Stop the “Salvadoran Option” –
U.S. considers death squad tactics in Iraq

The U.S. Department of Defense, faced with the growing quagmire in Iraq, is planning to develop and utilize death squad teams similar to those which ravaged the populations of El Salvador and Guatemala throughout the 1980s. The Central American death squads, which were linked to the U.S-backed military forces, were responsible for systematic war crimes, and for the worst human rights violations in the Western Hemisphere. U.S. officials are calling the new plans for Iraq the “Salvadoran Option.” Journalists Michael Hirsch and John Barry broke this story in Newsweek magazine's Jan. 8 online edition.

Military officials have stated that in Iraq “we are playing defense, and we are losing.” Evidently many believe that instead of breaking the back of the insurgency in Fallujah, the result has simply been to “spread it out.” The Pentagon has not learned the true lesson of Abu Ghraib, specifically, that the use of violence and human rights abuses has simply unified many Iraqis as well as others in the Islamic world against the United States.

The proposal would send Special Forces teams to “advise, support and train” Iraqi squads, which would in turn carry out kidnappings and assassinations.

Take action now

Please call your representatives and senators in the United States Congress on an urgent basis, or email them through our online Legislative Action Center.  The congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121. If you can make additional calls, please contact the members of the Armed Services and the Appropriations committees as well.

Message

-- We strongly oppose the creation or support of any kind of de facto death squads in Iraq. We remember all too clearly the horror inflicted on the people of Central America by death squads linked to the U.S.-backed military forces. In El Salvador this included the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero and tens of thousands of peasant leaders, unionists, physicians and dissidents. In Guatemala 200,000 human beings were tortured, killed, or “disappeared” by the army and its death squads, including Bishop Juan Gerardi, Sister Dianna Ortiz, and countless others.

-- Death squads and the use of torture are abhorrent to the American value system, and we should refrain from such actions on moral grounds alone.

-- Moreover such activities are highly illegal under our many international treaties. They also constitute aiding and abetting and conspiracy to commit kidnapping, murder and torture, themselves criminal conduct.

-- Because we are in full control of the Iraqi government and Iraqi military, we are fully responsible for any actions of this nature carried out by them in this regard.

-- We will not stand for these horrors to be carried out in our names yet again 

-- These atrocities do not increase our national security. By sowing hatred against us, these policies endanger us all.

Background

Throughout the 1980s, the United States was deeply involved in the internal conflicts in Central America. President Reagan, alarmed by the Sandinista rise to power in Nicaragua, greatly increased economic aid and other support to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador despite the extraordinary and well known human rights violations being carried out by the armies in those nations. Equipment and weapons were provided, and military leaders were trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga.. Worse yet, the CIA maintained many of the worst human rights violators on the U.S. payroll as paid informants, or “assets”.

These military regimes operated death squads which were responsible for the most notorious repression in the hemisphere. U.S. intelligence agents nevertheless worked closely with many of the intellectual authors. In El Salvador during the 1980s the death squads were responsible, for example, for the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and tens of thousands of civilians, including union members, peasant leaders, physicians, and anyone working with the poor. In Guatemala, the 200,000 victims of the army and its death squads included Bishop Juan Gerardi and Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, a young mother raped and killed in 1985 together with her 19-year-old brother and two-year-old son. The baby's fingernails were torn out as a warning to others. The U.S. support for the Guatemalan intelligence divisions responsible for many of these acts was sharply criticized by the U.N. Truth Commission report in 1999. In both countries, civilian institutions were dangerously weakened, and the rule of law was lost. Can we seriously call these results the building blocks of democracy for Iraq?

The same was true in Honduras, where then U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte has been harshly criticized for his role in supporting and concealing the death squad activities there. Mr. Negroponte is now U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Former death squad members have testified that their U.S. advisors were fully aware of the ongoing torture and extra-judicial executions.

These actions in Iraq would violate the Geneva Conventions. Moreover, the Convention against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory, prohibits any participation in torture and also any conspiracy to commit torture. It also prohibits the deportation of any person to a country where he or she might be in danger of torture. The U.S. anti-torture statute also prohibits such participation, direct or indirect, in torture, and makes such acts a felony.

Jennifer Harbury
Director, STOP (Stop Torture Permanently) Campaign
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
800.388.3920
stoptorture@uusc.org

Posted Jan. 13, 2005