"We are deeply in your debt,'' Rumsfeld said during a Veterans Day ceremony honoring U.S. and Salvadoran soldiers. He held up El Salvador as "a nation that understands well the human struggle for liberty and democracy.''

Terror is the given of the place. Black-and-white police cars cruise in pairs, each with the barrel of a rifle extruding from an open window. Roadblocks materialize at random, soldiers fanning out from trucks and taking positions, fingers always on triggers, safeties clicking on and off. Aim is taken as if to pass the time. Every morning El Diario de Hoy and La Prensa Grafica carry cautionary stories. Una madre y sus dos hijos fueron asesinados con arma cortante (corvo) por ocho sujetos desconocidos el lunes en la noche": A mother and her two sons hacked to death in their beds by eight desconocidos, unknown men...

It is largely from these reports in the newspapers that the Unites States Embassy compiles its body counts, which are transmitted to Washington in a weekly siaptch referred to by embassy people as "the grim-gram." These counts are presented in a kind of tortured code that fails to obscure what is taken for granted in El Salvador, that government forces do most of the killing.

In a January 15, 1992 memo to Washington, for example, the embassy issued a "guarded" breakdown on its count of 6,909 "reported" political murders between September 16 1980 and September 15 1981. Of these 6,909, according to the memo, 922 were "believed committed by security forces", 952 "believed committed by leftist terrorists", 136 "believed committed by rightist terrorists", and 4,889 "committed by unknown assailants", the famous desconocidos favored by those San Salvador newspapers still publishing. (The figures actually do not add up to 6,909 but to 6,899, leaving ten in a kind of official limbo.) The memo continued:

"The uncertainty involved here can be seen in the fact that responsibility cannot be fixed in the majority of cases. We note, however, that it is generally believed in El Salvador that a large number of the unexplained killings are carried out by the security forces, officially or unofficially...