Blood in the Pink Zone: New details on the 1985 Zona Rosa Attack

In 1985, four Marine Security Guards were killed in a targeted attack at a café in the Zona Rosa district of San Salvador — the deadliest strike on MSG Marines in the program's history. Author Chito Peppler joins the show to discuss his book on the attack and the years of research behind it.He describes how a chance conversation in a hotel lobby led him to a sealed Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, and how he pieced together what happened that night: the FMLN guerrillas who disguised themselves as Salvadoran soldiers, the two Marines who survived because they had moved to the next café, and the seven civilians who also died.Chito recounts how the mastermind was eventually captured, only to be released under a wartime amnesty and paroled into the United States — a decision driven by a conflict between the CIA and the Department of Justice. He also traces the wider fallout of El Salvador's civil war, the formation of MS-13 and Barrio 18 in Los Angeles, and his own effort to locate the exact site of the attack decades later, now a butcher shop with no marker of what took place there.Chito's book, Blood in the Pink Zone, is available on Amazon.For the firsthand account from a Marine who survived the attack, listen to the earlier Post One episode with Anton Koszuth: Surviving San Salvador: The Deadliest Attack in MSG HistoryChito's YouTube video showing the exact location of the attack.Follow Chito Peppler on LinkedIn and Instagram.