Dear Mr. President,
The policies you are pursuing in El Salvador and throughout Central America are putting you on a collision course with many of us in the churches. If you continue, we promise you our opposition.
The brutality in El Salvador is grotesque. As I write you this letter, I'm watching a former Salvadoran government official tell CBS News of a visit to the morgue with a friend going to pick up the body of his daughter who had disappeared two days earlier. The grief-stricken father was puzzled that his daughter looked pregnant. Lifting the sheet covering her body, he discovered that she had been slit open and her boyfriend's head stuck in her stomach.
I have heard before of such atrocities committed by the military security forces and the death squads in El Salvador, of how pregnant women have the fetuses cut out of their wombs and replaced with the heads of their murdered husbands. It is very difficult to speak, let alone write, of such things. But the awful stories must be told.
The violence we are witnessing in El Salvador is a picture of the demonic. Amnesty International reports and documents the systematic repression of human rights, torture and murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children by the military security forces of El Salvador. The brutal rape and murder last year of four religious women from the United States brought to public attention what has happened to tens of thousands of Salvadorans. Amnesty International, the testimony of the church, and many other eyewitnesses all say the pattern of military repression and terror is continuing. Your administration's claim that the human rights situation has improved is a self-serving lie without a shred of supporting evidence.
One news report told of soldiers shooting children in a Salvadoran village. "Why are you killing our children?" cried a woman in agony. "Because they are the seeds of new subversives," replied the soldiers. "We are killing the seeds."
No sector of the Salvadoran population is untargeted. As in Stalin's Russia, every family has been touched by the violence. The great suffering of the people cries out to heaven for redress.
Those cries have also reached our ears. The sadistic, demonic violence is carried out by the forces receiving military aid and political support from the United States. We are deeply implicated and morally responsible. In the name of God, we demand an end to our support for such butchery.
You want the people of the United States to believe that the Soviets, Cubans, or Nicaraguans are behind the trouble in El Salvador. That, Mr. President, is an exercise either in public deception or ideological blindness. The real causes of the civil war in El Salvador are the grinding poverty of the majority of the people, the control of the country by an elite of wealthy landowners, and the reign of terror being carried out by the military to enforce the rule of the few over the many. A refusal to acknowledge that injustice while blaming outside parties is both morally dishonest and politically foolish. As Mexican President Lopez Portillo has pointed out, it is as wrong for the United States to blame the Soviets for revolution in Central America as it is for the Soviets to blame the West for the rise of Solidarity in Poland.
The people of El Salvador are now saying, "No mas," no more. You, however, have chosen to take the side of the rich against the poor, the military against the people. The United States' support for the junta in San Salvador will only cause the number of guerrillas to grow and increase the likelihood of a violent solution to a political problem.
You claim that arms are being sent to the guerrillas through Nicaragua. Certainly the Nicaraguan people feel great sympathy for the Salvadoran insurgents, having just fought their own revolution against another U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza. But whatever moral support and practical assistance the Nicaraguans have offered the Salvadoran opposition, there is simply no evidence for the major support role you allege.
So far you have produced virtually no evidence to support your charges. Your desperate and unsuccessful attempt to prove massive outside subversion with the testimony of a 19-year-old Nicaraguan made the United States look ridiculous.
Your hostility toward the new government in Nicaragua has been evident ever since you took office. The fear of United States attack has precipitated an arms buildup and state of emergency in Nicaragua that is good for no one.
And now, on the basis of unsubstantiated charges, you have apparently approved a CIA plan for covert paramilitary operations against Nicaragua, including the training of anti-Nicaraguan forces and the recruitment of a mercenary army to invade and carry out acts of terrorism in that country. You are creating unnecessary conflict with the people of Nicaragua.
What gives you the right to intervene in the affairs of another country and seek to overthrow its government? Apparently terrorism and subversion are only wrong when carried out by Col. Qaddafi or the Soviets.
Your passionate denunciation of Soviet-backed martial law in Poland rings hollow. Can you not see that what you are doing in Central America is no different than what the Soviets are doing in Poland? Jesus said, "How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye?" (Matthew 7:4).
Both superpowers aid the denial of human rights when it is in their own interests. Do you think that the people of Central America feel less dominated by U.S.-backed regimes than the Polish people do by Soviet-backed martial law? The only difference is that the situation in Poland has not yet sunk to the level of military barbarism we now witness in Central America.
The only clear evidence of massive outside intervention in Central America is that of U.S. involvement. We have sent hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to El Salvador and the surrounding dictatorial regimes, and we are responsible for the sophisticated weapons and heavy firepower that are turning the whole region into a war zone. Our military advisers are helping the Salvadoran military fight the rebels, and we are training hundreds of Salvadoran officers and troops at bases in the United States. Were it not for the opposition of the churches, Congress, and public opinion, we would be preparing to send U.S. combat troops to El Salvador.
The most massive intervention in Central America, the largest shipments of arms, the most extensive training of combatants, all of which make up the greatest contribution to escalating the war in El Salvador, come from the United States.
I do not know, Mr. President, if you are deliberately lying about the situation in Central America or if you honestly do not understand it. The worst mistake you could make would be to continue regarding El Salvador and Central America as an arena for East-West confrontation, a place for a showdown with the Soviet Union or Cuba. Such a contest will only bring greater suffering to the ordinary people of El Salvador and the whole region.
The violence born of poverty and repression will only be made worse by outside interference and the insistence on military solutions. A just political settlement of the internal situation is the only means of averting more bloodshed. Your predecessors made the same mistake in Vietnam that you are now making in El Salvador, and I pray that you will change your course before it is too late. The acceptance of the Mexican initiative for political negotiation would be a good start.
Your Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, has lied continually about El Salvador. Ignoring the injustice and violence perpetrated on the people, he denounces the Soviets and the Cubans as if they were wholly to blame for the war. He is an ideologue of the worst order, a mirror image of the kind of Soviet propagandist you so despise. His charge that the four religious women from the United States "must have run a roadblock" was one more example of his preference for falsehood over truth. The highly charged and vindictive rhetoric of your Secretary of State has only inflamed the situation in Central America.
If your policy in El Salvador and Central America does not change many Christians will oppose you. We will not be silent while violence and hypocrisy go on in our name. We have listened to the testimonies of the body of Christ in Central America. We have seen the suffering of the churches as they have stood with the poor.
The military government that you support is persecuting the church. If you continue to perpetuate the suffering of the people and the church in Central America, you will have to persecute us too.
Jim Wallis was editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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