Salvadoran Minister of Defense General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, left, and the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, right, at the funeral procession with Monterrosa’s family and military officers following his death in a helicopter explosion in the Morazán department four days before, San Salvador, El Salvador, October 27, 1984. FMLN guerrillas led by Joaquín Villalobos, who had previously denounced Monterrosa and his command authority over the Atlacatl Battalion for carrying out the December 1981 civilian massacre in El Mozote, claimed responsibility for the helicopter crash. Monterrosa trained at the notorious School of the Americas and was hailed by American advisors as the army’s best field officer.
Minister of Defense General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova salutes during a military ceremony in San Salvador, El Salvador, September 1, 1983. Vides Casanova was head of the Salvadoran National Guard between 1979 and 1983 and served as Minister of Defense from 1983 to 1989. After a 15-year legal battle, he was found guilty in the United States by his command responsibility over Salvadoran security forces for acts of torture and extrajudicial killings, including the brutal slaying of four U.S. nuns in 1980. On April 8, 2015, U.S. immigration officials deported Vides Casanova to El Salvador from the United States, where he had resided as a legal permanent resident since 1989.
Salvadoran Minister of Defense General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, left, toasts U.S. Army Colonel John D. Waghelstein, right, as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador Kenneth W. Bleakley, center, oversees a ceremony honoring Col. Waghelstein prior to his departure from the country, San Salvador, El Salvador, June 1, 1983. As Chief of the U.S. Military Group in El Salvador, Waghelstein held command over the U.S. advisors stationed in the country and was one of the army's leading experts on counterinsurgency warfare.
Deputy Minister of Defense Rafael Flores Lima, left, and Minister of Defense General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, right, salute during a military ceremony in downtown San Salvador, El Salvador, September 1, 1983. The twelve-year Salvadoran civil war was rooted in class conflict. The country's high economic disparity had existed since Spanish colonial rule and continued after peace negotiations concluded in 1992. The landowning oligarchy and the military formed an early alliance in the country’s history that all but guaranteed an impermeable apparatus of consolidated control and impunity.