Pro-Government Militias

Pro-Government Militia Website

Documentation for Secret Anti-Communist Army

Aug. 4, 1977
NEW YORK TIMES

Progressive Roman Cath priests in Central Amer are increasingly targets of official and semi-official campaigns of violence and intimidation led by conservative mil and civilian groups. In mil repubs of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, 2 priests have been murdered and several dozen deported, tortured or threatened this year. Church fears region's rightist govts are coordinating campaign and exchanging information on clergy's activities, citing willingness of Guatemala to hold incommunicado 3 priests arrested and tortured in El Salvador. Groups claiming responsibility for attacks on clergy are El Salvador's White Warrior Union, Guatemala's Secret Anti-Communist Army and Nicaragua's Natl Anti-Communist League.

April 14, 1981
The Globe and Mail (Canada)


"The Secret Anti-Communist Army claimed to have done it, but we all
know that many of them are off-duty army officers."
Military participation in political terrorism is taken for granted in
Guatemala. Soldiers enlisting in the death squads are inspired in part by
Government claims that the country is the object of a Cuban-backed
Communist conspiracy.

May 3, 1981
The New York Times

The letters were signed by the ''Secret Anti-Communist Army,'' a designation that is so openly associated with the regular army that one recipient simply called a general he knew to inquire whether the threat against him was genuine. The officer said it was, and the man left Guatemala for Mexico last weekend.
xx a former press secretary to President Lucas Garcia who went into hiding in September, told Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, that stationery with the letterhead of the Secret Anti-Communist Army was stocked in the office of the Minister of the Interior, who is responsible for internal security. ''Hit lists,'' accordingto xxx were drawn up by the Army Chief of Staff

June 21, 1981
The New York Times

Soldiers thinly disguised as members of the Secret Anti-Communist Army continue to assassinate moderate and leftist politicians. Victims in the past 10 months have included 76 leaders of the Guatemalan Christian Democratic Party.

Dec. 21, 1981
The New York Times

One hundred heavily armed members of a rightist ''death squad'' raided a village in northern Guatemala and kidnapped 25 peasants, six of whom were found dead later, the police said today.
A police report identified the gunmen as members of the Secret Anti-Communist Army, one of three right-wing gangs that hunt down suspected leftists in an underground war against four leftist guerrilla groups.

Jan. 23, 1982
The Globe and Mail (Canada)

During 1980, about 3,000 people were killed by rightist death squads
such as the Secret Anti-Communist Army. In its 1981 report on Guatemala,
Amnesty International charged that the activities of such death squads are
under the direct supervision of the President himself, with their
headquarters annexed to the presidential palace in Guatemala City.

Dec. 19, 1985
Globe and Mail

Election called no guarantee Fear increases in Guatemala
And, after months of absence, the initials of one of the paramilitary
groups, the Secret Anti-Communist Army, have appeared recently on walls in
parts of the capital.

May 30, 2006
The Independent (London)

Trade unionists, students, teachers, lawyers, university professors, journalists and even priests were killed at a rate of five a day in 1979. That figure rose to 10 a day by 1981. New "death squads" appeared with names like the Secret Anti-Communist Army.

Aug. 3, 2009
Historical Dictionary of Terrorism. (Sloan Anderson)

The Ejército Secreto Anti-communista (ESA) was a state-sponsored, repressive organization aimed at silencing leftist dissent and activism in Guatemala that operated largely as a death squad. The ESA emerged in 1977 during a period when the leftist guerrilla movement was reconsolidating its forces

Nov. 3, 2016
Wikipedia. "Secret Anti-Communist Army".

retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Secret_Anti-Communist_Army&oldid=747668420
Political killings were also carried out in El Salvador in the name of the ESA as well during the height of the internal terror, beginning in 1980 but escalating around 1983. Sources suggest that the ESA was operated primarily by the Salvadorean National Police and was led by detective Edgar Perez Linares. (…) Connections existed between the militaries and the far-right of Guatemala and El Salvador, and at one point El Salvador's National Police chief Col. Reynaldo Lopez Nuila and the director of the Salvadorean police academy visited Guatemala for counterinsurgency advice and had set up links within the security services