In the pallid light of dawn on December 3, 1980, a dairyman named Guadalupe Gómez trudged down a lonely dirt road near the village of Santiago Nonualco, El Salvador, off to milk his employer’s cows. A few hundred yards from the home of a comandante of the paramilitary civil defense forces, he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of four bodies sprawled by the roadside. Later that day, they were buried in a shallow grave on orders from the national guard, whose operations here in the