On February 17, 1980, just weeks before his
death at the hands of US-trained assassins, San Salvador archbishop Óscar Romero wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter imploring him to prohibit US security aid to the Salvadoran military dictatorship. Carter never responded, and Romero was gunned down during mass on March 24, 1980.
Carter had restricted military assistance to El Salvador over human rights concerns, but the July 1979 Sandinista victory in neighboring Nicaragua struck fear into the heart of Washington’s Cold Warriors. After a reformist military-civilian junta took power in El Salvador in October, Carter quickly restored “nonlethal” military aid, hoping to stave off revolution.
The junta soon collapsed, its civilian members resigning in the first days of January 1980 as repression against popular protest and the Left continued. In October of that year, the country’s five leftist political-military organizations united to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, formalizing the onset of a twelve-year civil war.
Carter’s nonlethal military assistance included the Huey UH-1H helicopters that rained casings down on anthropologist Philippe Bourgois as he and hundreds of Salvadoran families fled through the northern mountains from an eleven-day scorched-earth military operation in November 1981: “The only difference between ‘nonlethal’ helicopters and military-grade ones was the removal of the external machine-gun parapet with its 360-degree pivot,”
writes Bourgois. “Instead, the gunners had to open their side door when strafing civilians from their ‘human rights’ helicopters.”
It wasn’t until the Salvadoran military abducted, raped, and murdered
four US churchwomen — three Maryknoll nuns and one lay missionary — that Carter relented, severing US support in December 1980. That bout of conscience was short-lived. After a major January 1981 guerilla offensive, Carter reauthorized military assistance, initiating a massive flow of funds, weapons, training, and advisers to a bloodthirsty dictatorship that would go on to murder and disappear some eighty thousand people by the civil war’s close in 1992.
https://jacobin.com/2023/03/oscar-romero-el-salvador-junta-jimmy-carter-letter