A Fênix em El Salvador: intervenção, controle e repressão que renascem das cinzas (1980 a 1992)

Abstract

The present research sought to understand how Operation Phoenix was deployed during the civil war in El Salvador (1980-1992). Such operation took place in the moment that Central America became an important stage to American foreign policy, due to the international situation, as well as regionally, particularly with the Sandinista Revolution (1979) and the United States’ fear that such a revolution would spread to the Central American isthmus, challenging their status quo. Changes were made necessary to the modus operandi of interventions carried on by the United States, which restructured the strategies and tactics to be used in Central American conflicts throughout the 1980s. Low-Intensity Warfare was the adopted strategy for these interventions, applied together with local governments in all of Central America. In the particularity of El Salvador, for the development of Operation Phoenix the American advisors promoted the extensive use of State Terrorism, deepening counterinsurgency war methods, by means of psychological warfare and covert operations, concomitant with actions of civic aid, in order to fight the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The results of the research are based on documents from Salvadoran collections still unpublished in Brazil and on in loco contact made in the main regions of conflict. We also counted on the great help of researchers from that country, to whom we are deeply grateful. We had as a founding concern to objectify from sources the evidence of intrinsic corporate relations during the analyzed period, reaching further from the intentions of the speeches