El Salvador’s Civil War:

US-Sponsored War Crimes

Interviewer: Brian TerBush

Interviewee: Dr. Caleb Rossiter

Instructor: Alex Haight

February 14th, 2017

Table of Contents

Interviewer Release Form…………………………………………………………………………2

Interviewee Release Form………………………………………………………………………....3

Statement of Purpose……………………………………………………………………………....4

Biography……………………………………………………………………………...... 5

Context Paper……………………………………………………………………………………...7

Interview Transcription…………………………………………………………………………..25

Interview Analysis……………………………………………………………………………….54

Works Consulted…………………………………………………………………………………59

Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………62

Statement of Purpose

The Salvadoran Civil War was the most catastrophic and bloody event in all of El

Salvador’s history. An immense number of civilians were butchered by the right-wing, US backed Salvadoran government. The war would have never been able to last as long as it did, had it not been for the large amount of money, weapons, and training that were given to the

Salvadoran government by the US. To be able to fully understand the motives and actions of the

US government in El Salvador, an inside perspective is necessary. The purpose of this interview with Dr. Rossiter is to give an intimate perspective of the workings of the US government in respect to the war in El Salvador. I hope readers will get a better understanding of the US government’s policies and the real world effects that they have on people around the world.

Biography

Dr. Caleb Rossiter was born in Ithaca, New York in 1951, and he attended every level of schooling in Ithaca, from kindergarten to Cornell. He was raised in a very academic and competitive family. His father was a professor of history and politics at Cornell, and his mom was a newspaper editor, which was rare for that time. Surprisingly enough, when Dr. Rossiter was young, he was actually very patriotic. He loved to hear about “the great American heroes” and would imagine he could actually talk to or see them. By junior high, he had a more realistic, and arguably cynical view of the world. He was taught to not be a good German, meaning that he shouldn’t have been like the Germans that silently stood by and watched the Nazis commit genocide. He clearly took this message to heart because by the time he was 15, Dr. Rossiter was already protesting in Ithaca against segregation. While he was at College, he participated in a number of protests against discrimination of blacks, the Vietnam War, US involvement in Laos, and many other causes. Part of what inspired him to pursue anti-imperialism was being drafted to fight in Vietnam in 1970. He resisted the draft, and he passed out anti-Vietnam War leaflets at the draft board. The draft board didn’t press any charges. Dr. Rossiter later attended Cornell and got his Ph.D. in policy analysis in 1983. As soon as he graduated from college, he moved to

Washington, DC and got a job trying to withdraw US support for the Salvadoran Civil War, as well as several other unjust, US-backed conflicts.

El Salvador’s State of Perpetual Revolution

Archbishop Oscar Romero, the man that some would say started the Salvadoran Civil

War, said, “Let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality.”1 He was aware that blood, his blood, would most likely be spilled for the greater good of the revolution and the Salvadoran people. El Salvador has always been the paragon of a tumultuous and chaotic state. Since Spanish feet first stepped on Salvadoran soil, the vast majority of El

Salvador’s population was subjugated. Whether it be by the Spanish royalty, the Salvadoran oligarchy, or one of the many military dictatorships, the peasant farmers of El Salvador have been exposed to brutal treatment. This typically leads to an uprising where a military dictatorship is established, has an election, then gets overthrown again by a different Salvadoran political party. All the rebellions came to a fever pitch in 1979, when Archbishop Romero, the symbol of hope for El Salvador, was assassinated. The entire country was plunged into a state of chaos and war for over a decade. A countless number of people were slaughtered or displaced as a result of the war and the fascist government’s attempts at controlling the poor. All this was made worse by the United States’ involvement. The US gave large sums of money to the very dictatorship that was oppressing their people while turning a blind eye to their countless human rights abuses.

El Salvador was almost always a country plagued with constant revolts, coups, and massacres, however, America’s involvement in their Civil War made the conflict incomprehensibly worse.

Prior to Spanish colonization, the Central American country known as El Salvador was home to the Pipil people. The Pipil nation came into existence in the 11th century after the

1 Marsh, Michael K. "Oscar Romero – In Life and Death His Blood Was “a Seed of Freedom.”." Interrupting the Silence. March 23, 2014. Accessed February 13, 2017. https://interruptingthesilence.com/2014/03/23/oscar-romero-in-life-and-death-his-blood-was-a-seed-of- freedom/. collapse of the Mayan empire.2 The Pipiles had an agrarian based society which flourished due to their large amount of fertile land. They put up a strong resistance to the Spanish empire’s attempt to colonize and take resources. Spain attempted to invade Pipil in 1524 but were defeated and pushed back to Guatemala. In 1528 the Spanish successfully defeated the Pipiles and put them under their control.3 The Spanish came to Central America in an attempt to find gold, as well as other precious resources.4 They were disappointed when they found no easy way to acquire the gold in El Salvador, which is a Spanish name meaning “the savior,” and decided that the best available resource was land. The Spanish put a system into place where Spaniards could collect money from the Salvadoran farmers working on the land stolen from the Pipil, called the encomienda system. The colonizers exploited the land and people most heavily after they discovered the amount of money that could be made from a farming system based off of only one or two cash crops. The Spanish started to grow cocoa and indigo, both of which flourished in the area and yielded an immense amount of money.5 The Spanish Empire’s power started to wane in the early 1800’s during Napoleon’s conquests through Europe. In 1821, the Captaincy

General of Guatemala, which was compromised of Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Belize,

Honduras, and Costa Rica, declared independence from the Spanish Empire. Even without the

Spanish controlling them, El Salvador remained an unfair society with heavy Spanish influences.

The Salvadorans continued to be an oligarchic and dogmatic Roman Catholic nation, even when they were independent of Spain.

2 Albinson, Henry. El Salvador History: Spanish Conquest and Colonization, Civil Conflict, Society, Economy, Industry, Government and Politics. Amazon, 2016. March 4, 2016. 140 3 Brignoli, HeÌctor PeÌrez. A Brief History of Central America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 36 4 Albinson, El Salvador History, 153 5 Ibid., 169 Once freed from the rule of the Spanish colonizers, El Salvador had a new power that wanted to control them. In 182,1 Mexico managed to conquer El Salvador and other parts of

Central America until being forced out after their emperor, Agustin de Iturbide, died in 1823:6

The interlude of annexation with Mexico was thus ended and the Central

Americans now believed themselves masters of their own destiny. This, at least,

shone through the fervor of the deputies at the Assembly when they grandly

proclaimed the “United Provinces of Central America” to be a nation, “sovereign,

free, and independent of old Spain, of Mexico, and of all other powers whether of

the Old or the New World.”7

The very high hopes of the citizens of the United Provinces of Central America were squashed by the same thing ailing so many other Latin American powers at that time. Conflicts between conservative and liberal political parties caused tension in Central America.8 The liberals wanted to have a free economy open to foreign investment with limits placed on the Catholic Church’s influence; the conservatives wanted a restricted economy closed off to both foreign money and people, as well as a greater influence from the Catholic Church. The government changed hands between the liberals and conservatives multiple times, yet neither side was able to effectively implement their reforms on all five of its members. El Salvador, being mostly liberal, supported the rule of president Morazán, who was in charge from 1829 to 1840.9 During Morazán’s presidency, primarily conservative Guatemalan forces led an uprising against him. In 1840, the conservative forces defeated the liberal army and executed Morazán two years later. The war made it apparent that a united body of Central American countries was impossible, leading the

6 Brignoli, A Brief History of Central America, 67 7 Ibid., 68 8 Albinson, El Salvador History, 193 9 Ibid., 206 former members of the United Provinces of Central America to declare their independence. This fracturing of their united political system would make these Central American countries open to foreign political and economic exploitation and control.10 From its very beginning, El Salvador had experienced a near slave-like society with foreign leaders attempting to control them. These tensions would continue to grow for another 140 years.

Once El Salvador declared their independence in 1841, they became an oligarchic state controlled by, what many call, the “Fourteen Families,” although there were actually hundreds of powerful and rich families in control. The aptly named coffee republic was established from

1871 to 1927, during the era when liberals were in power. The church had little power during this time compared to other Central American nations, and laissez faire economic policies were embraced. One of the liberal policies that was passed that allowed the oligarchy to remain in power was the Salvadoran government’s prevention of communal landholdings, allowing a small group of people to control vast areas of land.11 By 1914, the coffee business was thriving. Coffee exports increased eleven-fold since 1880, and about 59 percent of government revenue came from the coffee trade. The coffee-oligarchs had soldiers from the Salvadoran National Guard brought onto their plantations to crush rising political dissent. During the liberal era, El Salvador had many constitutions get made then replaced. The longest lasting constitution was the constitution of 1886, which lasted a total of 53 years. The constitution of 1886 restricted presidential terms to four years and offered some other limits to presidential power. (Albinson

286)

10 Albinson, El Salvador History, 213 11 Ibid., 221 Several different presidents took over through a variety of means during the liberal era.

Santiago Gonzalez, the democratically elected president, wanted a dictatorship but was replaced by Valle in 1876 after losing the election. Guatemala intervened, removed Valle from power, and put Rafael Zaldivar in charge as dictator. Zalvidar was then overthrown by Menendez in 1885, who was overthrown by Erzeta in 1890. The one thing that all of these presidents had in common was that there was almost no attempt to help the poor working class Salvadorans by any of them.12 After several more coups and temporary juntas, the government reached a place of relative stability when Pedro Escalon took power in 1903. There were no coups and only one presidential assassination for another 30 years once Escalon took power. When the depression hit in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, coffee prices dropped substantially and the already impoverished working class was given even less:

The presidency of Pio Romero Bosque (1927-1931) was a transitional period in

Salvadoran history that ended the relatively stable functioning of the coffee

republic and the liberal economic system that sustained it… Those on the lower

end of the economic scale felt the deprivation most keenly, as wages were

reduced and employment levels cut back. The government first responded with

limited reform to ease this situation and the popular unrest it produced. The

subsequent response was brutal repression.13

Although president Romero responded to unrest in a brutal manner, he did allow for a relatively free and open election that was far more fair than any other at that time. Araujo was elected and continued El Salvador’s long history of violent oppression of the working class when they tried to rise up in 1931. However, he broke the cycle later that year when political unrest continued

12 Albinson, El Salvador History, 269 13 Ibid., 303 and he allowed for municipal elections. Many oligarchs and members of the military opposed this decision and staged a successful coup before the elections could be held. This event took the country from relative stability to a complete breakdown of their political system. This type of chaotic military rule would remain for the next fifty years.14 The chaos in El Salvador’s political system was a constant for most of its existence. Time after time, governments would be overthrown and a new government would promise reform and do nothing. This cycle became tiring and frustrating for the Salvadoran people and continuously built up tension.

General Martinez, Araujo’s ex-vice president, was now put in charge with complete control over the Salvadoran government, military, and people. Martinez allowed the previously scheduled elections to happen, but then barred the elected officials he disapproved of from taking office. This was most likely done in an effort to find out who and where the political dissenters were. This rejection of the democratic process led to an insurgency in 1932. Although the military caught wind of the rebellion beforehand and prevented some of it, many rebels still managed to conquer government buildings in four towns until the government sent in troops to remove them.15 The military action that Martinez’s troops took against the peasant farmers was referred to as “la matanza,” meaning murder or slaughter. Martinez’s forces killed roughly

20,000 peasants, in particular Indians, to show that the military was in control, and further insurgent action would not be tolerated.16

The era of dictatorial oppression did in fact sport some mild and constant reforms.

Although the government didn’t want to modernize, they also recognized the fact that they

14 Albinson, El Salvador History, 338 15 Ibid., 352 16 Brignoli, A Brief History of Central America, 117 would need to modernize to prevent further uprisings. Martinez was the longest lasting

Salvadoran president and was renowned for his anti-communist zealotry, making him appealing to the far right. Martinez was in charge of El Salvador for twelve consecutive years that yielded some good results. The governments stability allowed the economy to recover, he instituted a very basic welfare system, and allied with the allies in World War II. He raised the export tax in

1943 and tried to change the laws to extend his rule in 1944.17 These actions turned many against him and yet another coup was thrown. The coup was made up of pro-axis military leaders, civilian politicians, coffee producers that were mad about the export tax, and businessmen and bankers who were mad about the lack of economic restrictions. After the initial attempt at ousting Martinez failed, strikes and protests afterwards prompted him to resign from office.18

Menendez’s replacement went ahead with the 1945 elections as scheduled, but they manipulated the vote so their candidate, Castaneda, would get elected. Castaneda was paranoid of reformist soldiers taking power away from him so he sent as many reformist soldiers as he could away to train. When Castaneda, just like Martinez, sought to increase his term as president, the young reformist soldiers returned and removed him from power in 1948. The revolutionaries, as they liked to be called, created their own military dictatorship that they called the Revolutionary

Council. The Revolutionary Council held a relatively open election in 1950, and the strongest force in the junta, Osorio, won. Osorio, a member of the Revolutionary Party for Democratic

Unification (PRUD) instituted a number of important economic and governmental reforms like agricultural diversification, public works, establishment of social security, and sanitary and housing improvements.19 These reforms were only made available due to the boom of coffee

17 Albinson, El Salvador History, 373 18 Ibid., 379 19 Ibid., 400 prices in 50’s, and even with these reforms the oligarchy still maintained extremely influential and powerful in Salvadoran society. The oligarchy did their best, and often succeeded, at trying to stop all forms of redistribution of wealth that Osorio wanted.

Lemus, Osorio’s successor, also prevented any other political party besides PRUD from taking power. Lemus opposed most of the leftist beliefs Osorio stood for.20 In the election of

1956, two of the candidates that opposed Lemus were disqualified from the race for little to no reason, and the third lost by only getting seven percent of the vote, due most likely to Lemus manipulating the poles. Lemus’s government was plagued by economic hardships like the falling price of cotton and coffee. This lead to, as always, a growing discontent amongst the peasant farmers.21

At this point in time, many young Salvadorans began to look to the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro for inspiration. There was widespread demand for a true democracy that cares for its lower class to be established in El Salvador. Lemus ditched his initial reformist plans and started cracking down on political dissent. Both the middle and upper class were also discontent and worried with Lemus’s recent actions, resulting in his bloodless deposition in 1960. The new government was overthrown in another coup one year later, and new anti-communist military junta was established.22 The next set of elections in 1962 led to the election of Rivera, a member of the National Conciliation Party, who won every available seat in the Constituent Assembly elections of 1961. The National Conciliation Party was a group that broke off of the Christian

Democratic Party, who was soon to become their leading competitor. The National Conciliation

Party was made up of the middle and upper class and wanted a moderate government that

20 Brignoli, A Brief History of Central America, 132 21 Albinson, El Salvador History, 414 22 Ibid., 426 wouldn’t throw out the capitalist system entirely, but would also allow more progressive reforms. Rivera’s major contributions to the Salvadoran political and economic system were the aid money that was donated by JFK, as well him allowing competing political parties to take place in elections and actually allowed them to participate once elected. The Christian

Democratic Party won 14 seats in the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly, and their favorite candidate, Duarte, was elected mayor of San Salvador.23 The National Coalition Party helped strengthen the economy for all and drew most of its support from the middle class. However, the

National Coalition Party, just like almost all Salvadoran governments proceeding it, also relied heavily on the military. The military wasn’t like what it is in modern day America; if the government did something opposing the military or its conservative stances, there was a good chance the military would overthrow them.24

The Christian Democratic Party, although fairly moderate compared to other parts of

Central America, was seen as radically left by Salvadoran standards. In the next election of 1967, the National Coalition Party defeated the far more left leaning Christian Democratic Party once more. Their candidate, Sanchez, won with a large majority of the vote.25

In 1969, El Salvador and Honduras fought the “Football War;” the Football War got its name because of the misconception that a match of football caused it. In reality, as most wars are, it was a complex conflict caused by a number of different factors, of which the football match played a fairly small role. The biggest factor was Central America’s greatest resource: land. El Salvador had a relatively large, rapidly growing population relative to their small

23 Albinson, El Salvador History, 468 24 Brignoli, A Brief History of Central America, 172 25 Albinson, El Salvador History, 496 amount of land, and Honduras had a fairly small population relative to their far greater amount of land. Roughly 300,000 Salvadoran’s crossed the border and entered into Honduras as illegal immigrants by 1969.26 Honduras was already bitter about the Salvadoran exploitation of their economy. In Central America, El Salvador and Guatemala were the most developed economies and frequently preyed on the weaker economies for profit. Hondurans weren’t very bothered by the illegal Salvadoran immigrants or the usage of their lands, but rather the potential for El

Salvador to try to take over chunks of Honduras. The President of Honduras, Arellano, set up laws to try to expel the illegal Salvadorans from their land; the Salvadorans were being used as a scapegoat to try to turn people’s attention away from the Honduran economic and political struggles.27 The last straw was the football match between Honduras and El Salvador. The

Honduran players were being harassed by the Salvadoran soccer team, and Honduran press of this conflict exacerbated the issue. The war started and ended very quickly, only lasting about 4 days. The Honduran air force destroyed most Salvadoran planes, while the Salvadoran ground forces, although superior in strength, were forced to stop advancing due to supply shortages.

About 2000 were killed in the war, most of which were civilians. This war brought uneasiness to

El Salvador; fewer of their poor were leaving El Salvador, Honduras cut off almost all trade with them, and tensions between the two powers started to grow.28

The 1972 elections were a time of great uneasiness for the people and government of El

Salvador. Just two years prior, Salvador Allende, a communist, was elected in Chile. This was not only distressing to El Salvador’s military, oligarchy, and right wing citizens, but also to many of the more moderate and left leaning groups as well. The election of 1972 had a great number of

26 Albinson, El Salvador History, 509 27 Ibid., 517 28 Ibid., 545 parties. The UNO (United National Opposition) coalition was made up of various groups that ranged from moderate leftists like the Christian Democratic Party to the more extreme communist groups like the National Democratic Union. Overall the UNO, whose candidate was

Duarte, was still widely a moderate leftist group. Their primary opponent was the National

Coalition Party which was in charge of El Salvador at that time. The National Coalition Party’s candidate, Molina, seemed to be losing in the poles but the government which was allied with the

National Coalition Party suspended the voting and had a recount. In the corrupt recount, Molina ended up winning by 10,000 votes.29 The clear corruption that the National Coalition Party was plagued with angered many Salvadorans. A young force of leftist soldiers decided to overthrow

Molina’s government and put Duarte in charge. The rebels, however, were not backed by the air force and only had a small part of the army’s support. They got Duarte to broadcast a message for them, but this was not enough to keep the rebellion going. Duarte fled the country but was tracked down, beaten, and exiled to Venezuela.30

Molina used a relatively new organization called ORDEN to try to control peasants and suppress rebellion. ORDEN trained groups of peasants in counterinsurgent tactics that they could use against communist uprisings. A new problem that was facing the government, however, was radical-leftist terrorism in cities. Two groups, known as the FPL and ERP, split off from the communist party known as PCES. They would drive by shoot or kidnap members of the government and bomb government buildings. The successful rebellion of the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979 also helped inspire radical leftist rebels in El Salvador. In 1977, class- tension escalated due to the election of president Romero.31 Not only was president Romero

29 Albinson, El Salvador History, 586 30 Ibid., 600 31 Ibid., 631 elected in just as unfair and corrupt a manner as Molina, but Molina actually used ORDEN to intimidate voters. A new coup was staged also largely by young leftist members of the military, but this one succeeded. The new government instituted extreme leftist policies, saying they would freeze land-holdings over ninety-eight hectares and nationalize the coffee export trade.

The government also disbanded ORDEN, however most of these reforms weren’t carried out due to the lack of influence it had over the majority of the security forces. The government had such little control over the military that the violence against opposing organizations actually increased while they were in power. This junta was quickly replaced by a new reform junta which was also quickly replaced by a third junta lead by Duarte, who had just recently returned from exile.32

Duarte’s junta was a mirror of the juntas that recently proceeded him. He tried, and failed, to pass leftist land reforms, and he strengthened the military against the rebels. He also received monetary aid from the US in an attempt to prevent the communist rebels from taking over the government.

By 1980, there were five significant rebel groups in El Salvador. The five groups joined together to form the FMLN. One of the key events that strengthened these groups and caused them to join together was the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero. Oscar Romero tried to stop US funding of the Salvadoran government and told soldiers to abstain from carrying out actions they thought were wrong.33 In response to this, a member of the right wing (either part of the government or a death squad) killed him. The peaceful protest in response to his death had

32 Albinson, El Salvador History, 698 33 Wood, Elisabeth Jean. Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics). August 4, 2003. Accessed November 2016. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/171698. 7 also turned violent when shooting between protestors and government forces broke out. Large numbers of unarmed civilians were mowed down by the government.34

Covert right wing death squads were made and funded by the oligarchy and consisted primarily of ex-military personnel. One women who lived in a small farming village said, “we

[those who stayed in the area] were all seen as guerrillas. Every time we went to the coast, we were searched at the intersection. 1982 was a year of desperation, almost everyone left. My brother disappeared in 1982, one of hundreds who disappeared in 1982 and 1983.” They would regularly kill or “disappear” peasant farmers who they suspected of working with the FMLN.

The 1980’s was a gruesome time for all of El Salvador. Communist rebels fought right wing death squads and the US-backed Salvadoran government, but the people that suffered the most were the peasants. The total number of dead by the end of the war was at least 75,000, which were mostly civilians and made up roughly two percent of the total Salvadoran population. The UN investigation said that just over 85 percent of the total civilian deaths were caused by the US-backed government.35 The Carter administration and especially the Reagan administration gave large sums of money to the Salvadoran government to support their fight against the communist rebels.

The Reagan administration and the majority of Salvadorans all supported having a truly democratic election in 1982. What surprised Washington and El Salvador alike was the election of the more right-leaning candidate, D’Aubuisson. During the time of the election:

Their (FMLN) numbers throughout El Salvador were sufficient that FMLN forces

controlled approximately a fifth of national territory, a “revolutionary situation”

34 Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 275 35 Ibid., 7 of contested or even dual sovereignty in El Salvador. Despite subsequent strategic

and tactical innovations on the part of both the Salvadoran military and the

FMLN, the military stalemate continued until the end of the civil war.36

While under D’Aubuisson, right wing parties took over and destroyed any hopes of agrarian reform amongst peasants. In 1984, Duarte was elected president with the help of $2,000,000 being donated to his campaign by the CIA. More military aid was coming in from the US to keep the government alive and stop the advancement of FMLN. In 1985, the Salvadoran military, under Duarte, authorized “United to Reconstruct,” the largest counterinsurgency plan up until that point. This led to massive violations in human rights, including high numbers of civilians being raped, killed, and tortured. The next set of elections took place in 1989, resulting in a member of the right wing political party known as ARENA, Alfredo Cristiani, being made president. This angered FMLN and prompted them to start attacking San Salvador, as well as carrying out a greater number of assassinations.37 In November of 1989, the Atlacatl Battalion, a group of soldiers under direct training of the US military, murdered six Jesuit priests. Cristiani wanted one of the priests, Father Ellecuría, to try to negotiate with the FMLN, but the

Salvadoran military and their US counterparts disagreed, and had them assassinated. What was even more heinous was that the Atlacatl Battalion tried to frame FMLN for the crime.38 By the end of 1989, both FMLN and the government reached out to the UN to mediate peace talks.

During 1990 and 1991, the war actually escalated due to peace talks. Both the FMLN and the government wanted the upper hand going into the peace talks, and thus both increased their

36 Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 87 37 Ibid., 275 38 Rossiter, Caleb S. The Turkey and the Eagle: The Struggle for America's Global Role. New York: Algora Pub., 2010. 92 military action. By 1992, a peace agreement was signed and over the next year, both armies demobilized.39

The newspaper articles from 1980 give a fascinating insight into how Americans thought about the Salvadoran Civil War. There is a misconception that all Americans at that time were unaware of, or worse yet, apathetic to the actions of their own government in relation to foreign countries. In reality, it seems, some Americans were aware of, and deeply concerned by, the US foreign policy at the time. Murat Williams, the first secretary of the American embassy in El

Salvador, said that we should “pause and consider that for more than 30 years, almost without interruption, we have been shipping it [El Salvador] military supplies of many varieties.”40 He was aware of the atrocities being committed by the Salvadoran government and how it was pointless and cruel to have “a Salvadoran Army, trained and equipped by the United States, at war with a Honduran Army, also trained and equipped by us.”41 He also was aware of and worried about how weapons were now being used to stop social progress rather than promoting it. Rather than guns being given to revolutionaries, guns were being given to oligarchy-backed forces trying to suppress liberal reforms. Michael Getler, a staff writer for the Washington Post, was more interventionist than Williams. Michael agrees with the sentiment that keeping the junta in charge was “the best-indeed, the only-long-term hope that civil war can be avoided, social change absorbed and a moderate course preserved.”42 Getler says that backing the left wing junta was the only way to keep the government from becoming communist, and causing a domino

39 Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 276 40 Williams, Murat W. "Still More U.S. Arms Won't Aid Salvador." New York Times (New York), April 17, 1980. 41 Ibid. 42 Getler, Michael. "New Diplomacy Tested By U.S. In El Salvador." The Washington Post, April 17, 1980. effect amongst other Central American countries. Getler, along with the US government, thought that even with the Salvadoran death squads, backing the junta was the only viable option.

Michael Gadbaw’s interview showed me that, surprisingly, the Salvadoran people didn’t fully support the FMLN or other rebel groups. Compared to the juntas during the various wars, the rebels were seen as preferable, but they were still also disliked. Juana Guzman, who was raised in a poor family in El Salvador during 40’s and 50’s, said that her family wasn’t connected to any of the radical groups and that she was “so proud of that.”43 She said the government and the rebels were “a bunch of liars”44 and were not to be trusted. Both groups were fighting for a cause that the average Salvadoran didn’t concern themselves with, or rather didn’t think would be improved. This all changed in 1979 when the Salvadoran Civil War started. The amount of fighting and its intensity escalated greatly when Archbishop Romero was assassinated, and shortly after the whole country was drawn into the combat. Upon hearing about this, Guzman, who had already been living in the US, went back to El Salvador to get her son. At this point in time, most people in El Salvador disliked the government and preferred the FMLN, including

Guzman’s son. Guzman says she “didn’t want for him to be involved, but really he likes it (the fighting).”45 One of the hardest things for Guzman’s son was acclimating to living in the US.

Most Salvadorans knew at least one person who was killed or “disappeared” during the war, and it was extremely hard for them to move past that. That combined with living in the country that was directly supporting the government and military that was slaughtering civilians made it very difficult for many to move on. Guzman, and I imagine many other Salvadorans, opposed the

43 Guzman, Juana. "A Window Into El Salvador." Interview by Michael Gadbaw. Digital Maryland. 1998. Accessed February 12, 2017. http://collections.digitalmaryland.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/saac/id/25879/rec/1. 9 44 Ibid., 10 45 Ibid, 13 United States’ world-policeman policies and thought it was better for the US to focus on its own issues or at least not interfere negatively with other countries.

Most people think of American intervention in the Salvadoran Civil War as a dark and immoral time when the US backed a violent dictatorship and impeded social progress; however, as with any issue there are two sides. Benjamin Schwarz argues that America’s involvement in

El Salvador was the only way to stop a great evil. He brings up the “unsavory friends with whom the United States allied itself and the equally nasty enemies against whom it fought by proxy in

El Salvador and Nicaragua.”46 The FMLN was responsible for about five percent of the civilian casualties during the conflict, as opposed to the eighty-five percent the government was responsible for. Most people would say the counterinsurgency efforts conducted by the

Salvadoran army were abhorrent, but Schwarz finds them mostly justifiable. When addressing the death squads he says, “the death squads worked.”47 Tom White says that “if the FMLN… were to overthrow El Salvador then the entire political security of the region would be threatened.”48 He claims that worse political instability would have spread across Central

America if the FMLN wasn’t stopped. What he didn’t acknowledge was the already present political instability in El Salvador and the surrounding region. El Salvador was a nation plagued by coups, dictatorships, and false democracies and to say that the FMLN would have made it worse is patently false. FMLN wanted a nationalized and fair economy, land given to peasants, and for a true democracy. Even if FMLN didn’t manage to achieve all these admittedly lofty

46 Schwarz, Benjamin. "Dirty Hands." The Atlantic. December 1998. Accessed December 13, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/dirty-hands/377364/. 47 Ibid. 48 White, Tom. "Civil War in El Salvador and United States Counterinsurgency Strategy." Perspectives of the Past. May 23, 2012. Accessed December 13, 2016. https://perspectivesofthepast.com/terrorism-and-insurgency- in-the-contemporary-world/civil-war-in-el-salvador-and-united-states-counterinsurgency-strategy/. goals, to say that their reforms would have somehow worsened the state of El Salvador is almost certainly untrue.

The Salvadoran Civil War is and was so important because of how it affected the people of El Salvador and the precedent it set for US foreign policy. It killed the same percent of its countries population as the American Civil War did, and left millions displaced. The Salvadoran people are still suffering the repercussions of the civil war to this very day. This conflict, along with other imperialistic actions taken by America in Central America at the time, showed people that America wasn’t the “greatest nation in the world” like many thought it was. It marked a time when people started to realize that interventionism wasn’t necessarily a flawless ideology, and that fighting other peoples’ wars sometimes makes them worse.

Interview Transcription

Interviewee/Narrator: Caleb Rossiter Interviewer: Brian TerBush Location: Bullis School, Potomac, MD Date: December 14th, 2016 This interview was reviewed and edited by Brian TerBush

Brian TerBush: So tell me about your childhood.

Caleb Rossiter: My childhood? I grew up in Ithaca, New York, in a very academic family. My father was a professor at Cornell university, he taught history and politics. All his friends were professors so there were professors around all the time, making me a born teacher of statistics, because they are all critical thinkers. My mom was an editor at a newspaper before she decided to stop that and have kids, and that was pretty rare in the 1940‘s for a woman in those days. She graduated from college, so she too was always subjecting me to answer why I thought something was true. Critical thinking was at the heart of our family dinner table.

BT: Do you have any siblings?

CR: I have two siblings.

BT: What were your college years like?

CR: Not much, my undergraduate, should have saved my parents the money. This was during the Vietnam war, and we were much more interested in ending the war and protesting American involvement in other people’s civil wars and other peoples’ governments than we were in going to class. So the university were frequently going out on strike against the war and all the classes would stop because, I don’t know, Nixon invaded Cambodia or Laos or god knows where. The universities would actually give you a pass grade for the semester even though you hadn’t barely gone to any class, it was ridiculous. I transferred from political science into something I thought would be practical which was teaching, teaching head start, or kindergarten. So that I liked because I didn’t have to go to class I just went to schools and taught students.

BT: At what point in your life did you decide you wanted to oppose imperialism as a job.

CR: I’d like to say it was when Richard Nixon drafted me in 1970 because that concentrates the mind. Why am I being forced to be kidnapped by the US armed forces and taken over seas to kill people I got no quarrel with. Like Muhammed Ali said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with no

Vietcong.” But it was earlier. I had been a civil rights activist at your age, taking part of demonstrations against companies in our town, in the north, that had offices in the south where they discriminated against blacks under the laws there. From that it was a quick jump, just like for Dr. Martin Luther King, into human rights work on behalf of colored people overseas, as opposed to Americans, and I can remember by the time I was in 9th grade in 1965, standing at the board in my math class before I put up my problems, and writing “US out of Vietnam” on the board as my name. I’ve been involved in anti-imperialist work, trying to get the united states to stop backing dictators abroad for its own benefit of its armed forces and its finances, since I was about 15 years old, and I haven’t stopped. I’ve been doing it ever since.

BT: How did your parents feel about your protests?

CR: I’d say they were opposed. They had always told us this great quote growing up, “don’t be good Germans” because they remembered world war 2, where the nice people of Germany didn’t really hate Jews and didn’t really want to support Hitler attacking all the countries in Europe but they’ didn’t do anything in terms of protest to stop it from happening. That was the description of the good German. They always told us, “don’t be a good German,” so as soon as we saw our country allowing the police force in the south to shoot firehoses at black kids or beat up black activists and white activists who wanted to register to vote or stop dropping napalm in Vietnam or supporting a dictatorship there, we felt we had to speak up. And no initially most of our parents’ generation thought Vietnam was better off under US backed government than a communist government. We thought it was better off if it we let Vietnam pick its own government. So no initially, by 1970, most of America, including parents, had come around to believing that, you know what, this wasn’t such a great idea, but initially there was a lot of tension with family, a lot of tension with administrators of schools, a lot of tension with authorities if you expressed antiwar sentiment, which, by the way, has come full circle today.

BT: When they drafted you, did your refuse it?

CR: Yes, I was a draft resistor

BT: What happened?

CR: It was a long story. You’d have to read my other book called the “Chimes of Freedom

Flash.” Fortunately, that’s on the web for you. I was a draft resistor. I refused to step forward. I handed out leaflets at the draft board saying we shouldn’t be going. In the end they didn’t put me in jail. They only put about 1 out of 1000 draft resistors in jail. Mostly they ignored them and let them slither away. With me when I thought I’d be arrested, they looked in my ear one last time in 1970 and said, “eh you got an ear ache, we’ll give you six months medical deferment. (both laugh) That’s the kind of thing that was happening.

BT: (5:44) America has interfered with a lot of central American countries over the last century.

Did Americas history of interventionism affect the US’s involvement in El Salvador?

CR: Did the history affect it?

BT: Yeah, in regards to our past actions interfering in central America.

CR: I’d have to say yes. Even jimmy carter in 1977 and 1980 and his ambassador towards the end, Bob White, who was a friend of mine who died last year, were trying very hard not to let the brutal right wing government and military run around and kill human rights activists, but they felt the United States had to do something to keep the left wing rebels from taking power. They could never, the liberals, give up on the idea that our policy should be to find the middle way. So we don’t like the government but we’ll back them if they are willing to negotiate with the rebels, as opposed to just my perspective as an anti-imperialist: once the war starts, keep your hands off.

The reason, we felt, was that when you keep your hands off, then the government and the rebels will make a deal much quicker, which is what happened by 1989. We wasted 10 years from my perspective, and I admit my perspective is quite biased because I knew a lot of people were killed. About 70,000 people died between 81 and 89 unnecessarily. The answer to your question, because the United States was always involved in every country before 1977 in the region, we were always a player. People were always looking to see who the US was backing. Was the US aiding and training the military of the government or was the US backing the rebels? They always looked for that, because we were playing everywhere. So it was almost unavoidable, the action of being Switzerland and saying “I don’t know, we’ll just accept whichever government comes out of this mess” was not available to the policy makers, because they felt they had to do something. (I close the door) If you look at any position paper for the time about what we should do about Vietnam in the 60’s, in El Salvador in the mid 70’s, in Nicaragua, the staff always gives the president three options, do nothing, come in on the side of the government, or come in on the side of the government a lot and send troops. They are never going to pick do nothing because it will make them look like they don’t care, as opposed to saying a real option is, you know, watch carefully, work with people in the region, provide extra funding for good offices for people to make negotiations as they move towards the resolution between the rebels and the government.

That is never on the table when the US is the main player.

BT: How did America first get involved in the Salvadoran Civil War?

CR: Well, there were brutal dictatorships in most of central and south America in the 60’s and

70’s. As they existed, there was much social agitation by unions, religious leaders, peasants’ organizations, especially in el Salvador, where very few families owned the entire country and made everybody work for what they wanted, with the governments military backing them up. All this agitation lead to demands for elections, and to calm them down there were elections. The US involvement has to do with guiding and moderating and trying to bring the government to a place where they can stay in power, and calm down the left, and calm down the labor leaders, and calm down the religious leaders. They felt that if they gave aid to the government, then the government would listen to them. That was our main thing. If we arm them and we pay for their balance of payments, then when we tell them to stop killing people, to stop shooting up your priests, stop shooting up your peasant leaders who’re demanding change, then they’ll stop.

That’s the great fallacy of US foreign policy, people who want to stay in power take our weapons, take our money, then kill whoever they want. In El Salvador they did right down to

November 16th, 1989, as you know. And that’s what finally ended the war. Congress said

“ENOUGH,” but until that point, the Salvadoran military, no matter what they did, could always count on US support. They were so scared of the rebels taking over.

BT: (10:28) In my research I discovered El Salvador’s long history of political instability. How did that effect the Salvadoran Civil War’s beginning?

CR: They all knew each other. it’s a small country, they’d all gone to the elite high schools together. Both the heads of the rebels, who were not exactly peasants and were also educated people in the cities, as well as the heads of the governments. And they took different sides. The people from the latifundium who were the 13 families who run the country and the rebels who were more Che Guevara, Castro types in thinking we want to have a managed economy so the people can benefit. There was a great appeal to socialism at the time to the left in Latin America, because the only experience they had had with capitalism was military imposed crony capitalism, where everything’s owned by the thirteen families. There was no real middle way. So that’s how the crisis really occurred. They didn’t know how to compromise. They were scared of each other, the two sides. They didn’t trust the other side not to kill them when they took power, so therefore they would never surrender power. Politics is not about having a fair election; politics is a continuation of war by other means. The elections are, their purpose then is, to win the war and destroy your enemy.

BT: Before the war started, the Salvadoran government wanted to pass some moderate left leaning economic polices but was stopped by the military and the oligarchy. How do you think the war would have changed if some moderate reforms were passed?

CR: Oh, it would have ended. But that’s why they couldn’t accept that. You’re precisely putting your finger on the problem. They won’t give up power and they are willing to fight it out on that line as Ulysses S. Grant said in 1864, “if it takes all summer.” In this case it took 10 years. They can’t accept land reform; they can’t accept giving up that land.

BT: Or nationalizing the economy and other things like that?

CR: Yeah

BT: The war was caused by the peasants’ anger over their economic situation, can you describe how severe the poverty of the average Salvadoran peasant was?

CR: Well social scientists say it’s amazing people don’t revolt more often. Salvador was very very poor outside of san Salvador and san Miguel, those two cities. Small country, people could travel throughout it within 3 or 4 days. I think it was about 5 or 6 million people at the time, half of whom ended up living inside the United States as they fled. But I would not say the revolt was primarily economic. It was when people were agitating for their economic rights, and they began to be slaughtered in their thousands with their bodies left out to rot. When I first went to

Salvador, in 85 I think, every person I met who was interesting and helpful and useful to try to push through peace. Father Ellacuría, who was head of the Jesuit university, which was sort of like being head of Georgetown university here. The head of the labor unions, the head of the church organizations that did social service, the head of the top journals, they had their jobs only because their predecessors were sitting in their meetings, like you and I are sitting now, the door banged open, the death squads came in with the military, and they were dragged out in the street and executed. In case after case after case after case, so it really was the violence against the people demanding change by the military that caused the war, I would say. People can accept a lot of poverty, but they’ll not accept being slaughtered and left with no other choice but to head for the hills.

BT: How strong would you say the Salvadoran oligarchy was before the war and after?

CR: You mean 1980 to 1990?

BT: Yeah, how did their power change?

CR: Well they were totally in control in 1980 because they’d have their own private army, and they’d rent out the army if the peasants tried to organize against them to get more pay. By 1990, many were already living in America, living in Miami, moved all their money there. There was tremendous capital flight during the war. People put their money in suitcases or would play with invoices when they’d do import and export with the United States. They’d overvalue the import in the US so they can keep their money in the US, which is sort of fraudulent but a way to get your money into the US. Capital flight and money laundering. They got their money out. They weren’t so powerful in the country, and today they have their farms, but they have to pay a lot more and they have many more restrictions, so the oligarchy is not that powerful today. El

Salvador’s problems lie pretty much in the destruction of civil society, the proliferation of weapons. The gangs there have better arms than the military now.

BT: Is that the main problem in el Salvador right now, gang crime?

CR: Yeah they lost control of the country. It’s as dangerous as it was during the war.

BT: (15:40) How resistant was the American government to changing their policies regarding giving aid to the Salvadoran government?

CR: 100% fought us tooth and nail every second of the 1980’s. I was in the group of congress staffers trying to end that aid, condition that aid, dramatic reforms, cleaning out the military, prosecuting human rights abusers. They fought us every step of the way, the entire time, even after the Jesuit murders. We had to win that big vote by Joe Moakley and John Murtha, who were two democrats who brought the conditioning, and it was only a condition for half the aid on the prosecution of the Jesuit murders. It was a very minor amendment, and we still had to fight the administration on that. They fought it all the way.

BT: Did you get it from both Democrats and Republicans?

CR: It was the more liberal democrats and the moderate republicans trying to end the war, and it was the conservative democrats and the conservative republicans trying to continue it. We fought over the swing votes in the middle. I think our first big amendment we had 128 votes, and you need 218 to win. In 1985 or 86, an amendment by Gerry Studds cut off some aid, only got 128 votes, we ended up with 216 when Mr. Murtha, 5 or 6 years later, after the Jesuit murders shocked people. We had a good vote of about 180 or something with Congressman Matt

McHugh in 1989, not to soon before the Jesuit murders. We just keep clawing away, trying to convince people to get them lobbied at home by human rights activists and religious leaders saying you cannot give money to this government, they are slaughtering people. Congress in

1985 voted for military victory by about 1 vote. It was called the Broomfield amendment. Henry

Kissinger’s aid package to the region. One or two votes, and that’s a vote for military victory. A core of southern democrats divided the margin of victory to the Reagan forces, because it was sort of different in those days, Brian. There were southern democrats who were quite conservative in the party and in the caucus. They aren’t there anymore, they’re all gone. There were moderate northern republicans, I worked for Jim Leach of Iowa, there was Connie Morella,

Chuck Mathias of Maryland, these moderate republicans were spread across the north and they would vote with the democrats opposing aid to oppressive governments, maybe 50 or 60 of them. There are zero of them now. The republican party has completely become a conservative party; the democratic party has completely become a liberal party. There’s not many swing votes to look for. We called the democrats “Dixiecrats” from the time in the war, the Vietnam war. they were providing support for the war, they were very conservative, they were the dixies we called them.

BT: How did they come to exist?

CR: Strom Thurmond, who was the first democratic governor of South Carolina, the seat of the confederacy, ran for president in 1948 on what they called the Dixiecrat ticket. Meaning he is a democrat, but he won’t vote for Harry Truman because Truman is going to have Hubert

Humphrey, an ally of his from Minnesota, desegregate the armed forces, oppose segregation laws in the south that don’t let blacks ride on the bus or vote, and so many people in the south voted for Thurmond. He got a lot of electoral votes because he was seen as a segregationist, and they called that party the Dixiecrat party. Just like George Wallace won running as independent in 1968 I believe, won all the southern states. Neither Nixon or Humphrey won those electoral votes. So this is like America’s racial history explains Dixiecrats. We called them Dixies.

BT: How did the Bipartisan Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus come to exist?

CR: Vietnam war. The Vietnam war, they called themselves Members of Congress for Peace

Through Law. The committees, foreign affair and armed services, are full of people who want to help the armed services and the state department because they have bases in their district, their district is conservative, they agree with America’s intervention and our cold war policy of finding friendly dictators or as Roosevelt said finding “our bastards” as opposed to the “other sides bastards.” So therefor they wouldn’t give the information. They wouldn’t pass information about what was going on in the war to the more liberal members of the caucus who were being told by their constituents to stop the war. The left wing of the Democratic party and the

Republican party, the Mark Hatfield’s, Matt Mathias’ people like that and the Republicans, Ron

Dellums, people from Berkley and New York and all were against the war. So to get information to do the things that I did in congress, to go get the data on El Salvador, write reports, sneak around the house and find out what’s in the package of aid that the administration is about to throw on the floor before you can even look at it, that’s what we do. We do detective work. The caucus was formed for the Vietnam War to try to get that information, because information is power. And notice the first thing Newt Gingrich did when the Republicans took power in 94 in the house, get rid of the caucus’s. Caucus’s allowed you to take your staff money as a member of congress and not spend it on your own staff, but throw money into a pot to hire a professional staff. People like me who just work on the foreign policy for 140 members, and if you wanted something, I’d get it for you. But you can’t afford to have me on your own staff because that’s too expensive, and you have too many things to cover on your own staff, like transportation, post offices, health care, social security, so it’s like pooling resources, having your own committee of people committed to arms control and a more non-intervention foreign policy. Caucus exists probably from 1967 to 1994.

BT: (21:38) What was the main focus of the Bipartisan Arms Control and Foreign Policy

Caucus?

CR: Well, Vietnam was about 67 to 74 or 75, then obviously the war ended but the caucus was still in existence, and they very much opposed Jimmy Carter who was a democrat. Most of them were Democrats, and they opposed Jimmy Carter’s support for the Shah of Iran, for Mobutu in the Congo, support for Marcos in the Philippines, the war in Afghanistan, Carter’s building more nuclear weapons, building the MX missile. These were like liberals, both Democrat and

Republican, who wanted to stop carter from being dragged to the right by Brzezinski, his

National Security advisor. We failed in most of that. So my boss, Edie Willkie, had been there since about 1975. She’d been a congressional staffer. She came and took over the caucus, and she was the power in the caucus all the way from 75 to 94 when she retired. What did we do?

Arms control, nuclear freeze, stop building nuclear weapons, stop the MX missile. That was the arms control side. For foreign policy we wanted to stop the war in El Salvador, stop the war in

Angola which we’re supporting, stop spending so much money on the armed forces, sign the salt treaty with Russia. It was like a liberal approach to foreign policy, both on weapons and our military adventures. I would say we were a human rights caucus.

BT: What bills, besides the one we covered before, did you help pass to try to stop the war in El

Salvador?

CR: Every day that’s all we did. Most of Congress works on amendments to appropriations, so we’d go on an appropriations bill and hold up some of the economic support funds until we can some corruption. We’d hold up military aid until the killers of the nuns would be brought to trial.

Not a lot, but some. We were constantly passing and fighting for little amendment to condition little bits of aid to push the Salvadoran government. Now, to be fair, we didn’t want to push the

Salvadoran government, we wanted them to stop the war, but we had to have something that you could get more than our 128 liberals to vote for. We’d come up with things that were bridges, as congressman David Bonior used to say, “bridges to bring more conservative members over with us.” Who can be against holding up money until you find the killers of nuns, killers of Jesuit priests, killers of thousands of peasants. That’s what we did. Constantly. Every day. We were doing amendments, we’re learning stuff, we were digging around to find shocking stories of

USA in el Salvador so we can cut down the wide open support that the murders got.

BT: (24:22) Did the caucus have any influence on the eventual UN intervention in el Salvador towards the end of the war?

CR: No, the UN intervention came because people needed to have somebody to negotiate the end, but the end came when congress cut off the aid in the Moakley-Murtha

bill. The UN came in because they needed an honest broker, but the UN can’t force anything. If the money had been pouring into El Salvador, the Salvadoran army wouldn’t have negotiated.

BT: Was the US government employing any kinds of propaganda to try to get more people to support the war in El Salvador?

CR: Yes, the Office of Public Diplomacy didn’t focus overseas, it focused here. From Otto

Reich, who was investigated in Iran-contra for this. He’s still in town. He was working in administration recently. Elliot Abrams was indicted for lying in congress. He’s been a big shot in the administration of George W. Bush. These guys never pay a price for lying to the American people. They were caught lying in Iran-Contra. It was huge, huge public diplomacy effort to convince Americans, as always, that we were on the right side. That’s what they did. I’m not complaining. We did the opposite. We tried to show that the Salvadoran army had shit on their shoes. Found an old report we published about the Salvadoran high command, the one that helped win the vote in 1989. That’s the kind of work that we did. The vote came in 1990. So we did this stuff all the time, trying to show the Salvadoran army is full of human rights abusers at the top, the other side did reports saying they’re all the good guys.

BT: Why do you think that the average American seemed fairly apathetic towards the

Salvadoran cause at that time?

CR: Americans don’t care about foreign policy. I ran for congress hoping to talk about foreign policy. I gave up after the first day. Americans in their lives, rightly so, are worried about what’s going on around them. Can their kids get educated, go to school, taxes, jobs? Foreign policy was not much of an interest for the American people until the streets are alive with protests. So

Vietnam, South Africa, those became domestic political issues because the mess the protesters were making. In general, most of the people around the world ignore foreign policy, especially in empires. Britain, in the 19th century, celebrated its military adventures as promoting freedom just like we do. Its massive. It’s all over the TV every night in every sporting event. People just don’t think about it. They weren’t against the Salvadorans, just very few people get involved. Those who did, helped us lobby against congress.

BT: What were the main things you did to try to get the common American’s attention towards the conflict?

CR: I was not involved in grass roots stuff. We did provide them all our materials. We constantly were a source of research, like our reports on El Salvador we did in 85 and 87, even before this one in 89. Front page stories in New York times. They would be sent out to all activists who would take our long congressional report, melt it down to a smaller one, and pass it around. I suppose we provided information to the grassroots, but there are a lot of great grass roots groups working on their own, Central American Working Group, and one that I believe is now called Peace Action but used to be called SANE/FREEZE. These were citizens’ groups who cared about this stuff, and we coordinated with them every week. They helped us lobby, they reached out to members of congress in their districts, and hammer on them after we tell them who’s our swing votes. It was very tightly coordinated.

BT: How much did America directly influence the Salvadoran military actions and in particular the Atlacatl Battalion?

CR: We created the Atlacatl Brigade. We created the entire military. The military was a tiny little force of a few thousand in 1981, and we boosted it up to about 70,000. We completely funded the Salvadoran government. The first time in history we gave more money to a government than it raised on its own. That’s one of our major findings. It was our army. We trained them all, we created them all, and we kept saying, “if you just give them enough and tell them to behave themselves, they won’t slaughter people.” Americans were with the Atlacatl the night that they went off to slaughter the Jesuit priests. They were all holed up in the hotel, the

Camino Real, on the next day during the final offensive, so called by the rebels, and they had to be evacuated. They were training illegally. They weren’t supposed to be down there under the laws. They were illegally training the Atlacatl at the time.

BT: When people found out about this kind of thing, why were there no people being prosecuted in America?

CR: Because we don’t prosecute for foreign policy, and the few who did get convicted in Iran-

Contra like Elliott Abrams and Cap Weinberger, Lieutenant Defense Secretary, George H.W.

Bush immediately pardoned them when he left office. The only person that got punished for the misdeeds of the US government was Colonel Steele, who I made sure, with senator harken, while holding up his nomination, he ran the US military group in el Salvador. He illegally used

Salvadoran military aid fuel to do these Contra aid flights over Nicaragua, where he got shot down. That’s an illegal use of US foreign aid to help another war. He got held up and he never became a general. That’s about all I can say.

BT: (29:58) What were the biggest effects of father Ellacuría’s death?

CR: He was well known on Capitol Hill. We brought him here a number of times to speak to our caucus and to others. He was a very brilliant Jesuit theoretician. He was born in the Biscay region, I believe, of Spain. He lived in Salvador all his adult life. Brilliant. He was the negotiator between the government. He was the intermediary between the government and the rebels. This is why they wanted to kill him. Because they knew he might be able to help them make a deal.

His death shocked the congress in a way that nothing had before. Congress had just voted, like I said, on our amendment, the McHugh Amendment, 185 votes against full aid to El Salvador and, in three months or four months, we got 257 and the war was over. It was a complete shock to the system. Nobody wanted to go out and say we can’t do nothing except the administration. So we passed that amendment because of father Ellacuria’s death. (my dad briefly interrupts then leaves) You have to remember father Ellacuría and his death achieved what he tried to achieve in his life. It’s a really remarkable thing. End the War. The shock and this murder completely turned the congress around, and we manipulated the second they did it. We went out and did our reports, more importantly Mr. Moakley did his report with Murtha on who ordered the killing.

The US government somehow couldn’t find it out. The CIA was down there running the whole war, and they couldn’t find it out. (we both laugh) Moakley always used to say, “I went down there with two guys as my aids, Bill Woodward and Jim McGovern, who didn’t even speak

Spanish, and they found out within three days who had given the order. It was the high command. The people, they wrote about it in their report that it was the high command. Without the Jesuit murders we would have been there forever.

BT: Did it draw a lot of American’s attention when he (Ellacuría) got murdered?

CR: The average American couldn’t tell you where El Salvador is and couldn’t pronounce

Father Ellacuría, but it shocked enough people in the congress who didn’t want to be voting.

Now I told the story in my book about father Paul Tipton, who was the head of the Jesuit colleges in America and the UCA. The university, Father Ellacuría was one of their members.

Tipton was a conservative guy. Alabama. Was friends with all the conservative members of congress. This Jesuit Priest who had been a president of University of Alabama, which was also

Catholic, went to the hill and worked like an animal. “You must vote against this government if you’re a good Catholic.” The head of Georgetown university went over and chewed out the members of congress, a lot of them worshipped in Catholic churches. The conservative members, the Republicans. Everybody beat the hell out of those folks intensely. Murtha and Moakley had a lot of credibility because Murtha was a tough guy from Pennsylvania, a real Dixie type who’d been for the war, everything pro-military, but he’s a democrat. Moakley, a liberal from Boston who’d got involved because there were a lot of Salvadoran refugees in Boston, but very highly respected, and more importantly, head of the Rules Committee. You wanted anything out of congress, you had to go to Joe Moakley and beg to get it ruled to put it on the floor. These are big powerful players. And with their staffers, Billy Woodward and Jim McGovern, they took this and they creamed the administration. The administration didn’t know what hit em’.

BT: What exactly does the Head of the Rules Committee do?

CR: In the house, no bill can come to the floor without a rule that says what amendments can be offered, how long will there be debate, when will debate be cut off. In the senate there is no

Rules Committee. They just get on the floor and talk. Head of the Rules Committee is one of the most powerful positions in the congress. So Moakley, when he was writing his report and we were writing ours, and Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense and tried to stiff us, and not give us what we wanted. I have a letter here for you that shows what happens when we sent our letters to these guys that say “give us the information.” We asked them “give us some information about all the background of the Salvadoran high command, what they did earlier in their careers,” which we know the Defense Intelligence Agency knows. Secretary of Defense wrote us back, said, “sorry, we can’t tell you. Why don’t you ask the Salvadoran embassy?” [See

Appendix 1] Howard Berman, who is head of the foreign affairs committee, writes back and says, “your reply borders on the flippant, you give me this stuff.” [See Appendix 2] So, Moakley gets on the phone and says the following thing to Dick Cheney, who was the Secretary of

Defense, “If you want your mother fucking bill to get on the floor with the amendments you want, the defense authorization bill, you give us this godamn’ information, and we want to talk to the American who was on the staff down there and had talked to these rebels and had talked to the military about who they were killing.” That’s how you do politics. When Moakley says,

“Dick, you’re not getting your godamn bill on the floor unless you give us information that we want, then you’re playing politics.”

BT: (35:09) Do you mind if, once were done, I take photos of these [the documents]?

CR: Go ahead. That’s how congress works. You got to have a threat or the administration will say “screw you, we’re not giving this information about what the Salvadorans are doing.”

BT: The Salvadoran Civil War killed almost 2% of the Salvadoran population, was this felt throughout all of El Salvador equally?

CR: The whole country. Anybody who was a labor activist, peasant activist, religious leader, journalist, was up to be murdered.

BT: What were other goals of the Bipartisan Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus in the

Salvadoran Civil War besides just pulling out? Did you have any other goals?

CR: No, ending the war. Our goal had nothing to do with pulling out or pulling in. Our goal was what will most likely to end this war. We believed from the start that you cannot give the

Salvadorans military aid when they’re slaughtering people. You have to tell them no, then they’ll make a deal with the rebels. That happened 9 years later. In 1989, they made the deal. They got out, and the government by the way has been ruled by the leftists, freely elected, for the last 8 or

9 years. The actual people who were the rebels are now the government. Same thing with

Nicaragua.

BT: So no one at the caucus wanted, for instance, for the FMLN to be backed? They just wanted to completely pull out?

CR: That’s the difference between the right and the left in congress. You put your finger on it.

The right in congress and those who voted for the war, they voted for military victory. They wanted one side to beat the other. We were voting for a settlement. We were pushing for a settlement. We don’t back the communist rebels. We wanted the war to end and it could not be ended until both sides thought they couldn’t win. If the rebels thought they could win early on in

81 or 82, they wouldn’t have negotiated. After that they knew they wouldn’t win but at least they could make the deal. The government thought they could win all the way through because the

Americans kept giving them more airplanes, and helicopters, and weapons, and training all their military, and paying their military’s bills, and paying for the soldiers. Why would you bargain? It looks to me like our theory won. Which seems to be the case all over the world. You got to cut off the goodies. In Vietnam they sent letters to the government in 63 and 64, “If you guys don’t stop killing all these priests and nuns, and slaughtering peasants, and collecting rent on behalf of the rich landlords, we’re going to pull out.” Of course they weren’t going to pull out. Only congress can make the administration pull out. That’s what our job was in congress, cut off the money.

BT: Jimmy Carter once said, “human rights are the soul of our foreign policy because human rights are the very soul of our sense of nationhood.” How did Carter’s actions in El Salvador prove or disprove that?

CR: Totally disproved it. Under Carter, and I had good friends who worked in his human rights bureau, and I worked a lot with him, human rights mattered for the small countries that didn’t matter, not the big ones that did. You can’t be backing Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah in

Iran, and the Salvadoran government, and say you’re for human rights. Well Carter at least put it on the agenda. His two human rights leaders were Brzezinski, who was his National Security

Advisor, totally against this. He just wanted to smash the Soviet Union. He even helped start the war in Afghanistan and was proud of it. His other was Cyrus Vance who was quite liberal. So he was dealing with schizophrenia all the time, but no, he never could get outside the US policy of backing dictators, even though he liked to talk about human rights.

BT: Once the Cold War ended, did that affect people’s perspective about backing a group opposing communists?

CR: These things happened around the same time, and it may have been on the minds of the

Salvadorans. It certainly was on the mind of Jim Baker who was the Secretary of State in 89 for

George Bush, that we wanted to end these wars and the Soviet Union was starting to go away right at the same time. So September 89, Poland became free and the first election happened and it was clear that Gorbachev was not going to interfere with troops. November of course was the murder of the Jesuit Fathers. Yeah, you’d have to say it played into this. But the United States continue to back repressive governments around the world after this period. For example,

Savimbi in Angola, Colombia, remember we were backing dictators long before there was a

Cold War. Latin America we backed all the dictators, in Haiti, in El Salvador, in Brazil, and

Honduras back in the 30’s. So, to me, the Cold War was an excuse to keep us down in every other region in the world because we kept backing dictators in return for access to their natural resources and military bases. We do it today in the Middle East. Bahrain is using US weapons to slaughter their people who want voting, but Bahrain is the base for the US fleet. Saudi Arabia, they’re our ally in the region, and we back them. Our biggest foreign policy problem is us backing dictators in return for their military cooperation. That hasn’t stopped since 1990.

BT: (40:50) Do you think the people, especially the right that were pushing anti-communist messages, genuinely believed that communists would take over and start to spread across the world?

CR: I learned a long time ago in politics and in education, I never questioned people’s motives.

If they say they believe it, they believe it.

BT: The Salvadoran standard of living before the war and after the war, how did it change?

CR: Depends who you are. It’s all been very low for the poor and very high for the rich. Very hard to collect statistics about infant mortality, life expectancy, income during the war, so it’s very very hard to say.

BT: Another student at St. Andrew’s did another project about the Salvadoran Civil War. The person they interviewed said the government forces “put a knife to his neck,” “hit him in the stomach,” and “yanked the earrings off of a woman” and ripped off her earlobes. Was that a common experience for a lot of the Salvadoran population back then?

CR: Yes. But it is more likely that the entire village would be massacred. Anywhere that the rebels could move freely, near the 80’s the government just slaughtered everybody.

BT: When people were “disappeared,” do people now know where they went when they said they were disappeared?

CR: Yeah, in El Salvador they tended to kill them and leave them out on the garbage somewhere so you would find them within a few weeks. This wasn’t like Argentina where you never found the disappeared. Like I said, you’d be in a meeting, people would come in the door and I’d never see you again until the next day when you’re lying up in the garbage somewhere. That was the military. They had a thing called “death squads” which were just military people and they’d take off their uniforms and come with the same guns and take you out.

BT: So the death squads weren’t special units?

CR: No, death squads could be bits of pieces of units, they typically were people that took off their uniforms. They were under the pretense that it was just “who knows who it was, it could have been the rebels.”

BT: For things like ORDEN, where they trained peasants to do their own-

CR: Self defense

BT: Yeah, like that. Were those groups mostly used for attacking leftists and not actual self- defense?

CR: They were irrelevant. The ARENA death squads, ARENA is the big party, a right wing party, they were the military. They created the death squads. These self-defense groups were not significant.

BT: In Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address, he says “As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the

American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it, now or ever.” How true do you think that was?

CR: I would consider the Salvadoran government at that time and military, enemies of freedom, so it doesn’t mean anything.

BT: Howard Zinn says that “the press was especially timid and obsequious during the Reagan years.” Do-

CR: They were always timid and obsequious on foreign policy.

BT: So was it not particularly strong during the Salvadoran Civil War?

CR: Ray Bonner a friend of mine who was a reported for the New York Times and he traveled with the Salvadoran rebels and wrote true stories about the El Mozote Massacre and the administration came down on him. They tried to get him fired and transferred from the New

York Times. Everything that came out, they’d go after. I knew all the journalists down there Julia Preston was there, the fellow that runs the San Francisco chronicle was there, Phil

Bronston, they were all there filing good reports, and doing a good job. Bob Perry, Douglas Faire for the Washington Post, they filed good stuff and they were under tremendous danger. The information was coming out about death squads and who it was, there was no mystery. The only people who couldn’t figure it out was the CIA.

BT: (45:07) (I laugh) What a coincidence.

CR: It was obviously a war for control of the society.

BT: Do you think there was a lot less press coverage for the Salvadoran Civil War versus other things like Iran-Contra?

CR: People love a scandal. George Miller, a congressman who spent a lot of his time working with me on the Central American Task Force of the caucus to try to organize members on

Salvador said, “we got to wait for some more bodies to turn up,” and then the Jesuits turned up, and he was right. High profile bodies have to turn up. I mean Nicaragua and Iran-Contra was a great scandal. People love to write about bits of it, and of course it was all related to Salvador because the planes for Iran-Contra flew out of El Salvador. Colonel Steele was the one they gave the fuel at the airbase. The murder of 70,000 people pretty much never really had a big impact in the media or elsewhere. Hell, in Guatemala a couple hundred thousand were being killed at the same time. That was a much bloodier war.

BT: Why was Iran-Contra so much bigger than other US involvements around that time?

CR: It was a chance to break the administration, so the Democrats jumped on it. Like Hillary

Clinton’s emails, it’s just a thing that’s out there. We tried to jump on it. Eugene Hasenfus was a kicker, meaning the person that kicks the weapons out of the airplanes that fly over the contras.

His airplane came down in October of 86, or whenever the heck it was, and that started the scandal. He came down from the sky and revealed the CIA had put him there, and they were flying out of El Salvador. And it had links all the way back to Ollie North in the Whitehouse. It was illegal to spend money on the Nicaraguan war at the time. We passed an amendment on that, the Boland Amendment. It was illegal for the administration to work on it, but Ollie North in

Reagan’s Whitehouse was running it. Getting the Saudis to give him money, and Elliot Abrams to keep the contras going, even though congress had voted to cut them off. That’s illegal. You can’t always spend money by appropriation in this government. So it was a constitutional crisis.

Also, the notion that Reagan had been exposed. The way they got the money was selling weapons to Iran to free American hostages. But “we don’t pay for hostages,” do we? So the whole thing was just amateur hour. Robert McFarlane was our national security advisor, way over his head. Former marine colonel didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He was letting all this stuff go on in the Whitehouse basement. So they’re thumbing the nose at Eddie Boland who was a conservative democrat from Massachusetts who wrote the amendment that you couldn’t spend any more money on the contras. You’re taking on the congressional institution. He’s not some flaming liberal. Moakley, Murtha, Boland, these are the reasons they were highly positioned people, Tom Foley as well, who was the Whip at the time. We worked on an amendment called the Foley Amendment to ban US troops from fighting in Salvador. The big players decided it was in their benefit to take on Reagan, and finally of course, Jim Wright did.

When Reagan was weak, Jim Wright, the speaker, took him on.

BT: Do you think that the heavier the culture difference between America and El Salvador, and other places at the time, bred apathy for their cause?

CR: Whose cause?

BT: (48:50) For the leftist rebels’ cause. Do you think it caused people to not care as much about death squads and other things like that?

CR: From Americans? No it has no effect. It was too far away from upstate New York; people don’t really care a lot. They don’t know the information, they can’t possibly. I had to go down there and go out into those areas and be terrified of being killed by the government that did my research and see the peasants and what they lived under, and travel with the human rights workers, like Human Rights Watch, to even have a feel for how brutal and oppressive the government is. Not a lot of people get down and do that. That’s why they pay me.

Interview Analysis

Father Ellecuría, a prominent Jesuit priest that wanted an end to the Civil War once said,

“here in El Salvador, life is worthless.”49 This quote doesn’t just mean that life was so awful in

El Salvador that it was pointless, it also means that the government literally thought of their citizen’s lives as not having any value. To live in El Salvador during the 80’s meant that a person would have to face the reality of their own mortality. Nearly everyone in El Salvador during that time knew someone who was murdered by the government. A fact that is too often overlooked is how much of an influence America had over the Civil War. This was “the first time in history we

(the US) gave more money to a government than it raised on its own.” This is the reason why an interview is so important. It can give a perspective that one might not have ever even considered.

An interview helps to stress the importance of how events impact individual people. History is an indescribably large collection of events that encapsulates all time, and sometimes that causes us to forget the ordinary people involved. What is the point of learning about events without learning how they impacted the people experiencing them? Dr. Rossiter’s personal experience contradict the American notions that Communism was the biggest threat to Central America at the time, and that America was only involved to try to help the citizens of El Salvador.

The interview with Dr. Rossiter started with me asking him about his childhood. He

“grew up in Ithaca, New York, in a very academic family.”50 He was taught the importance of being educated and forming his own opinions from a very young age. He spent a lot of his time in college protesting because the Vietnam War, or because “Nixon invaded Cambodia or Laos or

49 Cuff, Matt. "Here in El Salvador, Life Is Worthless." Ignatian Solidarity Network. October 30, 2014. Accessed February 12, 2017. https://ignatiansolidarity.net/blog/2014/08/20/el-salvador-life-worthless/. 50 Rossiter, Caleb. "Oral History Project Interview." Interview by author. December 14, 2016. 25

god knows where.”51 The discussion about El Salvador started with talking about the United

States’ objectives in the war. Dr. Rossiter expressed that the US wanted there to be peace, but also couldn’t allow a communist government to take power. The US thought that if they gave enough money to the Salvadoran dictatorship, they would be able to get them to stop killing civilians. The conversation then transitioned to talking about the circumstances leading up to the war. According to Dr. Rossiter, “social scientists say it’s amazing people don’t revolt more often.”52 El Salvador was, and still is, a country riddled with poverty and extreme income inequality. Dr. Rossiter thinks that the conflict wasn’t primarily economic, but was rather caused by the government’s brutal reaction to people’s protests and complaints. Next, the discussion changed to how he tried to alter the US’ policies while working in DC. A lot of the progress that was made was involving small limitations being tacked onto larger bills. Frequently, a small amount of economic support would be withheld until some form of corruption or human right’s abuse was investigated. Dr. Rossiter focused on acquiring information that opposed our involvement in El Salvador and used it to get the swing votes (liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats) to switch to their side. Dr. Rossiter says that “the end came when congress cut off the aid in the Moakley-Murtha Bill.”53 This bill ended US support for the

Salvadoran government, and by extension, ended the war.

Dr. Rossiter’s experience in trying to pull America out of the Salvadoran Civil War gave him insight into the civil war that contradicts the idea that the rebel forces being Communist makes them inherently wrong. For nearly a century, America has been largely anti-Communist.

Communism was mainly portrayed as a toxic and cruel ideology by the American media from

51 Rossiter, Caleb. "Oral History Project Interview." Interview by author. December 14, 2016. 26 52 Ibid., 32 53 Ibid., 39 the late 1910’s to the early 1990’s. Whether real or fake, the threat of Communism was used as the main reason for intervening in El Salvador’s civil war. Tom White says that “if the FMLN… were to overthrow El Salvador then the entire political security of the region would be threatened.”54 To Tom White, the Communist rebels were seen as a greater threat than the right- wing dictatorship. Dr. Rossiter contradicts this point when he says the war happened “when people were agitating for their economic rights, and they began to be slaughtered in their thousands with their bodies left out to rot.”55 Dr. Rossiter believes the dictatorship that was in charge was already dangerous and was already causing destabilization. He also points out that

“the government… has been ruled by the leftists, freely elected, for the last 8 or 9 years.”56 This shows that the Communist rebels were who the majority of people wanted in charge. This contradiction shows how modern political alignments affect how we view history. Tom White believes that Communism is a bad enough philosophy that it can cause worse destabilization to

El Salvador and Central America than the far right government, whereas Dr. Rossiter thinks that the far right government was about as bad as a government can be. Disagreements like these show the true subjectivity of how history is portrayed.

Although American apathy largely prevented people from trying to get America to withdraw from the Salvadoran Civil War, the idea that the US was doing it for the good of the

Salvadoran people was still necessary. In almost every non-defensive war in recent history, the aggressors have had to claim that they are acting out of altruism and a desire to help the people in the nations they are intervening in. President Carter said that “human rights is the soul of our

54 White, Tom. "Civil War in El Salvador and United States Counterinsurgency Strategy." Perspectives of the Past. May 23, 2012. Accessed December 13, 2016. https://perspectivesofthepast.com/terrorism-and-insurgency- in-the-contemporary-world/civil-war-in-el-salvador-and-united-states-counterinsurgency-strategy/. 55 Rossiter, Caleb. "Oral History Project Interview." Interview by author. December 14, 2016. 32 56 Ibid., 45 foreign policy because human rights are the very soul of our sense of nationhood.” 57 However, the US-backed a government that was responsible for roughly 70,000 civilian deaths, yet still claimed that human rights was their focus. President Reagan said that “As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it, now or ever.”58 Both of these speeches were given while America was giving aid to the

Salvadoran government. To Dr. Rossiter, both these speeches are patently false. The Salvadoran military was being paid by the US government and had their own death squads made to hunt down innocents. Dr. Rossiter says that the “death squads… were just military people and they’d take off their uniforms and come with the same guns and take you out.”59 He doesn’t just talk about the Salvadoran death squads being part of the military the US supported, but also how “we created the Atlacatl Brigade.”60 The Atlacatl Brigade was under direct supervision of the US when they slaughtered the innocent Jesuit priests. This statement contradicts Regan’s so heavily because the Jesuit priests were the people actively attempting to make peace between the two sides. America never had any interest in making peace or upholding human rights. The disagreement between the presidents, who weren’t even part of the same political party, and Dr.

Rossiter is shows a lot about the American mentality. For leaders of modern nations, it is almost a requirement for them to state how they are on the morally right side in a military conflict. It also shows how biased a government can be when faced with the reality that they did something wrong.

57 Carter, Jimmy. "Universal Declaration of Human Right's Remarks." Speech, 30th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, White House, Washington D.C. 58 Reagan, Ronald W. "Ronald Reagan's Inaugural Address." Address, 1981 Presidential Inauguration, D.C., February 10, 2017. 59 Rossiter, Caleb. "Oral History Project Interview." Interview by author. December 14, 2016. 49 60 Ibid., 40 Throughout this OHP, I learned about the struggles of the Salvadoran people and the role that America had in them. Before the project, I assumed that when America got involved in a foreign nation in an attempt to prevent Communism, they, at the very least, were trying to bring stability to that nation. I still don’t think I fully understand America’s motivations for interfering in El Salvador, however I know we didn’t get involved for any altruistic reason. In terms of life skills, I now fully understand the importance of time management. When a project that involves typing 17 pages of context is assigned, it’s a good idea to try to space that out over a few weekends rather than doing half of it during Model UN. This project ended up being a lot of fun, especially the interview itself, which I loved. The interview was so great because Dr. Rossiter was friendly, helpful, and intelligent. All in all, writing the OHP was an enriching and educational experience that I wish I could do again.

Works Consulted

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blood-was-a-seed-of-freedom/.

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Perennial, 2015.

Appendix

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

Appendix 5

Appendix 6 Appendix 7 Appendix 8

Appendix 9