Death Squads Quotes

Make the economy scream.

You needn't kill everyone to complete the job... We instituted Civil Affairs, which provides development for 70% of the population while we kill 30%..

In the 1980s the United States spent $6 billion supporting a Salvadoran Government that was dominated by killers. We armed them, trained their soldiers and covered up their crimes.

I'm post-cynical on this stuff. I look at the El Salvador model as the glory days: Why don't we just fund the death squads secretly and keep our boys at home? That where I almost am at this point. Clearly the American military has been a force for good for the United States. There's a reason we have a standing military. But there's something to be said for having a much smaller military because then we wouldn't be tempted to get involved in things we shouldn't be getting involved in.

I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.

It's an unknown, it's a disappeared. It has no identity, it's neither alive nor dead...it's disappeared

If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.

Duarte is a moderate when it comes to civilian control of the military and curbing death squads. On economics, the man is almost a Marxist.

It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one's mind: this is a temptation one must resist. In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: 'We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.

This whole country is a graveyard, and we are all constantly walking on the bones

Such mobilizations are ripe territory for terrorists. It would be a shame to have another contingent of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo clamoring for their children.

School for Tortures and Assassins

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

Ronald Reagan, who led the larger New Right project of re-sanctifying U.S. foreign policy after its Vietnam disaccreditation, felt compelled to drape his support for Central American death squads in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism.

If crimes have been committed it is necessary to investigate. They say that the number of victims have been exaggerated, but one case is enough. Cain slew Abel only once. Christ only once was crucified.

Death squads have been created and used by the CIA around the world — particularly the Third World — since the late 1940s

This is an fascist society. We have to change its authoritarian structure …. And in the process we have to let a lot of people get away with crimes.

I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.

There's this talk that we're asking soldiers to make the greatest sacrifice, but the reality is that civilians bear the burden of war more than the combatants. You're much more likely to get accidentally blown up or killed by a death squad than you are to die in a firefight.