The news cut into my Thanksgiving Day and left a sharp pang, reminding me of the continuing crisis that is El Salvador. That morning 200 uniformed members of the Salvadoran army surrounded a San Salvador high school in which a press conference was being held by members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), the broad opposition coalition in El Salvador. Twenty-five men in civilian dress entered the building and captured six key leaders of the FDR and 23 others.
The tortured corpses of the leaders were later found on highways surrounding the capital city. Among those dead was Enrique Alvarez, president of the FDR, who had traveled through the United States last summer to plea for an end to U.S. aid which was funding the official terrorism that later claimed his life. A right-wing death squad claimed credit for the killings, as well as for the bomb which later exploded in the cathedral where the bodies lay in state, sending fragments of the caskets flying through the church.
There was hardly time to process the impact of the Thanksgiving Day murders when four more killings from El Salvador hit the headlines, this time the deaths of four American women. The bodies of Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, and Dorothy Kazel, all Catholic sisters, and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary, were discovered buried in a cow pasture on December 4. They had been shot, tortured, and at least two had been raped. The deaths of these women, whose lives were marked by their gentleness and compassion for the poor, should finally put to rest the falsehood that only leftists and armed guerrillas are the targets of official violence.
The deaths of the four women forced a U.S. decision to cut off more than $25 million in aid and launch an investigative mission to El Salvador. It is appalling that 9,000 other deaths in El Salvador last year were not compelling enough to force our government into action.
The mission, headed by William Bowdler, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, and William D. Rogers, who held the same position under Nixon and Ford, left with the intention to investigate charges that Salvadoran government security forces may have been involved in the murder. On its return, the mission reported that there was no real evidence to support a junta connection to the murders and only circumstantial evidence pointing to its participation in a cover-up of facts surrounding the deaths.
The "circumstantial evidence" leaves several facts unexplained: Several peasants testified that members of the junta's National Guard gave them orders to bury the women; the Salvadoran government did not report the deaths to U.S. Ambassador Robert White until a full day after the bodies had been discovered; the junta initially refused to aid in the investigation; and the U.S. team was not allowed to interview potential murder witnesses. Whether or not the junta actually ordered or carried out the murders, it is clear that the government, by its unwillingness to curb its own military forces' brutality, has created the climate of violence that made them possible.
The U.S. mission recommended that aid be resumed to war-torn El Salvador when the junta promised to carry out a thorough investigation of the murders and reorganize itself to return control to a moderate government. In a last-ditch effort to save the foundering government, the junta was reshuffled and Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte named president. Hailed by conservatives, Duarte, a one-time liberal, stated that what El Salvador needs most is "law and order."
This is more bad news to the thousands of Salvadoran peasants who are being pushed to desperation by government brutality and whose organizations challenge the law enforced by violence and an order maintained by a wealthy oligarchy through exploitation. So is the fact that defense minister Col. Jose Guillermo Garcia, whose troops are responsible for much of the savagery, remains in his post. And that the junta's most liberal member, Col. Adolfo Majano, was ousted by a no-confidence vote by the military.
Nevertheless, in mid-December the United States resumed $20 million in aid to El Salvador, showing once again that our government clings to the illusion that it is supporting a "moderate" government caught in the cross-fire between extreme Right and Left.
On the evening of November 4, guns were shot into the air and music flowed down the streets of the wealthy suburbs of San Salvador; a friend was coming to the White House. The day after the murders of the FDR leaders, Reagan aides announced assurances to El Salvador that Reagan would increase military aid for the purpose of fighting leftist guerrillas. Many believe that Reagan's promised support of the right wing has given government forces the security they need to launch an all-out terrorist campaign against the Left, of which the tragic year-end events were just the beginning.
El Salvador could well be the first international crisis Reagan inherits. And he may likely use it as a proving ground for U.S. muscle. U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, Lawrence Pezzullo, said he feared that Reagan would appease his right wing by allowing it to "eat up Latin America." It is a smaller bite to chew than the Middle East, or the Soviet Union.
The U.S. government says it wants a "stable" Central America. And, as always, stability is defined as maintenance of U.S. economic interests. The United States wants "stability" so badly that it will see in every movement of the people a Soviet-backed, Cuban-influenced virus about to start an epidemic. And it will apparently fund any repression that undercuts such perceived influence. This time we financed a violent regime whose list of victims includes four of our own citizens.
In El Salvador the categories are so distorted that Right is called Middle, imposed injustice is called stability, and any voice of self-determination for the people is labeled communist. It is always the poor who pay for such tragic games. In El Salvador they pay with their lives.
Joyce Hollyday was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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