“Once You Identify Your Enemy, He Will Probably Die”

We have seen that the relationship between the military and the oligarchy dated back at least to the 1930s with a sense of common interest: stopping communism and other threats to their privileged place in Salvadoran society. One explanation for the rise of death squads in the 1970s is that officers realized they did not need the oligarchy to remain in power – and at times social reform was in the military's interest. So the oligarchs created their own paramilitary forces – or death squads – closely or loosely tied to government security forces, most notably the military, often employing off-duty soldiers desperate for a “second income.”

These death squads shared such a deep antipathy for the revolutionary left that they aggressively targeted them starting in the late 1970s. The CIA reported in 1985 that death squads were in fact a function of the small “extreme right” versus the “mainstream right.” Both camps were nationalist and anti-communist but only the extremists were characterized by a “willingness to confront that change with active subversion of the constitutional system and with violent terrorism.” Interestingly, the CIA explained to U.S. officials that the “extreme right” did not “predominate in any one social, economic, or political sector. Rather, it is a fanatic fringe drawn from all elements of society.” This can be explained by the fact that, while few Salvadorans were active in death squads, many more from “all economic classes,” including rural peasantry, quietly condoned their behavior since they thought it was working against the revolutionary left – “however repugnant the methods used.