The United States was perpetrating atrocities of a different sort in Nicaragua. Former members of Somoza’s thuggish Nicaraguan national guard had been gathering across the border in Honduras, where, with CIA Director Casey’s assistance, they plotted a return to power. They called themselves the contrarevolucionarios, or “contras” for short. Here, as elsewhere, Casey transformed Carter’s rudimentary covert operations into a massive undertaking. He set up a Central America Task Force to run things. He installed Duane Clarridge to head the Latin America division. Clarridge was the perfect foil. He knew nothing about Latin America, never having worked in the region, and spoke no Spanish.
U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Anthony Quainton pinpointed the start of the war for an interviewer: “The secret war began on March 15, 1982, when the CIA, using Nicaraguan agents, blew up the bridges that connected Nicaragua with Honduras.” It had actually begun earlier. That December, Congress banned the use of government funds to overthrow the Sandinista government. In the administration, moderates like Shultz had little voice as hard-line right wingers increasingly set a ruthless foreign policy in Nicaragua and beyond. Reagan lied to Congress about what the CIA was up to. Casey lied repeatedly, deliberately misleading the House and Senate select intelligence committees. According to Gates, “Casey was guilty of contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in.”30 Shultz later said that he had complained to National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci in January 1987: “I told him that I had no confidence in the intelligence community, that I had been misled, lied to, cut out.”31 Congress nonetheless significantly expanded the intelligence budget, with much of the appropriation going to the CIA.
In order to make an end run around Congress, Casey and NSC official Oliver North concocted an elaborate illegal operation. Aided by Israeli arms dealers, the United States sold missiles to its enemies in Iran at exorbitant prices and used the profits to fund the contras, with Latin American drug dealers often serving as intermediaries and receiving easier access to U.S. markets in return. With U.S. funds and CIA guidance, the contra army grew to 15,000. The CIA also recruited contract mercenaries from countries like Guatemala and El Salvador who launched independent attacks from offshore, bombing and mining coastal targets and commercial ports.
Reagan defended the United States’ covert war with a flight of fancy that bore little resemblance to the reality on the ground in 1984. “The Nicaraguan people,” he said, “are trapped in a totalitarian dungeon, trapped by a military dictatorship that impoverishes them while its rulers live in privileged and protected luxury and openly boast their revolution will spread to Nicaragua’s neighbors as well. It’s a dictatorship made all the more insulting, all the more dangerous by the unwanted presence of thousands of Cuban, Soviet-bloc and radical Arab helpers.”32 Reagan went so far as to call the contras “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,” a comparison so odious that it drew a sharp rebuke from the Organization of American Historians. Reagan’s “moral equivalents” were notorious for torturing, mutilating, and slaughtering civilians. Employing terrorist tactics, the contras destroyed schools, health care clinics, cooperatives, bridges, and power stations and were responsible for the deaths of most of the 30,000 civilians killed in the war. One advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff called them “the strangest national liberation organization in the world.” In his view, they were “just a bunch of killers.”33 The U.S. Embassy reported one former contra leader’s assertion that civilians who refused to join the contras were “shot or stabbed to death” and others were “burned to death in smelting ovens.” He said that kidnapped young girls were “raped night and day.”34
Atrocities were also committed in El Salvador, where U.S. leaders decided to test their new post-Vietnam counterinsurgency doctrines and try to defeat an uprising without a large commitment of U.S. forces. First they expanded and modernized the Salvadoran army, which, by 1983, reached 53,000 troops, many of whom were trained in Fort Benning, Georgia, or in the U.S.-run School of the Americas in Panama. Former U.S. Ambassador Robert White, who served under both Carter and Reagan, testified before Congress:
For 50 years El Salvador was ruled by a corrupt and brutal alliance of the rich and the military. The young officers revolt of 1979 attempted to break that alliance. It was then Reagan renewed tolerance and acceptance of the extreme right which led to the emergence of the National Republican Alliance, ARENA, and the rise of ex-Major Roberto D’Aubuisson.
ARENA is a violent Fascist party modeled after the Nazis and certain revolutionary Communist groups…. The founders and chief supporters of ARENA are rich Salvadoran exiles headquartered in Miami and civilian activists in El Salvador. ARENA’S military arm comprises officers and men of the Salvadoran Army and security forces…. My Embassy devoted considerable resources to identifying the sources of rightwing violence and their contacts in Miami, Florida…. the Miami Six explained… that to rebuild the country, it must first be destroyed totally, the economy must be wrecked, unemployment must be massive, the junta must be ousted and a “good” military officer brought to power who will carry out a total cleansing—limpieza—killing 3 or 4 or 500,000 people…. Who are these madmen and how do they operate?… the principal figures are six enormously wealthy former landowners…. They hatch plots, hold constant meetings and communicate instructions to D’Aubuisson.35
In March 1981, the CIA informed Vice President Bush that D’Aubuisson, the “principal henchman for wealthy landlords,” was running “the right-wing death squads that have murdered several thousand suspected leftists and leftist sympathizers during the past year.” Three American Maryknoll nuns and a Catholic layperson who had been involved in humanitarian relief work had been raped and slaughtered shortly before Reagan’s inauguration. UN ambassador-designate Jeane Kirkpatrick insisted, “the nuns were not just nuns” but FMLN “political activists.” Secretary of State Alexander Haig called them “pistol-packing nuns” and suggested to a congressional committee that “perhaps the vehicle the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock.”36
One atrocity particularly stands out. U.S.-trained and armed Salvadoran troops slaughtered the 767 inhabitants of the village of El Mozote in late 1981. The victims, including 358 children under age thirteen, were stabbed, decapitated, and machine-gunned. Girls and women were raped. When New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner tried to expose what had occurred, the Wall Street Journal and other pro-Reagan newspapers assaulted Bonner’s credibility.
The Times buckled under pressure and pulled Bonner out of El Salvador. Administration officials helped cover up the massacre. Conditions worsened. In late 1982, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs reported that El Salvador, along with Guatemala, had the worst record of human rights abuses in Latin America: “Decapitation, torture, disemboweling, disappearances and other forms of cruel punishment were reported to be norms of paramilitary behavior sanctioned by the Salvadoran government.”37 However, Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for human rights, testified that the reports of death-squad involvement were “not credible.”38