Raymond Bonner > Quotes

“In the 1970’s El Salvador’s haves were ignoring the peasant poverty. A century earlier they had caused it, primarily as the result of their lust for profits from the nineteenth-century equivalent of oil: coffee. In order to maximize their earnings, they needed land, lots of it. So they took it—from the country’s Indians. Then they forced the Indians to work for them.”
― Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War

“This is evidence of an Army trained only to fight civilians,” Safire caustically observed about the Argentine Army after its defeat by the British in the Falklands in 1982. The same was true about the Salvadoran Army. It was brutally competent at the repression of unarmed civilians, but it couldn’t fight a war, even with all the hardware and training that the Americans gave them.”
― Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War

“To survive, peasants coax corn, beans, and vegetables from the depleted soils of their plots, frequently situated on seemingly vertical hillsides. They don’t own the land; they only work it as sharecroppers or renters. More than 90 percent of these parcels are smaller than twelve acres, but twenty-two acres are necessary to provide subsistence for a family of six, the average size of a Salvadoran family. But those with even tiny plots are fortunate; nearly half of all Salvadoran peasants have no access to any land.”
― Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War

“Successive military governments in El Salvador, going back nearly half a century, blamed all of the country’s turmoil on the Communists. Priests who worked with the poor were Communists. Students who marched in the streets were Communists who had learned from Communist professors in the university. Peasants who demanded a piece of land, and workers who wanted to earn more than $1 a day were Communists.”
― Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War

“But what has the Reagan administration accomplished in El Salvador? What does it have to show in exchange for the expenditure of nearly $1 billion? The Salvadoran military has taken the money, listened to the lectures about the need to respect human rights, heard the threats that aid would be halted if they didn’t—and gone on killing fellow countrymen.”
― Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War

“The young officers wanted to try Magaña because as head of the National Mortgage Bank he had made illegal loans to military officers. But there were to be no trials. Most of the officers who had been arrested were assigned new positions of command; others were sent to attaché posts in Salvadoran embassies abroad.”
― Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War

“The date was February 27, 1965. The country seeking peace and freedom was South Vietnam. The Communist aggressor was North Vietnam. Sixteen years later, on February 23, 1981, the newly elected administration of Ronald Reagan issued a similar-sounding white paper. “Communist Interference in El Salvador” was the title. Only the names and the dates seemed to have changed much.36”
― Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War