As President Reagan's first term in office wore on, the United States’ effort to bolster El Salvador's precarious democracy and abusive and inept military did not appear to be succeeding. The bad news out of El Salvador just kept coming. For example, on September 23, 1983, the Salvadoran Air Force indiscriminately bombed the small town of Tenancingo, leaving 50 civilians dead – a grisly episode that deeply frustrated U.S. military trainers. Of critical concern to the robust and still bitter debate in Washington over U.S. policy, El Salvador continued to be a “disaster zone” for human rights, although the numbers of reported disappearances and massacres had ebbed from the height of a few years earlier.

Key Reagan officials’ comments and actions periodically revealed ambivalence if not outright hostility to human rights. This often occurred when Reagan officials claimed that the death squads were shadowy forces and thus very difficult to control. For example, Reagan's top diplomat for human rights, Elliott Abrams, in August 1983 stated, “We don't know who is behind the death squads.”

Even more than security force abuses or embarrassments, such as the Tenancingo bombing, the wanton killings by the death squads were a public relations nightmare for the Reagan administration, which had decided to embrace the grin-and-bear it approach and focus on reform and elections to save El Salvador from communism. A difficult question, though, is whether the increased rhetoric on human rights that began in late 1982 and early 1983 was in fact genuine – or just more appetite suppressant for a Congress obsessed with human rights when in fact officials’ key concern was checking the Marxist guerrilla advance.