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Wagner to persuade the pope to rein in Romero, which the pope then tried to do. See Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit (New York: Times Books, 1984), p. 176. The provincial of the Jesuit order in Central America, Father César Jerez, was called to Rome shortly after to explain the Romero letter. Father Jerez, who had fled from Guatemala after the military had threatened his life, was very close to Archbishop Romero. Subsequently he was forced to flee El Salvador as well and is now a refugee in Nicaragua, where he is rector of the Universidad Centroamericana, unable to return to the two “fledgling democracies” except for brief (and dangerous) visits.

17. Quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 172.

18. On September 27, 1981, Alan Riding wrote in the New York Times that “under the Carter administration, United States officials said security forces were responsible for 90 percent of the atrocities,” not “uncontrollable rightwing bands.” In short, not only was Bushnell lying, but the media knew it, and failed to use that information. Riding had an article on March 23, 1980, entitled “El Salvador’s Junta Unable to Halt the Killing.” On media coverage of El Salvador during 1980, including gross falsification and cover-up of even congressional reports, see Noam Chomsky, Towards A New Cold War, pp. 35ff., reprinted in James Peck, ed., The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1987).

19. Church estimates were that the government was responsible for some nine hundred civilian deaths in the first three months of 1980, exceeding the total for all of 1979; a report of Amnesty International dated March 21, 1980, contains seven pages of incidents in which security forces, army units, or paramilitary groups under general military control or guidance killed unarmed civilians, usually peasants (quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 172).

20. This is a point that was conceded by Duarte himself, who admitted in an interview with Raymond Bonner that the army ruled El Salvador, but that he hoped to do so in the future (see New York Times, Mar. 1, 1982).

21. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 146.

22. See chapter 3, pp. 94–95.

23. One proof of the fact that the paramilitary forces kill under official protection is that, year after year, paramilitary murders never resulted in arrests (see Herman, Real Terror Network, pp. 115–19). As for the regular forces, through 1986, “there were no known instances of military officers or soldiers who were criminally punished for human rights abuses against Salvadoran civilians” (The Reagan Administration’s Record on Human Rights in 1986 [New York: The Watch Committees and Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, February 1987], p. 46).

24. Laurie Becklund, “Death Squads: Deadly ‘Other War,’” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1983.

25. Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol. 1 (London: Zed, 1985), p. 221.

26. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 162.

27. “United States Network News Coverage of El Salvador: The Law and Order Frame” (manuscript, 1986), pp. 17–18. Andersen provides many illustrations of how the networks continued to label the junta “moderate” throughout 1980, as atrocities mounted to what Archbishop Romero’s successor, Bishop Rivera y Damas, described in October 1980 as the armed forces’ “war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population” (Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 207).

28. “23 Die in El Salvador As Clashes Continue; 3 Officials Step Down,” New York Times, March 29, 1980.

29. Quoted in Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk, El Salvador: The Face of Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1982), p. 146.

30. From White’s cable to the State Department, quoted in Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 184.

31. This statement is quoted in Armstrong and Shenk, El Salvador, p. 152. Others present claim that troops were on the scene, contradicting Duarte, junta, and Treaster assertions to the contrary. Phillip Berryman, who was at the funeral, told the authors that he saw quite clearly two truckloads of troops in the vicinity. Treaster is cagey, though—he speaks only of troops