A Portrait of Official Evil : Documentation of debacle of America’s $6-billion support for El Salvador

As truth is the first casualty in war, so truth must be the first beneficiary of peace. As part of a 1992 U.N.-brokered peace agreement in El Salvador, a three-member Commission on Truth was empowered to take testimony about atrocities on all sides and issue a report. The purpose of the report was not to bring anyone to trial but simply to permit Salvadorans to learn what had been done to them and by whom. To protect witnesses from retaliation, much of the testimony taken was anonymous.

The report, officially presented Monday, is far from the blood-on-all-hands picture that Salvadoran government apologists so often drew in the 1980s. Though guerrilla crimes are reported, 85% of the complaints heard by the commission were against Salvadoran government forces, a devastating indictment.

America’s $6-billion support for El Salvador’s right-wing governments during the 1980s was clearly a foreign policy debacle for the Reagan and Bush administrations. The new report, by revealing the appalling atrocities of the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion, turns that generally recognized failure into a scandal. No doubt it was easier for the Clinton Administration to urge publication of the Truth Commission report than it would have been for a reelected Bush Administration, but all Americans have to mourn this somber confirmation of press reports that official U.S. sources dismissed at the time.

There are those who would like truth to remain a casualty. Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani sought to postpone or block publication of the report. His minister of defense, Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce, identified in the report as the mastermind of the murder of six Jesuit priests and two others in 1989, has resigned because of it. Others among 16 disgraced military officers who have defied a separate U.N. agreement by which they were to resign may now be forced out. Their anger, as Cristiani has warned (or threatened), may become a destabilizing revenge. Suppressing the report or smothering it under a blanket amnesty would only have prolonged the horror of state-sanctioned violence and, in the end, might well have driven El Salvador back into war.