1. Early English-language histories of the conflict include Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk, El Salvador: The Face of Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1982); Cynthia Arnson, El Salvador: A Revolution Confronts the United States (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1982); Enrique Baloyra, El Salvador in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador (New York: Times Books, 1984); Michael McClintock, The American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador (London: Zed Books, 1985); and Tommie Sue Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995). Recent comprehensive accounts include Hugh Byrne, El Salvador’s Civil War: A Study of Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1996); William Leogrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); William Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Teresa Whitfield, Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuria and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); and Philip J. Williams and Knut Walter, Militarization and Demilitarization in El Salvador’s Transition to Democracy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).
2. Quoted in Cynthia J. Arnson, Crossroads:Congress, thePresident, and CentralAmerica 1976–1993, 2nd ed. (University Park, Pa.: Penn State Press, 1993), 54, 56.
3. Concerning death squads, for example, senior administration officials stated in the early 1980s that they were a "spontaneous phenomenon," that there was "not a structure that has a headquarters that gives commands," that death squads represented a "phenomenon that was without a center," and that "there is no campaign directed out of a headquarters somewhere, or several headquarters somewhere, in the government, associated with the government, to eliminate the following numbers of people." Another claimed that "the assumption that the death squads are active security forces remains to be proved. It might be right, though I suspect it isn't right." See testimony of Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders in United States Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Presidential Certification on Progress in El Salvador, Hearing, 2 February 1983, 98th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), 143, 544
4. and United States Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Sub-committees on Human Rights and International Organizations and Western Hemisphere Affairs, U.S. Policy in El Salvador, Hearings, 98th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), 18, 31, 16, and 42. The latter statement is by Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Elliott Abrams, quoted in Christian Science Monitor, 3 August 1983, cited in Cynthia Arnson, Aryeh Neier, and Susan Benda, As Bad As Ever: A Report on Human Rights in El Salvador, Fourth Supplement (New York: Americas Watch, 1984), 52.
5. U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Thomas Pickering complained to Washington as late as April 1984 about “the lack of any systematic study” of the problem of the violence in El Salvador. “We rely on Washington agencies,” he said, “to integrate [embassy] data with what is available from other U.S. sources and to put it into historical perspective.” Such a comprehensive report was not produced by the CIA until February 1985. AmEmbassy San Salvador to SecState Wash DC, “Special Project to Analyze Salvadoran Violence,” 03831, 7 April 1984, 1.