El Salvador

In El Salvador, in the late 1970s, there was a proliferation of popular organizations, largely church-based, that threatened to lay the bases for a popular, for a meaningful democracy, and social reforms. The archbishop pleaded to the US government not to send aid to the junta because it would be used, he said, "to destroy the people's organizations fighting to defend their fundamental human rights."
The security forces backed by the United States overcame the threat of democracy and social reform by terror and slaughter, murdering the political opposition, assassinating the archbishop, physically destroying the independent media, invading and largely destroying the university, slaughtering tens of thousands of peasants, union leaders and others, killing priests and nuns and intellectuals, or driving them out of the country -- to which they still cannot return for fear of torture and assassination. When the population was considered to be sufficiently traumatized, a so-called "election" was held, "in an atmosphere of terror and despair, macabre rumor and grizzly reality," in the words of the British parliamentary human rights group that observed it.