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Amy goodman explains salvador option in iraq { February 28 2006 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/28/1427244http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/28/1427244
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006
AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of death squads I wanted to read to you an excerpt from an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine last May by Peter Maass, it was entitled "The Way of the Commandos." We are talking to the man who has just left Iraq as the UN Human Rights Chief, John Pace. We are speaking to him in Sydney, Australia, in his first broadcast interview here in the United States.
Peter Maass' piece reads, “The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam to which it is often been compared but El Salvador. Where, a right wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high. More than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it.
According to an Amnesty International Report in 2001, violations committed by the army and its associated paramilitaries included extrajudicial killings, other unlawful killings, disappearances and torture while whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred. As part of president Reagan's policy of supporting anti-communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid was funneled to the Salvadoran army and a team of 55 special forces advisors led for years by Jim Steele, trained frontline battalions accused of significant human rights abuses.”
Peter Maass' article goes on to say there are far more Americans in Iraq today, some 140,000 troops in all than there were in Salvador. But U.S. soldiers and officers are increasingly moving to a Salvador-style advisory role. In the process, they are backing up local forces that like the military in El Salvador do not shy away from violence. It is no coincidence that this new strategy is most visible in a paramilitary unit that has Steele as its main advisor. Having been a key participant in the Salvador conflict, Steele knows how to organize a counter insurgency campaign led by local forces.
He's not the only American in Iraq with such experience. He was the senior -- the senior U.S. advisor in the ministry of interior which has operational control over the commandos. Steve Castile, a former top official in the drug enforcement operation who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America. Castile worked alongside local forces in Peru, Bolivia, and Columbia where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel. Your response to this analogy rather than Vietnam, Salvador, in the 1980's?
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