"The Salvadoran Option"

On December 2, 1980, three American nuns and a church worker, were abducted by the Salvadoran National Guard as they traveled from the San Salvador airport. They were raped and murdered, and their bodies were found four days later [link]. Four Salvadoran soldiers were convicted of the crime in 1984, but they claim they were following orders [link]. These killings were part of a civil war, waged by the government, and heavily supported with U.S. money by the Reagan Administration [link,link,link]. Right-wing "death squads" carried out countless atrocities against government opponents [link], including the assasination of Archbishop Oscar Romero while he performed mass [link]. An estimated 30,000 people were killed [link].

Well, why am I bringing this up now, you might ask? Well, it seems that the Salvadoran death squads were such a success in preserving a friendly right-wing dictatorship in El Salvador that last January, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly comtemplated supporting a similar strategy in Iraq [link], and it is clear by the appointment of John Negroponte, former ambasador to Honduras under the Regan administration and chief architect of U.S. policy in Latin America during the 1980s that Rumsfeld has the administration's support.