Reporter recounts covering El Salvador's civil war The Biblio File

“El Salvador: Blood On All Our Hands” by George Thurlow. (Contributed)

By DAN BARNETT | Book Columnist
April 30, 2024 at 3:30 a.m.

With the approval of Ken Leake, publisher of the Woodland Daily Democrat, George Thurlow would take vacation time to report from one of the world’s hotspots — El Salvador. He arrived there on April 26, 1981.

Thurlow, editor of the Chico News & Review from 1981-1991, now living in Santa Barbara, spent only a few days in El Salvador during its civil war. Looking for the “bang bang,” the only way to get attention from news outlets back home, Thurlow and his translator, Gilberto Moran, were ambushed by the ruthless Treasury Police. Thurlow was wounded but Moran was killed. The Salvadoran police, Thurlow writes, “shoot first and don’t ask questions later.”

“El Salvador was in the throes of a civil war between the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which fought to end government repression and for land reform, and an authoritarian government.” Weeks after Ronald Reagan was elected U.S. president in 1980, four U.S. religious figures, including three nuns, were raped and killed by Salvadoran soldiers. Meanwhile, Thurlow notes, the U.S. increased support for the government in its proxy war against the Soviets.

. . .

Much of the book recounts Thurlow’s agonizing but fruitless search for Moran’s grave and his family. “Like so many other Americans,” he writes, “I had come to El Salvador to make a point, and I was leaving behind a trail of misery. I had stories to tell … and a clear understanding of how the U.S. was behind so much of the terror. But it would take me 20 years to figure out my responsibility. My country never has.”

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https://www.chicoer.com/2024/04/30/reporter-recounts-covering-el-salvadors-civil-war-the-biblio-file/