 59–60.
72 Dr. John T. Fishel, phone interview with the author, 5 May 2016.
73 Colonel James Waghelstein, phone interview with the author, 1 April 2014.
74 Andrew Bacevich et al, American Military Policy in Small Wars: the Case of El Salvador (Cambridge & Washington: Pergamon Brassey’s, 1988).
75 Colonel James Hallums, email interview with the author, 10 March 2014.
76 William Stanley and Mark Peceny, ‘Counterinsurgency in El Salvador’, Politics & Society 38.1 (2010): 67–94; Benjamin Schwartz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: the Frustrations of Reform and the Illusions of Nation Building (Santa Monica: Rand, 1991); Bacevich et al.
77 Col. James Hallums, email interview with author, 5 March 2014.
78 John T. Fishel, email interview with the author, 21 September 2016.
79 Joaquin Chávez, ‘El Salvador – The Creation of the Internal Enemy: Pondering the Legacies of US Anticommunism, Counter-insurgency, and Authoritarianism in El Salvador (1952–1981)’, in H. Gurman, ed., Hearts and Minds: a People’s History of Counter-insurgency (New York, 2013).
80 This also includes agrarian reform and other development projects such as Unidos para Reconstruir. Tommy Sue Montgomery, ‘Fighting Guerrillas: the United States and Low-Intensity Conflict in El Salvador’, New Political Science 9.1 (Fall/Winter 1990): 21–53, 21–23; Richard Duncan Downie, Learning From Conflict: the US Military in Vietnam, El Salvador, and the Drug War (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1998), 132–133.
81 Colonel Waghelstein reminded his Salvadoran counterpart, Colonel Eugenio Vides Casanova, that ‘unlike Vietnam, where we’d committed 450,000 troops it would not take me long to put the 55 trainers on an airplane’. Quoted in John Waghelstein, ‘Military-to-Military Contacts: Personal Observations—The El Salvador Case’, Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement 10.2 (Summer: 2003), 22.
82 McClintock, 224.
83 Schwartz, 82.
84 William Walker, interview with the author, 17 February 2014; Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador. From Madness to Hope: the 12 Year War in El Salvador. Last modified 15 March 1993. Available at https://www.usip.org/files/file/ElSalvador-Report.pdf
85 This view was confirmed by Ambassador Walker. William Walker, interview with the author, 17 February 2014.
86 See Bernard Aronson’s testimony at the Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs, Committee on Foreign Affairs, United States House of Representatives, 24 January 1990 (Washington: US GPO).
87 Telegram, ‘GOES-FMLN Negotiations: Where do we go from Here?’ 22 September 1989, El Salvador Online Collection, NSA.
88 José Medrano, interview with the author, San Salvador, 22 August 2013.
89 Facundo Guardado, interview with the author, 22 August 2013.
90 Peter Maas, ‘The Salvadorization of Iraq?’ The New York Times Magazine, 1 May 2005.
91 Mona Mahmood, Maggie O’Kane, Chavala Madlena and Teresa Smith, ‘Exclusive: General David Petraeus and “Dirty Wars” Veteran Behind Commando Units Implicated in Detainee Abuse’, The Guardian, 6 March 2013.
92 This quote is derived from an interview conducted with John Nagl on ‘What is the Secretive US “Kill/Capture” Campaign?’ Frontline, PBS, 17 June 2011. Available at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/kill-capture/transcript/.