El Salvador, U.S. Military Involvement in
El Salvador, U.S. Military Involvement in.Unlike most other Central American republics, El Salvador never had U.S. troops land on its territory, even during the 1932 Communist uprising. Internal security was left to various gendarmeries and the regular army, acting at the behest of a tiny planter elite. However, during the Cold War, Salvadoran officers trained in U.S. installations and received minor amounts of military aid, and in the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency helped found a rural paramilitary organization, ORDEN, birthing the “death squads” of the next two decades.
In the late 1970s, various small left‐wing insurgent groups allied to “popular organizations” of peasants, students, and slum dwellers began challenging the military government. Following the 1979 Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, U.S. national security experts feared El Salvador would be the...
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