“In his book Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador’s Dirty War, former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner cites the recollections of massacre survivor Rufina Amaya, whose blind husband and three daughters were slaughtered:

From her hiding place in the trees, she heard the soldiers’ conversation: “Lieutenant, somebody here says he won’t kill children,” said one soldier. “Who’s the son of a bitch who said that?” the lieutenant answered. “I am going to kill him.”

…As Bonner writes in Weakness and Deceit, Reagan’s celebration of Salvadoran efforts took place precisely one day after both the Washington Post and the New York Times had run stories about the massacre; according to a tally by the archdiocese’s legal aid office, in the year preceding the certification “13,353 Salvadorans had been murdered by the Salvadoran Army, security forces, and paramilitary groups.”

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