Ça? Ah non, juste une erreur: j'ai appuyé sur le piton boucherie avec mon coude par accident en nettoyant le moniteur sérieux

The terror continued throughout the decade. In November 1989, six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, were murdered by the army. That same week, at least 28 other Salvadoran civilians were murdered, including the head of a major union, the leader of the organisation of university women, nine members of an Indian farming cooperative and ten university students.

The Jesuits were murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, created, trained and equipped by the United States. It was formed in March 1981, when fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army School of Special Forces. The Battalion was consistently engaged in mass killing. A US trainer described its soldiers as "particularly ferocious... We've always had a hard time getting them to take prisoners instead of ears." (What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Noam Chomsky, 1993)

In December 1981, the Battalion killed a thousand civilians in a massacre that involved murder, rape and burning. Later, it was involved in the bombing of villages and the murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other horrors. The majority of its victims were women, children and the elderly.

The results of Salvadoran military training were graphically described in the Jesuit journal, America, by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. Santiago told of a peasant woman who came home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head."

The killers, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had struggled to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so its hands were nailed onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood stood in the centre of the table.

Reagan: Visions Of The Damned - Part 1, Medialens, 10 juin 2004