Bush Sr. Helped Reagan Smooth Over Death Squad Terror in El Salvador
Bush Sr. Helped Reagan Smooth Over Death Squad Terror in El Salvador
Published 15 December 2016 (6 hours 33 minutes ago)
Newly declassified files reveal that Washington wanted to whitewash El Salvador’s deaths squads to continue backing a bloody war.
In December 1983, then-U.S. Vice President George H.W. Bush slipped away on a little-known trip to Latin America to try to salvage Washington's agreement to fund a bloody Cold War fight against left-wing rebels in El Salvador as a surge in death squad activity threatened to derail its ability to continue supporting the military regime, newly declassified U.S. intelligence documented have revealed.
In a series of memoranda addressed to Bush detailing the goals of the trip to El Salvador, staffers of then-President Ronald Reagan explained that the vice president would be tasked with communicating a "carrot and stick" approach to the military government in El Salvador, at the time immersed in a brutal Washington-backed civil war against communist guerrilla forces.
Reagan's administration was at the time growing uncomfortable with exposure of the Salvadoran military's widespread human rights abuses, such as death squad murders of missionaries and civilians as well as cases of U.S. citizens being killed in the country. The grave human rights situation threatened to put Washington's support for the military government and its Cold War counterinsurgency strategy in "serious jeopardy," the documents state.
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