Doubls Bind Messages Double bind messages are extremely effective. For example in Nicaragua the Sandinistas were seen as the personification of the evil. Demonization was the tool to make the U.S.-population to believe that. And the propaganda, called "Operation Truth", succeeded - and is successful until today. The Sandinistas are still considered an enemy in the head of the people. The media played the role of spreading propaganda - nearly without any criticism. By the end of the 1980s the USA even paid Nicaraguans for voting other parties than the Sandinistas. El Salvador was a similar case. Again the guerrilla got demonized. The difference was the involvement of the Catholic Church, which was highly fought against by the ruling parties of El Salvador - and those again were financially and organizationally supported by the USA. The elections in the 1980s were more or less paid by the USA. U.S.-politicians were afraid El Salvador could end up being a second Cuba or Nicaragua. Every means was correct to fight this tendency, no matter what it cost. On the 21st of September 1996, the Washington Post published several documents proofing an old rumor: not only that Central American soldiers had been educated in a U.S.-army school (the SOA), they also were taught to use torture as a method against revolutionaries. Some of the Salvadorian "students" of that school became very famous for being extremely cruel, one of them being General Roberto d'Aubuisson (35), the person who ordered the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.

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Roberto d'Aubuisson Roberto D'Aubuisson is another Salvadorian graduate of the SOA. In 1980 he organized the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, voice of the poor and marginalized. In 1981 he founded the extreme right wing party ARENA as a weapon against the guerrilla. Between 1978 and 1992 he was the (not so) secret head of the Salvadorian Death Squads. He died of cancer in 1992, but his ideas are still followed by a new group of death squads, which was founded in 1996 (Fuerza Nacionalista Mayor Roberto D'Aubuisson = FURODA).

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