| Summary/Abstract |
It was a typical Saturday night at the posh Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador. The hotel’s coffee shop and adjacent dining room were teeming with oligarchs, businessmen, military officers, government functionaries, and expats, sitting in separate parties, eating dinner, and carrying on conversations about the country’s unfolding political turmoil. It was January 3, 1981, roughly a year into in El Salvador’s bloody civil war. At one table sat José Rodolfo Viera, a campesino turned head of the government’s agrarian reform agency. He was accompanied by two foreign advisors from the United States—Michael Hammer and Mark David Pearlman. Around 11pm, as Viera, Hammer, and Pearlman discussed agrarian reform over coffee, they were unexpectedly approached by two strangers in windbreakers. The strangers suddenly pulled submachine guns out from beneath their jackets and opened fire. All three men were killed.
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