George W. Bush has escaped to Latin America where they've probably never heard of Scooter Libby and haven't checked up on Bush's pathetic public opinion ratings. It's ironic that Bush is visiting Latin America these days, light of the recent death of the only survivor of one of the worst massacres in recent Latin American history. (The obituary of this woman is the end of this piece). Bush is probably too stupid to know that his own father got his hands dirty in the massacre at El Mozote, and that people in that part of the world probably haven't forgiven us for that terrible day.

El Mozote is shorthand for all that went wrong in El Salvador during the 1980's. Much has been written about American foreign policy in this region during that time, all of it horrifying, as President Reagan took office in 1981 basically looking for the neighborhood weakling. Once Reagan found that Third World sickly kid hiding in the corner, he kicked the shit out of him and didn't stop until he left office eight years later.

If you want to know more about U.S. foreign policy in El Salvador in the 1980's, just Google "Reagan" and "El Salvador." A good start is here. This guy is pretty reliable on these matters as well.

Briefly, Reagan decided that the Cold War was not exciting enough and that our government would step up its policy of supporting any military regime that claimed to fight communists, whether they were communists or not. Under the Cold War's twisted logic, any movement or rebel army that advocated anything resembling social justice, land distribution or a break in the rigid concentration of power and wealth in the Third World was the enemy. El Salvador, a tiny country in Central America, became one of the Ground Zero's in this regard. Particularly after the El Mozote Massacre.

The El Mozote Massacre took place in the village of El Mozote, in Morazán department, El Salvador, on December 11, 1981, when Salvadoran armed forces killed an estimated 900 civilians in an anti-guerrilla campaign. It is reputed to be the worst such atrocity in modern Latin American history.

The massacre was both a low point and a turning point in the civil war that ravaged this Central American country between the late 1970s and early 1990s. As news of the massacre slowly emerged, the Reagan administration in the United States dismissed it as FMLN propaganda because it seriously undermined efforts by the U.S. government to bolster the human rights image of the Salvadoran government, which the US was supporting with large amounts of military aid

That's right, Reagan and Co. blamed the leftist rebels for the massacre at El Mozote. They also attacked critics of the Reagan adminstration as communist sympathizers. After American newspaper reported on the massacre, the Reagan administration attacked the messengers.

Seeing the conflict as critical in its determination to prevent communist encroachment in Central America, the Reagan administration was determined to give the Salvadoran government military assistance in defeating the FMLN insurgency. This was seriously complicated by the reports from El Mozote, which appeared just as a new round of debate over the huge flow of money and arms being sent to El Salvador's armed forces was getting underway. Correspondingly, the reports drew immediate fire from Reagan administration officials and others on the American political right. Salvadoran army and government leaders said no such massacre had taken place and officials of the Reagan administration dismissed the reports "as gross exaggerations".

Eventually, it was confirmed without a shadow of a doubt that Reagan's critics were right and that the Reagan administration lied about this incident. The best summary of the episode is here, where Mark Danner wrote a long article for the New Yorker about it.

George W. Bush's father was Reagan's Vice President when Reagan was terrorizing Latin America, El Salvador in particular. Daddy was Reagan's foreign policy expert, having served as CIA chief in the 1970's. People in Latin America probably know that George W.'s father was involved in the dirty civil war in El Salvador, but George W. probably can't find El Salvador on a map. Today, America's dumbest is romping through Latin America, telling jokes, slapping people on the back and talking about democracy and freedom. But the people of Latin America know better.

Here's the obituary:

March 9, 2007 Rufina Amaya, 64, Dies; Salvador Survivor By DOUGLAS MARTIN New York Times

Rufina Amaya, who in 1981 saw Salvadoran troops slaughter her family and many others in her village, then, as the only witness, dedicated her life to telling about it, died Tuesday in San Miguel, El Salvador. She was 64.

The cause was a stroke, said her daughter Marta.

Mrs. Amaya escaped government soldiers on the morning of Dec. 11, 1981, as they killed all the men, women and children in her village, El Mozote. There and in the surrounding area, the Catholic Office of Human Rights in El Salvador said, 809 victims have now been identified, many found in mass graves.

After Rufina Amaya returned to El Salvador from a Honduran refugee camp in 1990, moving to a nearby village, she worked as a lay pastor for the local Roman Catholic church and led what she called “reflection groups.” She received a ceaseless stream of visitors from around the world.

Again and again, she told of seeing her husband being beheaded and hearing her daughter’s mortal scream, after she miraculously found a hiding place.

“God saved me because he needed someone to tell the story of what happened,” she said in 1996 in an interview with The New York Times.

Her most significant influence came less than a month after the massacre. Both the Salvadoran and American governments were denying the atrocity, despite protests from church groups and others.

After The Times and The Washington Post reported the killings on Jan. 27, 1982, both extensively quoting Mrs. Amaya as well as citing their own observations of human remains, the debate grew sharper. The United States and Salvadoran governments insisted that any dead were probably armed rebels.

In 1992 the exhumation of bodies, first those of many children, began. The atrocity could no longer be denied.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, leftist rebels battled the American-supported Salvadoran government. The Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Army had been trained by United States military advisers and was fighting guerrillas in northeastern El Salvador.

Accounts vary on leftist activity in El Mozote, a village of 20 houses facing a square. Mrs. Amaya recalled that unarmed guerrillas in ragged civilian clothes had once tried to get townspeople to assemble in a church, but few went.

“I remember people saying: ‘Don’t get involved. Let’s just live and work and not get involved,’ ” she said in 1993 in an interview with The New Yorker.

But on Dec. 10, 1981, soldiers arrived in El Mozote, demanding that residents turn over their weapons. When they said they had none, the soldiers killed some people.

Mass murder began the next morning. People were pulled from their beds before sunrise and divided into three groups. Men were beheaded; some women were raped. The first child killed was tossed in the air and bayoneted.

Mrs. Amaya said at the time in an interview with The Times that she heard her son scream: “Mama, they’re killing me. They’ve killed my sister. They’re going to kill me.”

She escaped when she realized nobody was directly watching her. She quickly huddled among pine and crabapple trees behind her house.

Her husband, Domingo Claros, a 29-year-old woodcutter, was killed; so were her son Cristino, 9, and her daughters María Dolores, 5; María Lilian, 3, and María Isabel, 8 months.

In 1990, Pedro Chicas Romero of La Joya, a nearby hamlet, who had hidden in a cave as soldiers killed his relatives and neighbors, filed a criminal complaint against the Atlacatl Battalion, demanding that its members be punished. Mrs. Amaya was the first to testify.

In January 1992, a pact ending the 12-year civil war explicitly exempted the army from human rights prosecutions. Mrs. Amaya complained bitterly about this.

“They have never even come to ask our pardon,” she said in 1996 in an interview with The Times.

She married José Natividad in 1985 while living in a refugee camp in Honduras. They were divorced two years later.

Besides their daughter Marta, she is survived by another daughter, Fidelia Márquez, who was not in El Mozote at the time of the massacre, and by her adopted son, Walter Amaya.

Jorge Ávalos, a Salvadoran journalist, remembered visiting El Mozote with Mrs. Amaya in 1992. Amid the ruins and roaming deer, she indicated where bodies would be found.

“Here, next to this tree, the young girls were gathered,” she said.

She did not cry. She said she long ago had cried herself dry.