Jimmy Carter’s Dark Legacy in El Salvador
President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday, is remembered as a humanitarian and a champion of human rights around the globe. His legacy, though, includes supporting a military regime in El Salvador during the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War, including the assassination of Saint óscar Romero.
The United States sent military and economic aid to the government of El Salvador during its bloody 12-year civil war, and trained military leaders. A reminder that the Cold War was not always “cold,” 75,000 people were killed in the war, most at the hands of the military and death squads. Some consider it less of a civil war and more of a proxy war; America’s justification for its involvement was that communism was spreading from the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, and Cuba. But in reality, the leftist guerrillas were motivated more by the material conditions within their own country — extreme economic inequality — than by any kind of international movement. Some experts speculate that the guerrillas would have won were it not for U.S. involvement.
The country never fully recovered from the war, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled El Salvador for the U.S. in recent years. The country has been plagued with gang violence and previously had the highest murder rate in the world; now it has the world’s highest incarceration rate, as its current government has jailed tens of thousands, including many thousands of innocents, under a “state of exception” suspending basic civil liberties.
At the beginning of the civil war, Archbishop óscar Romero took an active role in arguing for human rights and an end to the violence in the country in his weekly homilies that were broadcast on the radio. While he viewed himself as apolitical, Romero’s pro-human rights stance naturally placed him in opposition to the Salvadoran military. Originally something of a centrist, he became radicalized when his friend, Father Rutilio Grande Garcia, a Jesuit priest, was killed. The junta, Romero said repeatedly, was killing innocent people. He endorsed agrarian reform, a program to redistribute large areas of land to the campesinos, or peasants.
The Carter administration was paying attention. In January 1980, the U.S. reached out to Pope John Paul II about Romero. In the letter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, noted a “shift” in Romero’s rhetoric. The archbishop, he wrote, “has strongly criticized the Junta and leaned toward support for the extreme left.” The “extreme left,” he wrote, was responsible for the violence in the country — not the junta, or the death squads.
Brzezinski wrote: “We have cautioned the Archbishop and his advisors strongly against support for an extreme left which clearly does not share the humanitarian and progressive goals of the church.” He asked that the Pope intervene. Romero met with the Pope in Rome shortly thereafter.
But Romero kept pushing. In February, he reached out to the U.S. with great concern. He wrote to President Carter expressing his misgivings about the possibility of the U.S. sending aid to his country. The U.S. was thinking about giving military aid — a $49 million aid package with up to $7 million in military equipment — to El Salvador. Romero wrote: “the contribution of your government, instead of promoting greater justice and peace in EI Salvador, will without doubt sharpen the injustice and repression against the organizations of the people who repeatedly have been struggling to gain respect for their most fundamental human rights.”
He continued: “For this reason, given that as a Salvadoran and as archbishop of the Archdiocese of San Salvador I have an obligation to see that faith and justice reign in my country, I ask you, if you truly want to defend human rights, to prohibit the giving of this military aid to the Salvadoran government. Guarantee that your government will not intervene directly or indirectly with military, economic, diplomatic, or other pressures to determine the destiny of the Salvadoran people.”
The U.S. decided to send the aid, and Carter did not respond personally. Instead, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance responded to Romero, writing: “We appreciate your warnings about the dangers of providing military assistance given the traditional role of the security forces in El Salvador.”
“We are as concerned as you that any assistance we provide not be used in a repressive manner,” Vance continued, adding that any assistance would thus go toward enhancing the armed forces’ “professionalism” so they would be able to maintain order while using “a minimum level of lethal force.”
Romero knew he was putting himself at risk. Two days after he sent the letter to Carter, the Catholic radio station that broadcast his weekly sermons was bombed. But he had to keep going. “I would be lying if I said I don’t have an instinct for my own preservation,” he said, “but persecution is a sign we are on the right road.” He added, “We are now in the middle of a current that cannot be stopped, even if one dies.”
In March 1980, the day before his assassination, Romero addressed the Salvadoran National Guard, police, and the military in his sermon. “I would like to make an appeal, especially to the men of the army, and concretely to the National Guard, the police, and the troops. Brothers, you are part of our own people. You are killing your own brother and sister campesinos,” he said. “The Church defends the rights of God, the law of God, and the dignity of the human person, and there cannot remain silent before such abominations … In the name of God, then, and in the name of this suffering people, whose laments rise more each day more tumultuously to heaven, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”
The next day, while he was giving communion at the chapel of the cancer hospital where he lived, a gunman pulled up in a Volkswagen. The man entered the room, shot Romero, and fled.
According to a nun, on the way to the hospital, Romero said: “May God have mercy on the assassins.” He was 62.
Carter called Romero’s assassination “a shocking and unconscionable act.” He said the archbishop “spoke for change and for social justice, which his nation so desperately needs,” and demanded that the Salvadoran government “bring the archbishop’s assassins to justice.”
We still don’t have all the answers about Romero’s killing, but the Carter administration got an inkling in November 1980, when a Salvadoran National Guard officer told a U.S. embassy political officer that Major Roberto D’Aubuisson organized a meeting a day or two before the assassination where participants drew lots to see who would carry out the killing. D’Aubuisson had been trained by the U.S. at the Defense Department’s notorious School of the Americas. In other words, the Carter administration had reason to believe that a U.S.-trained military officer orchestrated the killing of a future saint, and — with this knowledge — continued working with that military.
That’s not to say the Carter administration didn’t care about human rights. When D’Aubuisson visited the U.S. in mid-1980, the Carter administration was embarrassed by “his open presence in the country,” writes human rights attorney Matt Eisenbrandt in Assassination of a Saint: The Plot to Murder óscar Romero and the Quest to Bring His Killers to Justice. One example of the Carter administration’s commitment to human rights is that it cut direct aid to Guatemala in 1977 during the Guatemalan genocide.
Debbie Sharnak, assistant professor of history and international studies at Rowan University, describes the line that Carter walked in his foreign policy: “By according the broad notion of ‘human rights’ such a prominent place in his administration, Carter raised expectations without clearly defining the limitations of human rights and the reach of its policy. This vagueness, combined with his inability to articulate the limited capacity of U.S. influence, hampered his policy and the public’s perception of his effectiveness.”
I have been researching the Salvadoran Civil War for years. In February, I asked staff at the Carter Center whether the former president wished to answer some of my questions about Romero’s assassination. A spokesperson wrote back: “As you know, President Carter entered hospice care on Feb. 18 last year, and since then he is not providing interviews or commenting publicly on events and issues.”
The president following Carter, passionately anti-Communist Ronald Reagan, made El Salvador’s civil war his own. When he took office in 1981, aid increased exponentially. By the end of 1981, the Salvadoran military was employing a “scorched earth” strategy inspired by tactics from the Vietnam War.
In December, between 700 and 1,000 people — including children, elderly people, and disabled people — were killed at El Mozote by the elite U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion. The battalion’s leader, Domingo Monterrosa, attended the School of the Americas, like D’Aubuisson. When U.S. newspapers broke news of the massacre, the Reagan administration went to great lengths to convince the public and Congress that the story of the massacre was guerrilla propaganda.
But major human rights violations happened under Carter’s watch, as well. In May 1980, Salvadoran soldiers, alongside Honduran troops, killed at least 300 civilians trying to escape across the river in what is known as the Sumpul River massacre.
Human Rights Watch alleges that earlier that year, officials at the U.S. Embassy even worked with a death squad in the disappearance of two law students. Salvadoran National Guard troops arrested Francisco Ventura and José Humberto Mejía after a political demonstration. With permission, they brought the men to the property of the U.S. Embassy. From there, men dressed as civilians put Ventura and Mejía in the trunk of a private car. They were never seen again.
There was more violence against members of the church. Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan had been working with the poor of El Salvador when they were raped and shot at close range in December 1980. Especially after Romero’s killing, this event drew outrage. Carter stopped aid briefly, but he soon brought it back.
Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White, committed to improving conditions in the country, said there was no evidence the Salvadoran government was investigating the murders of the churchwomen. White was, not surprisingly, removed when Reagan took office, and the new administration went to lengths to cover up the crime.
Ultimately, while Carter demonstrated an interest in protecting human rights — and would champion the cause in his post-presidency — he funded a country committing mass atrocities. In fact, sending lethal aid to El Salvador was one of the Carter administration’s final decisions.
The New York Times reported at the time: “Among its last acts, the Carter State Department disclosed last week that it had sent El Salvador ‘lethal’ military aid for the first time since 1977. Transfused with a quick fix of $5 million in rifles, ammunition, grenades, and helicopters, the junta seemed to have little trouble containing the guerrilla offensive, although hit-and-run strikes continued.”
Pope Francis declared Romero a saint in 2018.
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