Another note not yet added to My Songbook:

[1983:] President Reagan once described the Vietnam catastrophe as 'that noble cause'. Recently he has called Somoza's guardsmen, again killing their compatriots in Nicaragua under CIA auspices, 'freedom fighters'. Now he speaks eloquently of 'preserving freedom' in El Salvador for which more hundreds of millions of dollars are required. Salvadoran freedom is to be preserved in the tested Vietnam style. [...] Again US policy knows what is best for others, in the US national interest, while knowing nothing of the others, their history, culture, daily life and bitter needs. [...]
El Salvador is slightly bigger than Wales and even more beautiful and mountainous, blessed with a benign climate, fertile soil, lakes, rivers and magical trees. A country like a garden, a rural society, where most of the five million inhabitants live in destitution. For 162 years Salvador has been ruled by and for an oligarchy of landowners and its allied military. The last collected statistics in 1971 show how this works. Eight per cent of the top citizens received fifty per cent of the national income. Twenty thousand farm properties occupied seventy-five per cent of the land, leaving the rest for 330,000 small farms. Sixty-five per cent of the rural population had become landless seasonal labourers.
There was no peaceful way to change this permanent greedy imbalance of wealth and opportunity. Elections were a sham, ballot boxes invariably stuffed to suit the ruling caste, the swindle enforced by the military. Orderly protest marches ended in massacres by the police. Strikes were broken by the army, strikers shot and imprisoned. The majority of the Salvadoran people could live without hope, or rebel. [...] By now, there is no pretense of law. Salvador is ruled by terror alone. The people have no protection, except the Salvadoran Catholic Church, a moral and humanitarian support for which the Church pays in the death toll of its clergy. Doctors, nurses, medical students are murdered for giving their professional help to the poor. Rule by terror threatens anyone and everyone apart from those who use terror and rely on it. [At the Salvadoran Commission of Human Rights you] can read random selections from hundreds of sworn accounts of atrocity. You can study photo albums of the murdered. [...]
As wars go this one is minor so far, sporadic attacks with relatively light casualties on both sides. The guerrillas are destroying bridges, dams, pylons, factories, crops, striking at the wealth of the ruling caste. The real war is waged on the defenseless population by the government's security forces. Although the security forces have American planes, helicopters, bombs, mortars, machine guns, splendid rifles and unlimited ammunition, they are not very successful against the guerrillas, but hideously successful against the citizens - the Church estimates thirty-five to forty-five thousand unarmed civilian dead since 1979. (Martha Gellhorn, 'Rule by Terror', reprinted in 'The Face of War', 1998, p 323ff.)