After a week being bombarded with rosy revisions of Ronald Reagan, the man and the president, I could not remain quiet any longer. I am writing this because I know it is too painful for some of my closest relatives to express. These are my own reflections on the meaning of this man's life and his enormous impact on all of us.
My family will have a very difficult time forgetting Ronald Reagan. He is responsible for the deaths of 72 of our relatives in El Salvador.
Two of our aunts were hacked to death with machetes. My husband’s mother rushed home to find them in pieces, with blood and brains spread all over the house. Why? Because that is how the Salvadoran death squads were trained by U.S. military advisors to keep the population living in terror.
Mr. Reagan told the world he was fighting communism. When I asked my mother-in-law recently if she was a communist, she didn't even know what it was. She and my relatives only wanted to live a peaceful and decent life, and to receive decent wages for their labor. They worked hard, just like you and me, but many were paid only a $1 a day with little opportunity to get a good education because it was considered "communism" to want more.
The place where they lived was subject to relentless daily bombing for two straight years under "Operation Phoenix" (modeled after the offensive of the same name in Vietnam) in which civilians were to be killed simply because they "might" be supporting the guerrillas. Mr. Reagan sent bombers, manufactured in Detroit and piloted by illegal U.S. military advisors. If you put up a white flag to signal that you were a civilian, you were more likely to be targeted. So people learned to make "tatus" -- holes in the ground where 10 or 20 people would hide from the planes. Sometimes they would go for two or three days with no food or water. Pregnant women gave birth in those horrible holes full of snakes and rats. Most of the 60,000 people in the community eventually fled the country, but many women, children and old people were machine-gunned to death when they tried to cross the Sumpul river into Honduras.
I remember one day, near the end of the war, our cousin Ovidio came to visit us in the capitol of San Salvador with his small daughter, then four years old. "Tia Barbara," the little girl said to me as she looked up at me with her large brown eyes, "when the helicopters come, may I hide under the bed here?" This was apparently the first thing this young child had learned to do when she arrived in a new place. By that time, Mr. Reagan was pouring $2 million dollars a day into military aid to keep the country safe from dangerous children like this.
This is the Ronald Reagan we cannot forget. Unbelievably, just a few days before Mr. Reagan's death, we asked my mother-in-law (now 86 years old) what she would do if she ran into him on the street. "I would look him in the eye," she said, "and I would tell him that I forgive him." "But how can you forgive such a person when he is responsible for so much terror and death?" we asked her. "Because I know that I must forgive him in order to find peace with God," she replied. If only we all could have such hearts of gold.