El Salvador

“If Lech Walesa had been doing his organizing work in El Salvador, he would have already entered into the ranks of the disappeared, at the hands of “heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes”; or have been blown to pieces in a dynamite attack on his union headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek were a politician in our country, he would have been assassinated like Héctor Oquelí [the social democratic leader assassinated in Guatemala, by Salvadoran death squads, according to the Guatemalan government]. If Andrei Sakharov had worked here in favor of human rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert Anaya [one of the many murdered leaders of the independent Salvadoran Human Rights Commission CDHES]. If Ota-Sik or Václav Havel had been carrying out their intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have woken up one sinister morning, lying on the patio of a university campus with their heads destroyed by bullets of an elite army battalion.”
The journal Proceso of the Jesuit University of El Salvador, quoted by John Reed in the Guardian, May 23, 1990

“People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador; they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones while parents are forced to watch. … The aesthetics of terror in El Salvador is religious.”
Reverend Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest in El Salvador