United States and El Salvador Policy The El Mozote Masacre
Peasants in El Salvador did not have a good life. They were violently oppressed by their government, and their lives were practically dictated to them. They lived in a so called democracy but they couldn't vote for whom they wanted, and they couldn't openly oppose their government without the most severe of all punishments. You would be shot dead where you stood if a national guard found you passing out political leaflets that opposed the government (Forche 15). If you decided to vote against the government you would be taken away from your home in the night and your family would never find you. The people were oppressed and most of them were too scared to strike back. The scared ones would either run to refugee camps in Honduras or go about their lives and pray nothing would happen to them or their families. The ones who were not afraid joined ranks with any number of rebel militias. There was a civil war being fought in 1981, the fighting had first began two years earlier. Communist rebel militias openly opposed the government in an effort to see it crumble to the ground. The El Salvadorian forces were very afraid of the rebels, so afraid of them in fact that they viewed every peasant
If the United States populus widely knew about the massacre, and they openly opposed the government policy, then financial aid would have been cut off to El Salvador. In-turn the rebels would have made short work of the poorly trained, ill-spirited, El Salvadorian armies. Thus ending the murder of innocent civilians ten years earlier. If an event similar to the El Mozote massacre happens again, the U.S. public should know what their government is doing. However, the government can hide the facts from the media. People need to seek out independent sources of media (i.e. through the internet) to cut down on governmental agenda setting. With an accurate idea of what their government is doing they can denounce the genocide themselves and openly oppose the U.S. government. A simple solution to prevent another El Mozote: (a) avoid mass media, (b) seek out independent forms of media, and (c) speak out against injustices caused by the government. The United States has never been entirely fond of communist countries, and even less fond of the ones that were almost touching their borders (Gettleman et al. 9). The United States' government didn't want the rebels to take control of El Salvador, because the rebels were thought to be communist. So The United States supported the El Salvadorian government in the civil war, because after all El Salvador was a democracy, wasn't it? However, El Salvador was not a democracy. It was a prime example of an authoritarian regime which kept its power through violence, but The United States turned it's back against this violence. The U.S. government didn't care as long as the communist insurgence was being eradicated, and the U.S. populus didn't care as long as they didn't know what was happening to civilians in El Salvador. It's clear, from this one drastic example, that the United States government will support mass murder if it fits what it w
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Approximate Word count = 1284
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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