April 24

The Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union claimed another victim 41 years ago today, when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov plummeted 150 miles to Earth aboard the Soyuz I spacecraft. The accident took place three months after the United States lost three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire; it set the Soviet space program back by nearly two years, helping to assure that the United States would be the first superpower to reach the Moon.

Described posthumously by the Communist Party as “a loyal son of our motherland and a courageous explorer of space,” Komarov was incinerated when the ship struck the ground near Orenburg, Siberia after both its main and reserve parachutes failed, with the latter becoming hopelessly tangled in the drag chute. The tangled chute was the last of a seemingly endless sequence of failures after the previous day’s launch. Upon arrival into orbit, one of the craft’s solar panels failed to deploy, leaving the orbiter without sufficient power to maneuver. After a fate-tempting thirteen cycles around the planet, and with Komarov quickly losing his ability to stabilize the Soyuz, the decision was made to attempt re-entry, with results that were -- to understate the matter -- less than optimal.

The entire Soyuz project had been a chaotic mess to this point -- a situation that Komarov’s death only underscored. Previous unmanned Soyuz test flights had all ended badly, and it was widely known among the Soviet engineers and cosmonauts that the program was riddled with flaws. Despite the knowledge that literally hundreds of design problems jeopardized the launch, Party officials were determined to move ahead so that the first Soyuz missions would coincide with state celebrations of Lenin’s birthday. Before the launch, Komarov himself joked that if he were bumped from the mission, Yuri Gagarin -- a national hero -- would die instead.

Americans listening to Soviet radio transmissions claimed later that they could hear Komarov -- who had been able to say goodbye to his wife and children before re-entry -- cursing and berating the engineers and flight planners as his ship scorched the atmosphere at 400 miles an hour.

March 24

Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, the Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated by members of a right wing death squad on this date in 1980; he was shot in the heart at the Hospital de la Divina Providencia, where he had been leading a funeral mass for a friend’s mother.

Romero had become an unlikely champion for the impoverished peasants of El Salvador, which was in the early stages of a civil war that would eventually claim more than 75,000 lives by the early 1990s. Until the mid-1970s, Romero was a resolutely conservative figure in the Catholic church, focusing on social problems like alcoholism and pornography while many of his peers scrutinized the economic injustices that had left most of the country landless, politically disenfranchised and desperately poor. After witnessing human rights abuses -- including a 1975 massacre at Tres Calles, a village in his own diocese -- Romero began to revise his understanding of the church’s relationship to the poor. Shortly after his 1977 appointment as Archbishop, Romero began to challenge the government openly; when his friend and fellow priest Rutilio Grande was assassinated in early March 1977, Romero publicly excommunicated the murderers and commenced a three-year nonviolent struggle in concert with El Salvador’s dispossessed.

During this time, the right-wing, authoritarian government of Carlos Romero -- who was not related to the Archbishop -- intensified its pressure on those in the Catholic church who espoused “liberation theology” or who otherwise advocated on behalf of the poor. Death squads and assassins gunned down at least six priests between 1977-1979, and in some villages the possession of religious materials became grounds for arrest. As the death squads accelerated their work, Romero frequently visited the garbage pits where the bodies had been dumped, looking for campseinos whose families had reported them missing.

By 1980, more than 3000 Salvadorans were being killed each month at the hands of government forces who were in many cases armed, trained and funded by the United States, which fretted about the spread of anything resembling communism in Latin America. Romero appealed to the United States to withhold its resources, to no avail.

On March 23, 1980, Romero urged the Salvadoran soldiers to cast down their weapons.

I would like to make an appeal in a special way to the men of the army, to the police, to those in the barracks. Brothers, you are part of our own people. You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters. And before an order to kill that a man may give, the law of God must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to fulfill an immoral law. It is time to recover your consciences and to obey your consciences rather than the orders of sin…. In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuously, I beg you, I ask you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!

Oscar Romero understood that his opposition to the government would likely cost him his life. As he explained in his final homily, however, “[O]ne must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and those that fend off danger will lose their lives.”

The day after his appeal to the soldiers, Archbishop Romero joined the long list of Salvadoran martyrs. At his funeral, which was attended by nearly 250,000 people, government soldiers whot and killed as many as 50 mourners. Over the next 12 years, the US Congress and American Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush spent $1.5 million a day in support of the Salvadoran government. Archbishop Romero’s assassin was never captured.

December 11

Twenty-six years ago today, hundreds of peasants in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote were slaughtered by the notorious Atlacatl Battalion, in cooperation with units from the Third Infantry Brigade and the San Francisco Gotera Commando Training Centre. Plumped with a new $35 million stream of military assistance from the Reagan administration in the US, the military forces were carrying out Operacion Rescate, a vicious counter-insurgency effort on behalf of the government of El Salvador, which at the time was waging a civil war against the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN). The FMLN, an umbrella group that included several leftist guerilla organizations, controlled much of the departments of Morazan and Chaletenango in the northeast and northwestern mountains of the country; El Mozote was one of several peasant villages believed -- erroneously, as it turned out -- to have been a haven for guerilla forces.

On December 9, after a nearby skirmish with FMLN guerillas, the Atlacatl Battalion sealed off the entire department of Morazan. Most of the villages in Morazan had already been severely depopulated if not completely abandoned, as thousands of people fled the civil war and streamed across the border into Honduras. Those who remained hid in caves and ravines at the first sight of army forces. El Mozote, however, had absorbed scores of refugees from the area and experienced a temporary surge. When the Atlacatl forces entered El Mozote, they placed the entire village under a curfew and vowed to shoot anyone who lef their homes that night. The following morning, the men and women of El Motoze were separated into groups and killed, systematically and brutally. Men were herded into the chapel for brief and tortuous interrogations, after which dozens were beheaded, shot, or eviscerated by knife and bayonet. Soldiers dragged young girls from the village and raped them. The women and children of El Mozote, after hearing their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons being tortured and murdered, were then marched from their homes and gunned down. Men with guns empied their weapons into a room full of children at the home of Alfredo Marquez.

Rufina Amaya Marquez, one of the few survivors of the El Mozote massacre, managed to flee the village and hide in the surrounding trees during the confusion. There, she watched and listened.

Then I heard one of my children crying. My son, Cristino, was crying, 'Mama Rufina, help me! They're killing me! They killed my sister! They're killing me! Help me!' I didn't know what to do. They were killing my children. I knew that if I went back there to help my children I would be cut to pieces. But I couldn't stand to hear it, I couldn't bear it. I was afraid that I would cry out, that I would scream, that I would go crazy. I couldn't stand it, and I prayed to God to help me. I promised God that if He helped me I would tell the world what happened here.

When Raymond Bonner of the New York Times reported on the El Mozote massacre in late January 1981, Rufina Amaya got her chance to "tell the world" about the massacre, which took the lives of her husband and three children, the oldest of whom was five.

Among those who refused to believe the words of Rufina Amaya Marquez, however, were John Negroponte, United States Ambassador to El Salvador; officials at the State Department, including Elliot Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights; the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal; and the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media. These and other American voices refused to give credence to the survivors of Operacion Rescate, accusing Bonner and the Times of exaggerating or distorting the truth and thereby serving the interests of the guerillas. Bonner was eventually removed from El Salvador by his employers, who insisted their decision had nothing to do with adverse pressure from the US government, which would eventually invest $4 billion in support of the Salvadoran regime that organized the murders.

After a concerted effort on the part of the United States and the government of El Salvador to discredit the story, the American Congress renewed and expanded its sponsorship of state terrorism in Central America. El Mozote, meanwhile, lay abandoned while its victims remained unburied.

December 2

Twenty-seven years ago today, four American women were murdered in El Salvador by officers of that country's National Guard -- victims in a civil war that would eventually claim over 70,000 lives. On the evening of December 2, Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, lay missioner Jean Donovan and Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazell were abducted near the San Salvador airport when Ford and Clarke returned from a Maryknoll conference in Managua, Nicaragua. Along with four other guardsmen in civilian clothing, Sergeant Luis Antonio Colindres Aleman followed the women in a military jeep and detained them. After interrogating the four women, Aleman ordered that the Americans be taken to a remote field about 15 miles from the airport, where they were to be "eliminated" on the instructions of his superior officer. Each was raped and shot in the head by men trained and armed by the United States. The bodies were dumped along the side of the road. The next morning, when the bodies were discovered, a local justice of the peace ordered that they be buried in shallow graves. On December 4, the four women were exhumed after Ambassador Robert White learned of the murders.

Catholic priests, nuns, and lay workers were frequently accused by the right-wing Salvadoran government of aiding communist guerillas during the decade-long civil war; religious workers -- particularly those from outside El Salvador -- were routinely arrested, harrassed, beaten and tortured for providing food, medical aid and other forms of relief to the tens of thousands of people displaced by the violence. Jean Donovan, one of the December 2 victims, frequently picked up bodies of peasants left by death squads on the roadsides near La Libertad, the village where she worked. Donovan and her colleagues understood that their lives were at risk each day they remained in El Salvador. During a liturgy held in Managua the night before she was killed, Ira Ford read a passage from one of Archbishop Oscar Romero's last homilies, delivered shortly before he was assassinated in March 1980:

Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, the one who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be held captive -- and to be found dead

Under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the United States provided material assistance and training to the Slavadoran military that killed Ford, Clarke, Donovan and Kazel. Two months after the deaths of the churchwomen, Secretary of State Alexander Haig urged Ambassador White to publicly congratulate the government of El Salvador for conducting a thorough and prompt investigation of the muders; Haig was hoping to put the matter to rest so that full military assistance to the Salvadoran military could be resumed.

Because the regime of Jose Napoleon Duarte was not in fact conducting such an investigation, however, White refused Haig's request. He soon became the first ambassador to be fired during the Reagan administration.

October 9

Before death carried him off to that great covert operation in the sky, Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. -- who would have turned 89 today -- sowed discord among his his earthly fellows throughout the worst years of the cold war. Trained in literary studies at Brown, Hunt's literary enthusiasms somehow led him to the Office of Strategic Services after serving in the US Navy during the second World War. Over the next few decades, he prowled the globe on behalf of the CIA, uprooting communists -- and anyone who looked like them -- from governments in Latin America, East Asia and Europe.

In 1954, he helped eviscerate the elected government of Guatemala, unleashing forces that would eventually consume upwards of 200,000 lives during the course of a 40-year civil war. (Asked years later about the deaths to which he contributed, Hunt famously snorted, "Deaths? What deaths?") Having made the world safe for capitalist bananas, Hunt soon turned his attention to Cuba's Fidel Castro, whose "neutralization" did not proceed quite as smoothly as the ouster of Jacobo Arbenz. Charged with assembling a government from the ranks of disgruntled Cuban exiles, Hunt watched his career founder in the sands of the Bay of Pigs.

Rescued a few years later by the burglars and felons who comprised the Nixon White House, Hunt moved his softer side, orchestrating the array of black bag jobs and rat-fucking schemes that would eventually land much of the administration in state custody of some kind or another. During Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, Hunt arranged for McGovernite literature to be placed in the apartment of Arthur Bremer, the lunatic who shot George Wallace because he was an easier target than Nixon himself. At other times, he tried to sabotage other Democratic candidates by making them look like jackasses. As one of Hunt's former collaborators explained,

Howard had some fliers printed saying that Mayor [John] Lindsay of New York was having a meeting and there would be free beer. Howard handed these fliers out in the black areas, and of course there was no meeting or beer, so the blacks would come for their beer and leave hating Lindsay.

Howard thought this was the greatest thing since Chinese checkers

Always helpful, Hunt protected his bosses from humiliation -- for the time being, at least -- by supervising the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, blackmailing Watergate co-conspirators and administering the customary financial leverage required to soothe the jangly nerves of those with the ambiguous fortune to be "in the know." Hunt's first wife, Dorothy, worked as an occasional courier for Hunt's bribes until one of her flights went down in Chicago in December 1972. The $10,000 in her handbag survived, more or less, though Dorothy herself did not.

After serving nearly three years in jail -- quite a bargain, actually, as a trade-off for his crimes -- Hunt spent the rest of his life scribbling right-wing spy novels and fending off accusations that he'd been involved in the Kennedy assassination.

September 4

The pace of the Cold War accelerated in 1949; within a matter of months, the Soviet Union announced its first successful nuclear weapons test and victorious communist forces announced the formation of the People’s Republic of China. As their ancestors had done in the aftermath of World War I, self-professed American patriots stiffened with vigilance, rooting out internal subversives and arraying themselves in defense of the “American way of life.” Among other things, such defenses apparently required that hundreds of drunken yokels attack musicians and concert-goers at a picnic grounds north of Peekskilll, New York.

The “Peekskill Riots,” as they came to be known, actually began on August 27, 1949, when a benefit concert performance by Paul Robeson was pre-empted by several hundred men who -- expressing their dissent from Robeson’s political views by smashing chairs and pounding bystanders -- prevented the event from taking place. During the weeks prior to the event, local newspaper editorials had combined with the ululations of the local Ku Klux Klan to whip the community into an anti-black, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist frenzy. Hostility toward the concert organizers and performers only intensified when the event was rescheduled for the following week. On September 4 -- with private security drawn from the ranks of nearby unions -- Robeson took the stage with Pete Seeger and other musicians, performing without incident before a crowd of 25,000. After the concert was over, however, the previous week’s violence resumed.

In a ballad written and recorded the following week, Pete Seeger recalled the skirmish:

There were 900 police, deputies and state troopers at Peekskill. They allowed the mob to form along a four mile line of road, and directed all traffic down this only exit, and then stood by watching while the hoodlums threw rocks through the windows of cars and buses. Heads were bashed in, eyes were cut by flying glass. Cars were overturned, and the people in them dragged out and beaten! And the police stood by and laughed! Hoodlum gangs went on a night-long reign of terror all through Westchester County clear down to 210th Street and Broadway. Then the police moved! They moved into the picnic grounds to beat up the trade union guards.

Although no one died, several hundred injuries were sustained during the two battles, whose effects were reported across the globe. An official investigation, ordered by Governor Thomas Dewey, insisted that communists bore the ultimate responsibility for the violence in Peekskill.

August 3

Jonas Savimbi, leader of one of numerous terrorist organizations funded and supplied by the US during the Cold War, was born on this date in 1934.

Trained in Maoist guerilla tactics by the Chinese military during the early 1960s, Savimbi shuttled between several anti-colonial resistance movements, all of which sought to expel the Portugese from Angola, the land they had begun to colonize five centuries before. When Angolan independence came in 1975, Savimbi’s group -- the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) -- joined the struggle for power as the country quickly descended into a civil war. By 1976, UNITA had been more or less defeated by the Soviet-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

Driven into the bush, UNITA continued the war. Rejuvenated by hundreds of millions of dollars in covert funds from the CIA, UNITA laid waste to the nation’s agricultural regions, kidnapped and conscripted children, laid mines along public roads, and publicly roasted women accused of witchcraft. Over time, many of Savimbi’s associates met with grisly ends.

Backed by the United States, South Africa, Israel and a host of other rightist African allies, Savimbi was hailed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush as a “freedom fighter,” in spite of his extraordinary personal ego and his apparent disinterest in the emergence of actual democracy in Angola. Among Savimbi’s staunch defenders and promoters was a young activist named Jack Abramoff. Abramoff, who worked at the time for a conservative group known as Citizens for America, organized a 1985 “summit” of “freedom fighters” in Jamba, Angola; due in part to Abramoff’s efforts, the Reagan administration offered greater sums of covert aid to extend the violence. Meantime, the Soviet Union did its part as well to export the Cold War’s bloodshed far from its own soil, providing billions of dollars in military assistance to the MPLA.

When the Cold War evaporated and the Angolan civil war was halted long enough to hold free elections, Savimbi waged a campaign for president. When he lost in 1992, Savimbi refused to accept the results and resumed his guerilla war against the MPLA. Deprived of support from the US, he turned instead to revenues acquired from diamond, smuggled to Europe through Namibia, Rwanda, and other nations. Meantime, nations like Russia and Portugal -- who were supposed to be helping mediate a truce to the war -- shipped weapons to the Angolan government, prolonging the conflict in their own right.

While roughly ten percent of the country’s population was displaced, thousands of Angolans died in subsequent fighting -- the last of 500-600,000 who perished in Africa’s longest post-colonial conflict. Committed to the bitter end, UNITA shelled cities like Malanje and Kuito, causing hundreds of civilian casualties.

Jonas Savimbi himself eventually became one of those casualties, shot at least fifteen times in the head during a February 2002 ambush in Moxico, Angola. His death brought jubilant celebrations in Luanda, the nation’s capital.

July 26

Fifty years ago today, Carlos Castillo Armas was gunned down by a palace guardsman in Guatemala City, where he had ruled for three years as military dictator of a nation inching its way toward civil war. Castillo Armas, a former US-trained Guatemalan military officer who had already plotted -- unsuccessfully -- against his own government 1950, had fled to Honduras to escape arrest. There, he sold furniture and dreamed of returning home to crush the leftists he believed were ruining the land of his birth.

Backed by the United States, which objected among other things to the land reforms being carried out by president Jacobo Arbenz, Castillo Armas organized an army that eventually took control of Guatemala, deposing Arbenz in June 1954. By September, Castillo had been formally installed as president and immediately began a process of disenfranchising the population; before long, half of Guatemala had surrendered it right to vote. By revoking Decree 900, Castillo also forcefully removed tens of thousands of peasants from the lands they had acquired under the Arbenz government, and he established -- at the behest of the American CIA -- an organization that later became one of the first death squads in central America, the National Committee of Defense Against Communism. The Committee developed a list of 72,000 supposed “Communists” and began detaining suspects immediately under the Preventive Penal Law, which denied the accused of any rights to counsel or appeal.

Ironically, Carlos Castillo Armas came to be viewed by military rivals as being “soft” on communism. Although the Eisenhower administration pumped $80 million into Guatemala over the next three years, Castillo was unable to manage a failing economy and unable to quell widespread social discontent. Noting that Castillo was unlikely to remain in power for long, Keith Morgan observed in Harper’s magazine in July 1955 that “Guatemala may be caught in a revolving door.”

By the end of the decade, Morgan’s understated prediction turned out to be accurate. Castillo Armas was shot through the heart on his way to dinner on July 26, 1957. Over the next few months, four different successors held the office of president, some for as little as two days. From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala endured dozens of coups and counter-coups, as civil war took as many as 250,000 lives and displaced more than a million people.

Last year's entry:Nikephoros I and Ed Gein

July 16

On this date in 1945, the first atomic weapon in history was detonated in the New Mexican sands. The explosion -- nicknamed “Trinity” in reference to several poems by John Donne -- took place at 5:30 a.m. at the Alamogordo Bombing Range, 120 miles southeast of Albuquerque, where the equivalent of 20 kilotons of TNT opened up an irradiated crater of glass ten feet deep and several hundred yards wide.

The weapon, which would be deployed against human beings less than a month later, amazed each of the 300 observers who witnessed its inauguration. Brigadier General Henry Farrell, deputy to Major General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described the Trinity shot as “magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying.” In the Smyth Report, released to the public just days after the obliteration of Nagasaki, Farrell explained that

[n]o man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after, the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized.

One witness, the physicist and Manhattan Project's scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer, claimed years later that the explosion reminded him of a line from Vishnu in the Hindu sacred text Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

For the next four years, the United States enjoyed a monopoly on this newest weapon of mass destruction -- a monopoly it eventually surrendered on 29 August 1949, when the Soviet Union successfully completed “Joe One,” a 22-kiloton test modeled on the Trinity explosion. By the end of the 20th century, Great Britain, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan would join the nuclear club; to this date only South Africa and three of the former Soviet Republics have dismantled atomic weapons, with which they had previously sought to deter or coerce their rivals.

As of today, roughly 12,000 active warheads -- all of them, like Vishnu, becoming death -- continue to menace the planet.

April 24

The Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union claimed another victim forty years ago today, when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov plummeted 150 miles to Earth aboard the Soyuz I spacecraft. The accident took place three months after the United States lost three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire; it set the Soviet space program back by nearly two years, helping to assure that the United States would be the first superpower to reach the Moon.

Described posthumously by the Communist Party as “a loyal son of our motherland and a courageous explorer of space,” Komarov was incinerated when the ship struck the ground near Orenburg, Siberia after both its main and reserve parachutes failed, with the latter becoming hopelessly tangled in the drag chute. The tangled chute was the last of a seemingly endless sequence of failures after the previous day’s launch. Upon arrival into orbit, one of the craft’s solar panels failed to deploy, leaving the orbiter without sufficient power to maneuver. After a fate-tempting thirteen cycles around the planet, and with Komarov quickly losing his ability to stabilize the Soyuz, the decision was made to attempt re-entry, with results that were -- to understate the matter -- less than optimal.

The entire Soyuz project had been a chaotic mess to this point -- a situation that Komarov’s death only underscored. Previous unmanned Soyuz test flights had all ended badly, and it was widely known among the Soviet engineers and cosmonauts that the program was riddled with flaws. Despite the knowledge that literally hundreds of design problems jeopardized the launch, Party officials were determined to move ahead so that the first Soyuz missions would coincide with state celebrations of Lenin’s birthday. Before the launch, Komarov himself joked that if he were bumped from the mission, Yuri Gagarin -- a national hero -- would die instead.

Americans listening to Soviet radio transmissions claimed later that they could hear Komarov -- who had been able to say goodbye to his wife and children before re-entry -- cursing and berating the engineers and flight planners as his ship scorched the atmosphere at 400 miles and hour.

(Last year's post)