Its structure was composed of senior military officers directly responsible to the president, and it functioned as the brain of a security network that spanned the entire country, providing information and coordinating the activities of death squads.

[4][5][6][7][8] The October 1978 Amnesty International report on El Salvador indicated that ORDEN functioned as a government goon squad to frighten local people, break up community meetings, intimidate voters and torture and murder peasants.

Moreover, a March 1980 report by Amnesty International to the Inter-American Commission contained seven pages of incidents in which the military, security forces or ORDEN were responsible for killing unarmed civilians.

There were reports in the late 1970s of ORDEN and National Guard forces killing civilian opponents of the government with machetes, sometimes brutally hacking them to death and leaving them out in the open as a warning to other activists.

When the villagers were attempting to escape violence by crossing the river they were prevented from reaching the other side by the Honduran armed forces "and then killed by Salvadorian troops who fired on them in cold blood.

"[18] Peasants who survived the massacre later described to visiting foreign delegations of inquiry how Salvadoran soldiers and ORDEN members gathered children and babies together, threw them into the air and slashed them to death with machetes.