"The Salvador Option" posted by Richard Seymour

According to Newsweek, the Bush administration has a new plan for Iraq. And it is known as the 'Salvador Option' :

The Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

Pause for a second. There is no "allegedly" or "so-called" about the death squads that operated in El Salvador from 1979 to 1992. The UN-sponsored Truth Commission investigating the matter put it as simply as this:

The reformist coup by young military officers in 1979 ushered in a new period of intense violence. Various circles in the armed forces and the private sector vied for control of the repressive apparatus. Hundreds and even thousands of people perceived as supporters or active members of a growing guerrilla movement...were murdered. Members of the army, the Treasury Police, the National Guard, and the National Police formed "squads" to do away with enemies. Private and semi-official groups also set up their own squads or linked up with existing structures within the armed forces. …

It should be said that, while it is possible to differentiate the armed forces death squads from the civilian death squads, the borderline between the two was often blurred. For instance, even the quads that were not organized as part of any State structure were often supported or tolerated by State institutions. Frequently, death squads operated in coordination with the armed forces and acted as a support structure for their activities. The clandestine nature of these activities made it possible to conceal the State's responsibility for them and created an atmosphere of complete impunity for the murderers who worked in the squads. …

These death squads were partially home-grown, developing out of a long-standing collusion between landowners, businessmen and the military elite. But crucial too was the activity of the United States government, specifically through the CIA. Testimony from Salvadoran army officials reveals that the CIA involved them in regular briefings, trained them in torture methods, provided a monthly budget and even funded little expenses like having black window panes installed on vans so that executions and the like could be carried out in secret. One former officer named Richard Castro described how, after training with the US, he had been told by his fellow officers of two towns that had been captured, each with a population of roughly three hundred. He was told that its inhabitants would be tortured for information, then executed. He later discovered that all six hundred had been killed. According to Rene Hurtado, who worked as an intelligence agent for the Treasury Police (one of three Salvadoran paramilitary forces) before fleeing to Minnesota, the US had taught interesting torture techniques to his colleagues at Army Staff headquarters. In particular favour among torture methods were electric shock, suffocation, mutilation, the tearing of skin from the body and sticking needles into the flesh. He also describes the use of US-manufactured torture equipment, including something that looked like a radio "with General Electric written on it". Witnesses describe how Colonel Nicolas Carranza, who took to death squad activity with unusual facility and enthusiasm, was funded by the CIA to the tune of $90,000 a year. The Atlacatl Battalion, created under US pressure, was responsible for some of the worst atrocities, including the murder of Jesuit priests and the El Mozote massacre .

The activities of US-Salvadoran paramilitaries did not end there, however. In the US, Frank Varelli worked for the FBI tracking the activities of domestic opponents of Reagan's policies in Central America, focusing in particular on Salvadoran immigrants facing deportation - he would match his lists with 'death lists' supplied by the Salvadoran junta.

In all, the repression in El Salvador took 75,000 lives. Duarte's regime, funded to the tune of $6 billion by the US, became one of the most notorious and bloody governments in the region. In 1992, a peace agreement was reached, and since then the FMLN has dominated in elections, despite thinly-veiled threats from Arena (the party of the old junta) that votes for the FMLN would lead to reprisals from Washington.

That conveys some of what, apparently, awaits Iraq. Indeed, Dick Cheney telegraphed this during his pre-election debate with John Edwards:

Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador. We had -- guerrilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead, and we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress.

...

And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections. The power of that concept is enormous. And it will apply in Afghanistan, and it will apply as well in Iraq.

I'll leave to your imagination what grotesque creatures lurk in Cheney's belfry. Returning to the Newsweek story, we learn exactly why the 'Salvadoran Option' is being considered:

Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

So, they're going to make it cost the Sunnis something, and - presumably - the same goes for anyone else who doesn't line up behind the 'coalition' and its ruling junta.