U.S. warships enter the Salvadoran port city of Acajutla to "prevent disorder that would affect U.S. interests. With impunity, General Hernandez Martinez's rounds up tens of thousands of the opposition and kills them (The affair is known as both "The peasant uprising of 1932" and "La matanza," or "The Massacre"). The 1932 anti-communist purge, was carried out on behalf of El Salvador's rich coffee oligarchy, the so-called "Fourteen Families."
New president Alfredo Cristiani is a member of those same "Fourteen Families" and his ARENA party is linked to brutalities surpassing Hernandez Martinez's. Cristiani, former leader of a motorcycle gang, the "Bad Boys," is a perfect figure-head: photogenic, moderate-sounding, schooled in Washington D.C., and indebted to the military for power. As puppet president, he yields to ARENA founder Roberto D'Aubuisson, whom former U.S. Ambassador Robert White calls a "pathological killer."
D'Aubuisson, a former cashiered Army Major with ties to Jesse Helms arid the U.S. right, studied unconventional warfare in the U.S. and Taiwan. He once told European joumalists, "You Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism, so you killed them." According to D'Aubuisson, "the Christian Democrats [Ex- President Jose Napoleon Duarte's party] are communists," but Jesuit priests are "the worst scum" of all. U.S. State Department cables indicate D'Aubuisson "planned and ordered the assassination of the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero." It is believed he was behind the White Warriors Union (UGB), whose slogan was "Be patriotic - kill a priest." In 1989 six priests were slain and Cristiani soon admitted his U.S. trained soldiers had committed the murders. Yet, although assassinations of priests are notable, 70,000 other civilians have been killed by the Salvadoran military and the death squads since 1980.