Word: ordener
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...when Farabundo Marti, the father of El Salvador's revolutionary movement, led a revolt, paramilitary squads were sanctioned to aid the army in squashing the rebellion. The estimated toll: at least 10,000. The lines between official and illegal violence blurred further after the National Democratic Organization (ORDEN) was formed in the mid-1960s. ORDEN's dual purpose was to teach peasants about the evils of Communism and train them to watch out for subversives. But under the direction of a fistful of national guard intelligence officers, the group had deteriorated into a ruthless militia numbering between...
Violence assumed the proportions of a national policy in the 1970s, when the government was besieged by the right and the left. ANSESAL, the Salvadoran national security agency, targeted victims, while ORDEN carried out the killings. Military and police intelligence officers were in touch with both groups, and occasionally they received assistance from right-wing political organizations alarmed by the rising level of anarchy. Out of this explosion of terror came a death squad trademark that is branded forever in the psyche of the nation: mano bianco, a pair of painted hands splattered across a door or wall announcing...
...they would not cry because they were afraid that if they cried the Army would find them and if they found them they would kill all of them." They feared with reason. May 14, 1981, on the Sumpul River near the Honduran border, the Salvadoran National Guard, the paramilitary ORDEN group, and at least two military helicopters massacred as many as 600 women and children. According to a Brooklyn-born priest who witnessed the one-sided fighting, women were "tortured before the finishing shot, infants thrown into the air for target practice...A Honduran fisherman found five small bodies...
...Salvador restaurant at breakfast time and gunned down three young men. Another day, it was the left's turn. Members of the Ejército Popular de Liberación Faribundo Martí, the most active guerrilla group, executed 17 former members of the notorious paramilitary organization ORDEN in the village of San Francisco Morazán. Said a San Salvador journalist: "If you are not on the leftists' death list, you are surely on the rightists' list. There is no middle ground in this country...
...regarded as a conservative in his views, Romero had spoken out more and more boldly against the repressiveness of the country's rulers since his appointment as archbishop in 1977. He bitterly assailed Dictator Carlos Humberto Romero (no relation) and the notorious activities of the National Police and ORDEN, the brutalizing paramilitary arm of Romero's and other regimes. The archbishop had ample provocation. No fewer than seven priests have been murdered in the past three years by pro-government forces, and Catholic activists were frequently among those subjected to beatings and torture...