After unrelenting agitation on the part of the Communist media and the Communist sympathizers in the American Congress, Captain Madrano had had to issue warrants for the arrest of Colonel Quesada and his officers. The colonel then took sanctuary in Miami, under the protection of friends in the Administration.
As an officer in the Salvadoran Army and ORDEN, Captain Madrano had fought the enemy in all its forms. He had become aware of the insidious nature of subversion at the party celebrating his sixteenth birthday. He and several friends from his military academy had taken one of his family's maids into a back room and had amused themselves for an hour. The teenage maid died during the rape. Concealed by darkness, he and his friends had dragged the body to a car and dumped it outside the city.
The next day, the maid's father attempted to break through the gates of the family estate. Madrano knew he had been betrayed. Despite the privilege of working for one of the best Spanish families in San Salvador, despite the family's generosity, one of the servants had betrayed the boys to the old Indian.
He had often heard his father rave about the impertinence of the Indians and ladinos campesinoswho labored on the family's coffee plantations. On his birthday, because a worthless girl died during a game, the family's trusted domestic servants had betrayed him. Fortunately his father always posted soldiers at the gate or the Indian might have injured the young Madrano. The senior Madrano laughed at the incident. "Finally you are a man!"
Wealth guaranteed Alejandro Madrano a commission in the army of El Salvador. After graduating from a private academy, he entered the officers' school for training in command and protocol. However, he received his actual training in the mountain provinces, serving with army battalions fighting Communist bandits.
Why bother searching the mountains for the bandits when the campesinoswho fed the Communists camped near the roads? His superior officers showed the young lieutenant how to simultaneously deny the bandits information and support: kill the campesinos. Kill anyone who saw the bandits and did not report what they saw to the authorities. Kill anyone who might have seen the bandits and not reported. Kill anyone in the area where the bandits operated.
As his commanders told him: Communism spreads like a disease; kill the carriers, and the disease dies.
Later, Lieutenant Madrano volunteered to fight with ORDEN. Thus he learned how to fight Communism in the fetid breeding grounds of the slums.
When the Communists and their sympathizers — the union agitators, the schoolteachers, the health workers — met to discuss their radical plans for taking power and wealth from the government, informers noted every name and memorized the faces.
In the night, with a few trustworthy men, Lieutenant Madrano cruised the avenues in one of the high-powered Dodges donated by the United States. They took the Communists from their homes and made examples of them.
Somehow, the death squads never succeeded in eradicating the contagion, even as vultures feasted at garbage dumps stinking with rotting human flesh, and roadside ditches buzzed with iridescent green carrion flies, and unrecognizable masses of bloated gray flesh floated in the shallows of Lago de Ilopango.
The voices of the scum continued in their demands for democracy, opportunity and justice. So the escuadrones de muerteorganized into larger units. As army companies sealed off the barrios, the lieutenant and his compatriots used troop trucks to seize entire families.
In the barracks, the squad members' sexual amusements with the youths often proved to be the most effective interrogation technique. The screams of a youngster receiving first the lust of his soldiers, then the penetration of their knives would win names of co-conspirators from the parents when pliers and welding torches failed. Then the families joined the anonymous dead in the pits.
For his distinguished record in breaking a conspiracy among a union of truck drivers, teachers and nurses to create a meeting hall disguised as a children's health-care center, Lieutenant Madrano received his promotion to captain. His new duties included the administration of the land-reform program of the junta.
In the jeans and T-shirt of a student radical, he visited the new cooperatives dictated into existence by the much-publicized land-reform acts. With smiles and smooth words, he persuaded the farmers to elect leaders. He posed with the leaders while North American and European journalists photographed the scenes for their newspapers, magazines and television programs.
Once the journalists left, ORDEN executed the peasant leaders.
However, as the Communists stepped up the guerrilla war in the provinces, Captain Madrano refused any more assignments outside of San Salvador. He had no interest in the dirt and danger of combat. Let the draftees and North American soldiers fight in the remote fields and mountains. The captain continued his night war against subversion, drinking and dancing in the discos of the capital, then cruising the slums to find teenage Communist girls to interrogate.
Now he had the honor of carrying the war to the North American Communists. His duty in the United States offered him new opportunities. Today, as ordered, he would kill the journalist and his bodyguards. When would he receive orders to interrogate student radicals?
He thought of the blond coeds of USC and UCLA. As he shopped for gifts to send his mother in Spain, he had eyed the beautiful young girls strolling the campus in their shorts and tight jeans and miniskirts. Obviously whores. The posters announcing rallies against the United States intervention in El Salvador excited him. He hoped his commanders — in alliance with the American FBI — would assign him to the eradication of Communist subversives from the universities. He knew the pleasures of torturing and degrading Salvadoran girls. What pleasures would the American blondes give him?
Already he had launched a campaign that was highly unusual by any standards of international assassination. He had devised and executed a series of hits against targets the American public despised. Thus his mystery kill squads had earned a measure of tacit popular support, the better to let them continue their real work against refugees in the barrios and intellectuals in the universities.
With the help of smuggled-in troops from El Ejercito de los Guerreros Blancosand Organizacion Democratica Nacionalista, and some of the more determined hit men from El Falangeand La Guardia — and with funds supplied by the American rich, transferred from the Treasury to Swiss bank accounts — Madrano had engineered the executions of rapists, murderers, other criminal targets who wandered into the fire zone from the revolving door of America's "bleeding heart" justice system.
Throughout the United States the executions had continued unchecked. In recent days the assassinations had included two TV news personalities who had spoken out against the earlier killings, plus a black nationalist and two other black agitators who were known to be independently investigating the presence, according to witnesses, of "Panthers" and "Muslims" in the mystery death squads.
Reaction in the United States had ranged from horror at the wave of killings, to relief that the killings did in fact dispose of more career criminals than obvious innocents; this because the high-profile murders leached all the public's attention away from the vastly more extensive killings of unknown and uncared-about targets in the slums.
Madrano relished the uniqueness of the enterprise, ran over the details again in his mind.