One of the most jarring realizations that comes with age is that our sense of morality doesn’t refine itself into some ideal state. Instead of evolving towards perfection, it zigzags, backslides, and stubbornly resists any notion of becoming flawless. Unlike the ever-improving technology of a car engine or the latest Apple device, our collective views on issues like abortion, immigration, and war haven’t advanced; they’ve stayed the same or have even eroded over the past forty years.
Our drive to push for a documentary on El Salvador’s civil war stems from a desire to remind audiences that forty years ago was just as messed up as today. Narcissistic leaders, cowardly bureaucrats, and sadistic soldiers are, if anything, a constant factor. Highlighting this reality might seem trivial, but is actually essential. Understanding how these patterns repeat, recognizing the cracks in political morality, and being prepared for what’s coming is a massive advantage. More than that, it’s what helps us keep our sanity when everything else feels like falling apart.
Focusing on America’s foreign policy through the lens of the School of the Americas isn’t just a history lesson, it’s a reflection on how we understand and navigate the conflicts of today. For starters, it highlights the consequences when United States imperialism runs unchecked, revealing what happens when its foreign policy is executed with impunity. It also reaffirms the indispensable role of journalism; even after the brutal killing of four reporters, many others continued to expose the lies, atrocities, and cover-ups. And perhaps most importantly, it underscores the relevance of remembering, because the real danger isn’t losing a war on the battlefield, but losing it in the collective memory.
We discovered the existence of the School of the Americas by chance. When we first decided to investigate the story of four Dutch journalists ambushed and killed in El Salvador in 1982, we had no idea it would lead us to one of the most disturbing and underreported aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Our interest in the case was sparked by Zembla, a Dutch television program that managed to trace one of the alleged killers, ex-Colonel Mario Reyes Mena, to his home in the United States. While Zembla deserves credit for locating Reyes Mena, it did little more than express moral indignation. Intrigued, we decided to delve deeper into the story, and what we discovered was that the civil war in El Salvador, which raged from 1980 until 1992, is far from over.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen once wrote: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Although Thanh Nguyen was referring to his native Vietnam, he might as well have been writing about El Salvador. According to a UN Truth Commission, more than 75,000 people were killed, or forcibly disappeared during the war. Just five days after the UN published its report in 1993, authorities in El Salvador passed an Amnesty Law that prevented investigations into the human rights violations committed during the conflict. It took almost a quarter of a century for the Supreme Court of El Salvador to declare the Amnesty Law unconstitutional in 2016.
The reopening of the unsolved murder case of the four Dutch journalists in El Salvador signifies a growing recognition that the wounds of the war have never truly healed and that the country, now fighting the same war in memory, needs a proper reckoning. During our research, we discovered that this lack of a thorough investigation has been a source of enduring grief, not just for the people of El Salvador, but also for the families of the Dutch journalists. Remarkably, this quest for closure also extends to American diplomats, U.S. Army advisors, and CIA personnel who were involved at the time and who, according to Benjamin Schwarz in the American monthly The Atlantic, “consorted with murderers and sadists.”
Still, even though we realized the war is far from over and while El Salvador is currently trying to come to terms with its violent past, the murder case initially felt somewhat distant, after all, it happened a long time ago. How many people, including journalists, have been murdered since 1982? Their lives, tragically cut short, deserve to be remembered and documented just as much. However, our research took a sharp turn when we came across a photograph by American photographer Robert Nickelsberg, who spent significant time with both guerrilla and government forces in El Salvador. The photograph showed Salvadoran soldiers pursuing guerrillas, and its caption read: “Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa [who] trained at the School of the Americas and headed the controversial Atlacatl Battalion.” We hadn’t heard of the School of the Americas before, but what we discovered completely changed the scope and perspective of our story.
Originally located in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone from its inception in 1946, until its relocation to Fort Moore in Columbus, Georgia in 1984, the School of the Americas is a U.S. Army center that has trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills. The participation of the school’s graduates in torture, murder, and political repression throughout Latin America drew the attention and indignation of some high-profile politicians in the United States, and forced the school to officially change its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Despite efforts by former President Jimmy Carter and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to close it down, the School of the Americas, still operates to this day.
We are convinced that a documentary focused on the School of the Americas is long overdue. According to many eyewitnesses the school’s alumni operated with impunity in many Central and South American countries. We are eager to investigate this claim. Not least because the current war on immigration, a central policy of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, has its roots in America’s involvement in El Salvador.