Weakness and Deceit
about the book
A land and culture poorly understood by analysts, politicians, and voters in the far-off United States. A regime permeated with corruption; a country in the steel grip of a few families that disdained any system which might give a voice to the millions who kept them in comfort: guarding their children, watering their lawns and putting food on their tables. A brutal and remorseless police force and army trained in America, armed with American guns, and fighting a bloody proxy war against anyone who might conceivably be an American foe-whether or not they held a gun.
Sound familiar?
This was Central America in the 1980s, at a time when El Salvador was the centerpiece of a misguided and ultimately disastrous foreign policy. It resulted in atrocities that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized a region that has not recovered to this day. At a time when the Reagan Administration's obsession with communism overwhelmed objections to its policies, Ray Bonner took a courageous, unflinching look at just who we were supporting and what the consequences were.
Now supplemented with an epilogue drawing on newly available, once-secret documents that detail the extent of America's involvement in assassinations, including the infamous murder of three American nuns and a lay missionary in 1980, Weakness and Deceit is a classic, riveting and ultimately tragic account of foreign policy gone terribly wrong.
"A landmark book...Bonner reveals the full extent of Washington's complicity with a murderous regime bent on eliminating even its mildest critics. This story not only sets the record straight, but, as importantly, it also speaks to the future, serving as a fresh warning of the perennial perils of American engagement in secret wars." - Alan Riding, author of Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans; former Mexico City bureau chief, The New York Times
"Weakness and Deceit vividly depicts the failure of U.S. policy to take human rights seriously in Central America in the 1980s. Its lessons are more relevant than ever today as policy-makers struggle to respond to crisis situations in the Middle East, and elsewhere. For three decades Bonner's relentless pursuit of the truth has set the gold standard for investigative journalists everywhere." - Michael Posner, professor of Ethics and Finance at New York University, former U.S. assistant secretary of state
"Thirty years ago, Raymond Bonner wrote a fundamental book about the United States and Latin America. Here it is again, a major work by a big-hearted reporter, with new and fascinating details about the tragedy of U. S. interventionism during the Cold War, and the lies we have been told." - Alma Guillermoprieto, author of Looking for History: Dispatches From Latin America, and The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now
About The Author / Editor
Read An Excerpt
El Salvador is a tiny nation, with a population under five million. No larger than New Jersey. Go up in a helicopter, and at 9,000 feet you can see the entire country, as Ambassador Robert White was fond of saying. Yet in the 1980s, El Salvador was at the top of list of Washington's foreign policy concerns and fears in a way that Iraq, Iran, Syria are today.
Include neighboring Nicaragua, where in the Reagan Era a Marxist-led revolution had recently overthrown the decades-old, American-backed Somoza dictatorship, and the combined population of the countries concerned was under eight million, their total territory one-third that of Iraq. Obsessed by the "domino theory", after the "loss" of Nicaragua, Washington was determined that El Salvador should not be next.
The "-ism" feared then was not Islamism or jihadism. It was Communism. But there are parallels. Then, as now, there was brutality and butchery. ISIS beheads journalists, aid workers, Christians, and Muslims from other sects. In El Salvador it was the American-backed government and its henchmen that murdered a Roman Catholic archbishop, American nuns, Dutch journalists, Jesuit priests, aid workers, and political leaders who challenged the government. Government "death squads" seized students, tied their thumbs behind their back, shot them in the head, and left their bodies beside the road or behind shopping malls. Soldiers with automatic rifles cut down students and workers who dared demonstrate for democracy, and peasants as they forded rivers to flee the civil war, or who were considered the enemy because they lived in guerrilla-held areas of the country.
And just as senior American officials "dissembled" to take us to war in Iraq, so, too, American officials routinely "dissembled" about events in El Salvador, about who killed the nuns, who was responsible for the violence, about the government’s horrific human rights violations. The deceit was necessary to maintain congressional and public support for American involvement in the tiny country.
in the media
Related Interest
Related Interest
Weakness and Deceit
about the book
A land and culture poorly understood by analysts, politicians, and voters in the far-off United States. A regime permeated with corruption; a country in the steel grip of a few families that disdained any system which might give a voice to the millions who kept them in comfort: guarding their children, watering their lawns and putting food on their tables. A brutal and remorseless police force and army trained in America, armed with American guns, and fighting a bloody proxy war against anyone who might conceivably be an American foe-whether or not they held a gun.
Sound familiar?
This was Central America in the 1980s, at a time when El Salvador was the centerpiece of a misguided and ultimately disastrous foreign policy. It resulted in atrocities that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized a region that has not recovered to this day. At a time when the Reagan Administration's obsession with communism overwhelmed objections to its policies, Ray Bonner took a courageous, unflinching look at just who we were supporting and what the consequences were.
Now supplemented with an epilogue drawing on newly available, once-secret documents that detail the extent of America's involvement in assassinations, including the infamous murder of three American nuns and a lay missionary in 1980, Weakness and Deceit is a classic, riveting and ultimately tragic account of foreign policy gone terribly wrong.
"A landmark book...Bonner reveals the full extent of Washington's complicity with a murderous regime bent on eliminating even its mildest critics. This story not only sets the record straight, but, as importantly, it also speaks to the future, serving as a fresh warning of the perennial perils of American engagement in secret wars." - Alan Riding, author of Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans; former Mexico City bureau chief, The New York Times
"Weakness and Deceit vividly depicts the failure of U.S. policy to take human rights seriously in Central America in the 1980s. Its lessons are more relevant than ever today as policy-makers struggle to respond to crisis situations in the Middle East, and elsewhere. For three decades Bonner's relentless pursuit of the truth has set the gold standard for investigative journalists everywhere." - Michael Posner, professor of Ethics and Finance at New York University, former U.S. assistant secretary of state
"Thirty years ago, Raymond Bonner wrote a fundamental book about the United States and Latin America. Here it is again, a major work by a big-hearted reporter, with new and fascinating details about the tragedy of U. S. interventionism during the Cold War, and the lies we have been told." - Alma Guillermoprieto, author of Looking for History: Dispatches From Latin America, and The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now
About The Author / Editor
Read An Excerpt
El Salvador is a tiny nation, with a population under five million. No larger than New Jersey. Go up in a helicopter, and at 9,000 feet you can see the entire country, as Ambassador Robert White was fond of saying. Yet in the 1980s, El Salvador was at the top of list of Washington's foreign policy concerns and fears in a way that Iraq, Iran, Syria are today.
Include neighboring Nicaragua, where in the Reagan Era a Marxist-led revolution had recently overthrown the decades-old, American-backed Somoza dictatorship, and the combined population of the countries concerned was under eight million, their total territory one-third that of Iraq. Obsessed by the "domino theory", after the "loss" of Nicaragua, Washington was determined that El Salvador should not be next.
The "-ism" feared then was not Islamism or jihadism. It was Communism. But there are parallels. Then, as now, there was brutality and butchery. ISIS beheads journalists, aid workers, Christians, and Muslims from other sects. In El Salvador it was the American-backed government and its henchmen that murdered a Roman Catholic archbishop, American nuns, Dutch journalists, Jesuit priests, aid workers, and political leaders who challenged the government. Government "death squads" seized students, tied their thumbs behind their back, shot them in the head, and left their bodies beside the road or behind shopping malls. Soldiers with automatic rifles cut down students and workers who dared demonstrate for democracy, and peasants as they forded rivers to flee the civil war, or who were considered the enemy because they lived in guerrilla-held areas of the country.
And just as senior American officials "dissembled" to take us to war in Iraq, so, too, American officials routinely "dissembled" about events in El Salvador, about who killed the nuns, who was responsible for the violence, about the government’s horrific human rights violations. The deceit was necessary to maintain congressional and public support for American involvement in the tiny country.