U.S. Reportedly Trained Militia Linked to Salvador Death Squads

The U.S. Embassy in El Salvador discovered in 1990 that American military advisers were training a wealthy militia linked to the country’s right-wing death squads, according to State and Defense Department documents.

The U.S. ambassador, William G. Walker, immediately halted the training, despite protests from the chief of the U.S. military advisory mission, the documents show.

The training was part of a controversial program to build “civil defense units” to assist the Salvadoran military in its 12-year-long war against leftist guerrillas.

In some ways, the case of the “Patriots” unit, as the roughly 50 militiamen called themselves, was unique--the unit’s members were drawn from the wealthiest neighborhood in San Salvador and were largely upper-middle-class professionals who volunteered to defend their own lavish homes against the threat of rebel attack.

Still, the episode also may illustrate one of the persistent dilemmas of the long U.S. involvement in El Salvador: efforts to press the war against the Marxist-led guerrillas often put the United States in the position of strengthening repressive forces that were a threat to the democracy that Washington hoped to build.

The case of the “Patriots”-- Los Patrioticos in Spanish--came to light in the thousands of pages of once-secret documents on U.S. involvement in El Salvador released by the Clinton Administration last month. It was unearthed by researchers at the Center for International Policy, a privately funded think tank that has been critical of U.S. support for the authoritarian Salvadoran military.

The problem came to Walker’s attention in October, 1990, when an Embassy officer learned--apparently from a Salvadoran informant--that Col. Francisco Elena Fuentes, commander of the Salvadoran army’s 1st Brigade, had “permitted the use of his brigade’s civil defense training program as cover for the recruitment, training and possible dispatch of paramilitary civilian death squads,” Walker reported in a cable to the State Department.

The unit provided “phantom slots and other support to (Roberto) d’Aubuisson and his death squads,” the cable said, referring to the rightist leader who organized some of the irregular units accused of committing thousands of political murders.

When he inquired about the unit, Walker said, a Salvadoran military official told him that U.S. military advisers already knew about it--because they were providing training for the group.