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Let's take a stroll through history: It's early January and we're a few weeks away from the inauguration of a new Republican president following a single-term Democrat who has been criticized for providing an extraordinary amount of military and financial aid to a foreign government accused of human rights violations. Sound familiar? No, I'm not talking about President Biden and his administration's support of Israel. It's January 1981, President Jimmy Carter is on his way out and the foreign government his administration is supporting is El Salvador's.
Since Carter's passing, there has been an outpouring of goodwill for the former president, whose legacy invokes images of peanut farms and the wooden frames of houses he helped build. But for many Salvadoran Americans, like me, his memory is … complicated.
In February 1980, President Carter received a letter from the archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero (no relation). In it, Romero pleaded that Carter stop sending military aid to the Salvadoran government. At the time, Carter's administration was asking Congress to approve some $5 million in military aid to assist in the fight against leftist guerrillas, despite several reports of right-wing death squads carrying out extrajudicial killings against union organizers, teachers and priests. 1980 is also the year that my dad's aunt, Maria, was killed by a death squad in my parents' hometown, San Miguel. That's the same town that Romero was from, where he had served as my family's local priest. The archbishop wrote, "[P]olitical power is in the hands of the unscrupulous military who only know how to repress the people and promote the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy."
Carter's administration did not heed Romero's words. It would ultimately provide more than $10 million in military aid for equipment and training. A month after writing his letter, the archbishop was assassinated in the pulpit. Though no one was ever brought to justice for the murder, a U.N. truth commission found that the murder was planned by a U.S.-trained Salvadoran military officer.
Carter left office amid the start of the Salvadoran Civil War — a war that many consider to have been a proxy battle within the larger Cold War, where the U.S. backed the Salvadoran military, and Cuba and the Soviet Union backed a leftist insurgency. It left over 75,000 Salvadorans dead, and it's estimated that 85% of the violence toward civilians was committed by agents of the state. It's also the war that drove my parents to leave El Salvador. In the fall of 1981, my aunt drove my mom and sisters to the airport in the capital. Days later, that aunt would also be killed by a death squad. My mother and sisters set up a new life in Los Angeles, a drop in the sea of Salvadoran immigrants displaced by the war and its ripples.
When the Reagan administration took over, it turned funding the Salvadoran military from a hobby to a job. Carter, concerned about human rights abuses, had chosen to send mostly "nonlethal aid." Reagan handed out checks like candy. Between 1980 and 1990, the U.S. would send over a billion dollars. The question of whether a second Carter term would have changed El Salvador's fate is one lost to roads not taken.
In our episode on Arab American voters in Dearborn, Mich., and their concerns about the Biden administration's military funding of Israel, I couldn't help but hear echoes of El Salvador's story. It seems in every election, some issue forces us to "hold your nose, and close your eyes" as we cast our ballots. Listening to that episode, I wondered whether there were single-issue voters in 1980, hinging their votes on El Salvador.
It's no secret that President-elect Donald Trump is an ardent supporter of Israel. Time will tell how his incoming administration will handle the war in Gaza. It will also tell how Biden is ultimately remembered for his single term as president. I can say this: I didn't lay a lily on Reagan's grave, nor will I place one on Carter's.
If you want to know more about El Salvador and Oscar Romero, I made a show about it last year called Sacred Scandal: Nation of Saints
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