WEAKNESS AND DECEIT: US Policy and El Salvador

by Raymond Bonner ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 1984

As a New York Times reporter in El Salvador, Bonnet was singled out by the Reagan administration, in the person of Ambassador Diane Hinton, for his allegedly biased dispatches from behind guerrilla lines. What he saw and reported then--the guerrilla schools and hospitals, the tales of repression and massacre by government forces--is repeated here, together with the caveat that there is no guarantee of what a guerrilla victory would bring: of whether power would pass to the nationalistic and democratic elements among the insurgents, or to the hardline faction. The merit of Bonner's account is his first-hand experience with the former, never mentioned by administration spokesmen. (According to Bonner, a Carter official's observation that ""we didn't know shit about the left"" is still true.) These are peasants, Catholics, and students organized into a confusing panoply of opposition groups that Bonner says have grown proportionately stronger with increases in American military and economic aid to the San Salvador government. (From 1946 to 1979, American military assistance totaled $16.7 million; in the first full year of the Reagan administration, El Salvador received $82 million.) This has occurred despite the US Ambassador's statement, in 1977, that ""the United States really has no vital interest in the country""--a view echoed at the time by the head of the State Department's Latin American desk. What then happened, says Benner, was the flowering of a Vietnam-style approach to El Salvador's domestic political strife. The Carter administration was caught off guard by the Sandinista victory in nearby Nicaragua in July 1979, and when oppositional forces in the Salvadoran military staged a coup the following October, the US government moved to support the military faction of the new junta in order to prevent the army's dissolution. That move, in Bonner's view, closed off a political transition to democracy and escalated the civil war. Using documents obtained through formal and informal channels (government impediments are cited), Bonner shows that Washington has known 1) that the Salvadoran government is involved in repression; 2) that there is no real difference between the regular army and the National Guard, Treasury Police, and other repressive forces; 3) that no effort has been made to punish the people behind assassinations, disappearances, and massacres. When he went to El Salvador, Bonner says, he generally believed Washington's version of the situation; but no longer. Though this indictment will be written off by hardliners as an apologia for the guerrillas too, that will not alter its standing as the most thorough and up-to-date assessment of America's El Salvador involvement.

Pub Date: June 4, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Times Books

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION