Raymond Bonner (1942- ) writes for the New York Times and the New Yorker. He is best known for writing about El Salvador.
After getting a law degree at Stanford he practised law, first in the Marine Corps in the Vietnam War, then under Ralph Nader, then in San Francisco.
Then he wanted to be a journalist. So, without any training, he travelled Latin America and sent articles to the New York Times, some of which they printed.
In 1981 he came to El Salvador. Marxist guerrillas were fighting in the hills to overthrow the military government. America, fearing a communist takeover, trained the army on how to fight guerrillas and supplied it with helicopters and M16s, an American-made machine gun.
In January 1982 guerrillas showed him a town: El Mozote.
The town was empty. The church and the houses were burnt out. Instead of people there were bones and skulls and bodies. At the edge of a cornfield were the remains of 14 young men, women and children. On the ground about seven paces away were spent M16 cartridges.
It was the same in nearby villages.
The villagers showed him a list of the dead. It had the names and ages of 733 people, mostly women, children and old people.
They said it was the army: they came in helicopters and wore uniforms – things the guerrillas did not have. The men and older boys fled for their lives, many of them guerrilla supporters. They never dreamed the army would gun down defenceless people. But they did. Even babies.
In El Mozote only one woman lived to tell the tale. She hid in the trees and heard her nine-year-old son cry out, “Mama, they’re killing me. They’ve killed my sister. They’re going to kill me.”
Bonner wrote down what he saw and heard and sent it to the New York Times. After they were sure it was true, they printed it on January 27th 1982.
The Wall Street Journal and others on the right said Bonner was being used by the guerrillas to spread their propaganda. They questioned his character. The US Embassy said it found no proof of a mass killing (but never looked hard).
A.M. Rosenthal, the editor at the Times, took a great deal of heat from the Reagan Administration. He never printed four articles that Bonner later wrote on Nicaragua. In August he brought Bonner back to New York to become a business reporter. He later put James LeMoyne in charge of covering El Salvador.
Bonner took a leave of absence to write a book, “Weakness & Deceit: US Policy and El Salvador” (1984). And then he quit.
Alma Guillermoprieto, who reported El Mozote for the Washington Post, was later sent to cover – suburban Maryland. She also quit.
Bonner did not return to the Times till the early 1990s. By then the United Nations had proved him right: it found the bones of more than 500 bodies. It found that over 100 children were in the sacristy of the church where they were gunned down with M16s.
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Some guys write about Idols and Paris Hilton, some write about Salvador. Who will write about Irak and Afganistan?? Too hot to handle, I guess.
Funny thing though, this gets no replys. Question about the looks of the black/white women sprouts a heated debate that is still going strong?
Are you guys serious? Butts of women are more important than this? I mean, I love women, don’t get me wrong, but what does it say about you that you can go on and on about butts, but something straight political stuff… Wow.
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sam,
No one likes politics!
😉
Just kidding.
As for this story, how sad. Gunning down defenseless people, and especially children.
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No doubt, Sam.
Americans are apparently more motivated to discuss the injustices of 500 years ago than they are to look at what is being done in their name RIGHT NOW.
It’s one of the reasons I have a bit of trouble taking all these heartfelt chest-thumpings about “privileges” and “injustices” seriously.
For a while, we had a very intelligent black British poster on here named J. One of the highlights of this blog, in my memory, will always be the day J, a Brit, lectured Mira, a Serb, about how she couldn’t possibly understand how racism REALLY affected black people because she was cushioned by white privilege.
J apparently had completely forgotten that, less than a decade ago, his nation had made a sincere and concerted effort to bomb Mira’s back into the stone age.
This sort of stuff is why I now look at classic critical race theory with a degree of ironic attachment: it works, insofar as one keeps it withint theoretical and not real world bounds. In other words, it works if one autistically ignores how real life actually plays out. But what it does, in effect, is ignore the complex realities of how several markers of difference – race, gender, sexual choice, class, nationality, etc – intersect and combine to ACTUALLY, REALLY create power flows and privileges in our world.
Theoretically, J was right: Mira is white and he is black, so preumably Mira has more “white privilege”. In practice, such a view results in the obscene spectacle of a Brit lecturing a Serb about how privileged she is.
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Haha… Sam it’s ALL politics.
even the butts.
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…and to take up Natasha’s post, people will happily say “How sad” and what have you, but they have a hard time applying the same sort of systemically critical approach to this sort of thing that they’ll happily employ when the topic’s race and racism.
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The Billie Holiday “Strange Fruit” post has 8 comments. I think the lack of comments has more to do with what is being presented. This is the life of a person – one many people are unfamiliar with. The controversy in this case had the truth revealed, so there is pretty much nothing to debate (debates being what makes the comments grow long).
I love the irony in these comments – all of us critiquing the way no one comments…while still not making any comments ourselves that pertain to the actual post. Fabulous.
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I’m thinking for the majority of the usual posters here (possible with the exception of Thad), things that happen south of US has no real bearing…so it’s interesting news but not something to dwell on…
I have family in Belize, Panama, and Costa Rica, so my antennaes rise when I hear of political goings on in Central America.
I thank you for posting this, Abagond…living in US, it’s unspoken taboo to criticize the US policies. The news channels don’t really give both sides to the story…that’s why I don’t like watching cable news anymore…
I usually speak of things back home between family and close friends who like myself have experienced the US government having their hands in my countries business…they typically get what they want.
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I remember from the French news back then that the massacre was carried out by the El Salvador armed forces. What I didn’t know is that the Reagan administration tried to cover it up. No real surprise in retrospect.
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Perhaps if more people in the Blog sphere brought to attention these massacres and other crimes to the general readers , then perhaps we can have greater discussions on such topics.
People have become insensitive to the plight of others, how many more have disappeared with no one to seek justice for them.
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My old man was in Salvador in 80’s and actually was in on one fight between guerillas and military (stupid finnish journalists went to the field unlike the smart ones who send in local runners and did their stories in hotels) and that tape sent some chills up and down my spine.
They toured Nicaragua, Honduras and Salvador and did stories form there but we did not know all of it untill they came back. They also visited one indian village in Guatemala, which was wiped out right after they left. We have a nice textile bought from there hanging on our wall. A reminder of that massacre.
But I just find it funny that really, the questions of looks and appearences get people really going on here on this blog. Days and days and months. But these, whiff… 😀
And yes, butts are political too. 😀
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While I am just now commenting on this post, I did comment on the topic in my class today. We are discussing the social construction of reality, and the constraints and limitations of the mass media, organizational structure and impact on news, media agenda and social agenda’s.
So, yes, I did not initially respond in this thread for general/generic comment, but, did in fact use some of this thread discussion as ‘resource’ for my lecture.
America’s ‘hands’ are dirty; America loves the image of itself as altruistic to a fault. One student commented(complained) that at least the U.S also helps, ie. Hurricane Katrina, Haiti. But, my feeling on this was, that there is always more to ‘the rest of the story’, and is often a cover for the U.S. to spread ‘Democracy’, steal oil, land,and ward off perceived threats of communism.
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We are discussing the social construction of reality, and the constraints and limitations of the mass media, organizational structure and impact on news, media agenda and social agenda’s.
Hurrah, Berger and Luckman!
Your professor wouldn’t happen to be Ralph Kjolseth by any happy chance?
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So basically, Bonner is the anti-Lemoyne.
Good to know they exist.
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It’s quite fascinating how much more energy and dedication certain Americans put into covering up (unpopular) facts and manipulating the public than into finding the truth. This is not to say that other countries are innocent when it comes to distorted objectivity, however it seems like manipulated facts are much easier to sell to the US public than anywhere else, at least in the Western world. There have always been articles in respected US media which are flawless in form but in terms of content are of tabloid quality.
But the real kicker is that a lot of Americans (the majority?) firmly believe that they are always properly informed by their media alone and that ‘the rest of the world’ is brainwashed…
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Fascinating? I find it maddening, and I’d say it riles you too, Femi. Worse, I’ve met plenty of people outside the US who buy the endlessly sold myth of the US as a gentle, if clumsy, giant who only wants to help the rest of the world and only ends up funding and fomenting wars, massacres and police states by mistake.
Another funny thing about the post above is the information about Bonner serving in Vietnam. “Serving your country” is always considered a mark of honour in the US, as it seems to be here, but it usually means you’ve gone somewhere and helped maim and mutilate the population and impoverish the survivors for generations to come, the US-Vietnam war being a fine example.
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I would have said “fought” instead of “served” except that Bonner’s law degree kept him from seeing battle. He mainly worked as a defence lawyer in court martial cases in the Marine Corps.
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Maruja, my “fascinating” was sarcasm.
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El Mozote was hardly the first or only mass killing in El Salvador in those years, merely the most famous, partly because of its scale, partly because it made the news in the Western press.
There is an arc in my posts of late that goes from this one to the one on the Philippine-American War (also a guerrilla war with mass killings by the American or American-trained side), to the Indian Wars (in which most of the American generals of the Philippine-American War had fought) back to Columbus’s genocide in Hispaniola, which set the pattern for “how to deal with natives”.
I do not know how race plays out in El Salvador, but I would guess that the rich are as white as snow and the people killed in El Mozote, the people that the guerrillas fought for, were mostly Indian or mestizo.
And there is another arc that goes from this one to James LeMoyne, the PBS NewsHour and why American history is whitewashed.
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Ankhesen Mié said:
“So basically, Bonner is the anti-Lemoyne.
Good to know they exist.”
Right, except that LeMoyne came after Bonner, so properly speaking LeMoyne was the anti-Bonner!
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Yes, Femi, I’m familar with the use of “fascinating” as a passive-aggressive way to indicate disapproval. It’s far more common than its literal use.
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Maruja de lujo: “Serving your country” usually means you helped maim and mutilate the population and impoverish the survivors for generations to come, the US-Vietnam war being a fine example.
Agabond: I would have said “fought” instead of “served” except that Bonner’s law degree kept him from seeing battle. He mainly worked as a defence lawyer in court martial cases in the Marine Corps.
I don’t see any contradiction there.
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Maybe I should elaborate.
You don’t have to personally, directly maim and kill to be an effective part of the war machine that does it, especially in the case of the US, which uses a great deal of money and ingenuity to get people in other countries to kill and terrorize each other rather than using US soldiers to do it. They spent years trying to do that in Vietnam — changing South Vietnamese leaders quite a few times because all of them kept looking for alternatives to war — before they finally sent US soldiers in.
Many well-educated US Americans serve their country by helping to maim and mutilate foreigners in ways that are less direct, better paid and less dangerous than being a soldier or an assassin. You should know more than I do about how it was done in Pinochet’s Chile, in El Salvador, in Nicaragua, in Cuba (with less success) in Panama, in Jamaica.
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That is worse indeed.
Most of the people I interact with see the USA as a violence-loving, racist bunch of religious nutters, suffering from “socialism” paranoia, who like to play world police but preferably only where there are interesting resources for themselves.
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This is not surprising to hear. To be honest, this is the first time I learn about El Salvador conflicts. It doesn’t matter: the way US reacted didn’t surprise me at all.
Maybe the mess in my country (and when I say “my country” I mean Yugoslavia, the only country I really considered “mine”) taught me not to be surprised to hear these things. In fact, it’s surprising to hear about a different outcome.
War(s) in ex-Yugoslavia are a perfect example of this, locals killing each other and west taking advantage of this, siding with any group that sees fit. (I don’t know if any of you know, but at the beginning, west was pro-Serbian. Others were satanized. Later, when Milosevic stopped playing by the western rules, the story changed. So just like nobody heard/cared about non-Serbian story of the story at the beginning, nobody cares about Serbian now. And the truth is quite simple- several ethnic groups were killing each other; west watched, basically not doing much, if anything).
On the other hand, it is extremely important to raise your voice against the atrocities that were done in “your name”. It is important to say, no, I don’t agree with this, no, they didn’t do it in my name, no, I don’t think like this.
As for Thad’s “not all group of whites are privileged in the same way”, well, yes (I thought it was obvious).
Femi,
But the real kicker is that a lot of Americans (the majority?) firmly believe that they are always properly informed by their media alone and that ‘the rest of the world’ is brainwashed…
Exactly! Look, we all know media brainwashes people. We all know media in un-democratic societies brainwash people. But guess what? So does US media!
It can go from relatively-innocent stuff such as things that are aimed to make people more patriotic, to horrible things, such as excusing war, genocide and murders. (All in the name of freedom, of course. <-Not just US media, any country's media does it).
Sorry if this was completely off topic. Like you guys (and girls) already established, this post is difficult to comment on. Let's face it, it's because most of us know much, if anything, about the war/attacks in question. And like Thad said, yes, it can show the lack of interest (and as a proof of good old "people only care about things that concern them"), but it's not like it's easy to post a comment on something like this. So the lack of interest might not be the only reason.
What can you say to a post like this anyway? The Internet-popular "oh, how sad 😦 " (not the presence of smiley) is actually really disrespectful. So while beauty standards and white women jealousy are very important and serious topics, commenting on butt sizes is easier than commenting on mass murder.
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Femi,
Most of the people I interact with see the USA as a violence-loving, racist bunch of religious nutters, suffering from “socialism” paranoia, who like to play world police but preferably only where there are interesting resources for themselves.
lol. Same here (in my country).
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Maruja de Luja:
Point taken. I changed “served” to “took part in”.
Yes, I am very well aware of how America gets others to do its fighting. This very post has an example of it.
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maruja de lujo,
I guess you are as white as the driven snow.
Bonner job in the military might have saved some poor grunts ass, from serving time to being dishonorably discharged or both. As as civilian you probably have no idea how ones life can be destroyed on charges that only would seem unimportant to you. You talk back to your boss, you get a reprimand, but you don’t lose pay, get fined, reduced in your rank or time in jail.
In the US the military is under civilian control, wars can’t only last as long as the citizenry wants, so don’t blame the soldier.
At that time, the draft existed, many given a choice volunteered for other services beside the Army where they felt they could minimize their participation.
Not every 18 year old was willing to go to jail or become an expatriate. Would you have been so willing?
I also want to know are you a pacifist or is there something you are willing to fight for. When one joins the military it is hoped that you will be asked to fight for a just cause. What is also interesting, there are times when ordinary folk disagree as to what is just.
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Marujo de Luja:
Personally I am not going to blame a soldier for his country’s foreign policy. Most of them just want the war to be over so they can go back home. Some were forced to join the military, most of the rest joined for honourable reasons.
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I think it is difficult to comment on a post like this, because it is the past. Nothing you say now can change it. It is evident that our society hasn’t learned from the past, because the present it so full of conflict now.
I get overwhelmed by the amount of war and violence in all parts of the world. Where to start? Even with the internet, one can not know the whole truth, there are so many points of views. I can only try to glean a little of what is really happening.
I do not feel that I can adequately blog or comment on specific situations. I don’t have the contacts or resources to do so.
One can only generalize, philosophize and discuss the abstract of ethical behavior, with the hope that it can make people think and question their individual leaders and make better decisions as citizens.
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Voces Inocentes is an interesting movie about a small town fought over every night by the army and the guerillas. The main theme is how children were used in the war (at age 12 they were conscripted) but also touches on the role of americans, the people’s attitudes toward the guerillas and the behavior of the army.
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“Yes, I am very well aware of how America gets others to do its fighting. This very post has an example of it.”
So you’ll agree with me that “serving your country” in the US does mean serving a military which kills and maims a lot of people all over the world, and needs lawyers, diplomats, spies, logistical experts and so on to help it with its killing and maiming.
Of course you are right not to condemn someone for being part of the US military, especially when he was obliged to work for it at the time.
I pointed it out because it seems to me — an outsider — that the phrase “serving your country” — meaning doing the right thing by being part of the US war machine — is something US Americans hear so often in their lifelong, extra-official jingoism training that it doesn’t even strike any of you as paradoxical in a post such as the one above.
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The U.S. of A. is exactly what it claims to be, and that is a federation.
The U.S. has grown on the idea that its wealthiest citizens and organizations, along with the federal government should be bound in a tight interlock of dependency.
It is said that the U.S. wages war at the best of its own interest and agenda. With such a system, how could the u.s not do so ?
But then, with such a sound and rational system again, why is U.S. history plagued with massacres, downright genocidal politics, exceptional longevity of segregation, irrational behaviour of banking system toward races, and an important number of undeclared wars.
Along with many other bloody incidents which strike as an endless string of oddities for such a promising young republic.
Although the U.S. scrutinizes itself all day long incessantly, it also excels at unseeing itself. And the press is an integral part of both processes.
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