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And the mute raths outgrabe, January 16, 1981, page 7

- Teetering‘on the’Brink of Civil War

outside of El Salvador as to salvadm leé'BSé 0f the Catholic

The following few pages are especially designed forl

those of you who have not been keeping in with the outside world (yes, it still exists).

the article on this is reprinted from the Nov. 7, 1980, issue of the University of Calgary's stu—

dent newspaper, 'Ihe Gauntlet..Arierican aid to El

Salvador was cut OE 1n Deognber, 1980, after four missionaries were murdered in El Salvador, but the . Shipment of jeeps, trucks, and helicopters has mos

recently been resumed. fry-Jim Stanford ’ v . ’~

The tiny Central American; nation'of El Salvador is teetering‘ on the brink of full-scale civil

war. Political killings are occur- :1

ring at a rate of a dozen‘ or so daily, and'this in a country with a ' population of. only 31/2-million to start with. Peasants and indus- trial workers strike and demon- strate regularly; there is an exo: dus’ of upper-class residents, in- vestors and capital.There are ominous warnings of military intervention from neighboring Honduras or Guatemala, or even, directly from the. United States. The Legal Aid Society of the San' Salvador diocese of the Catholic Church has estimated: that there have been 6,000 poli- tieal assassinations 'so far in 1980, with an additional 1,000. unaccounted-for disappear- ances.

Much like the rest of Central

,1

America, El' Salvador has a poor _‘ 1

and underdeveloped economy, ' dominatedby American invest- ' merit. Coffee, the primary agri- cultural produ'ct of the nation, is produced on large, privately- owned plantations, usi_ng the labor :of the landless peasants who make up the bulk. of the population. A tiny group of 14 rich families own'i'mOSt Of the land, some say as much as 80% of producing agricultural land; as 1 a result, .much of the Opposition to the current military junta comes from the countryside.

In the cities, however, the ,

small industrial working class is

also highly politiéized, as evi- f

denced by a recent wave of paralyzing general strikes. Not surprisingly, this sector of the population is the target for much of the political repression that is taking place. For example, in' late August, when the union of electrical workers. occupied power stations across El -Salva—- dor and cut off electricity for ’23 ,hours as a {retest against the government, over 100 of its leaders "and; rank-and-file mem- bers Were arrested by the Nation,— al Guard, and detained without charge or trial. Similarly, over 600'.workers were rounded up during the general strike'of August 13415 of this year, and many of them have yet to be re— yleased. ' ' - ' ' This unrest has been. ferment- '1 ing in El Salvador for years. iSince 1931, when the last free, elections were held, the couniry

has been ruled by a successionof 7. unchanged. . , government5rrnore' re-‘ ' a,

.heavy-I'Ethd, conservative dic- tator with close ties to the ex- f President of Nicaragua, Anastas- ' io Somo'za. As political opposi-

' tion increased, and the popular

opposition forces became more _ unified, Romero was toppled, on Oct. 15, 1979, in an Ameri- can-backed, bloodless coup, and replaced with a five-man junta, comprised of two top military commanders and three Christian

' Democratic politicians. In an ef-

fort to ward off” a left-oriented

' _cently by Carlos Romero,__ra_f

exactly what the political situa- 'tion is within that country. CAaT; garians received a first-hand per- spective of the turmoil when Merardo Gomez, a former pro- fessor at the National University of San Salvador, recently spoke

to an audience of about 150 at the U of C. ’ ' '

Gomez is’ a representative of .

the Democratic ReVOlutionary Front (FDR), a coalition, twenty years in the making, that was

' formed early this year and con-

sists of the four largest opposi- tion groups within El Salvador.

The FDR has its headquarters in ‘

exile in Mexico. ‘ ' Speaking through a transla- tor, Gomez pointed out that the ' most common conception in Canada of the situation within_El Salvador is that of left-wing and right-wing extremists battling it

hurch, Gomez pointed out that

., 85% of all Salvadorans killed so

1

far in 1980 were murdered by-

. military forces it'n uniform, and -‘ that most of the killings were car- rietl out by paramilitary forces, described by the Church as “mili- tary in plainclothes.”

As an aside, Gomez said that the Church as an interest in col- lecting such, statistics, for since Archbishop Romero’s assassina-j tion, a number of other priests" and church administrators in Elli Salvador have been killed or kid- ‘ napped. ‘ '

On the basis of these facts, Gomez asserted that by no ' means is the present junta ‘mod- erate’; the 6,000killed so-far this ‘;

. year is a figure three times as l

large as the total number killed i

base—of support, that he feels that both the junta and its American backers know it must soon fall.

I, The FDR has isolated a number

of different scenarios if this proves to be the case.

Gomez believes that the first tact will be another coup, backed by the US. and the military. This would declare present Christian Democrat junta»

'member Napolean Duarte as

President, make _a few other ‘minor shuffles, and then try to pin'the bTame for the'current re- pression on present Defense Minister VJgse Garcia. The FDR. ."thinks this will have little effect, as the Salvadoran people would realize that it wasn’t a change at all. '

After this, there could be

. altogether under the PteViOUS more direct military intervention,

two military administrations, in-

popular‘ uprising,- the junta launched a few ,moderate reforms. The military command. structure remained largely un-

7 changed, however, and pressure”

from other military leaders

p. forced the transfer of most of the _

junta’s power to Co]; Jaime Gu- tierrez, the more conservative of the junta’s two military mem-

Even the Christian Demo- 5 tremiSts’, and that government

' crat members of the ruling body :

’enjoy'the support of only a

minority of their party’s organir

zation':

Political opposition and vio- lence continued unabated, and as a result the junta moved‘ further and further to the right, abandoning many of its reforms. -The_situation reached a mini- climax this past summer, with .the murder of Archbishop-Oscar Romero, the outspoken head of El Salvador‘s relatively progress-

. ive Catholic Church, who had

'been highly critical of the junta’s political repression. Workers begana series of general strikes,

' and the countryside became the' site of major battles abetween ’

government and opposition armed forces (where previously violence was limited to isolated ' skinnishes). Things have cooled down somewhat since then, but the situatiOn remains, essenfially

There is much confusion;

This image is fostered, he said, by the foreign policy statements of both the Salvadoran junta and the ,_Arnerican and Canadian

govemmenfsfand by the reports

carried in the'privately-owned Western media.

But Gomezlalle'ged that most‘

‘ of the casualties are being in-

curred by the so~called ‘leftist ex-

and so-called ‘rightist extremistsf are escaping. largely unscathed. For instance, a United Press l'n- , temational story, carried in the Aug. 27, 1980 Calgary Herald,

~ reported that, the previous day,

13 Salvadorans had been killed .in political violence, including

_ ,“the firstho righhwing .extrem- ,. isis ever reported killed in a clash .with goverriment troops”; at that

point, nearly 5,090 people had been killed in political violence in

, El Salvador in 1980.

Gomez claimed that the broad i

. coalition of opposition groups

that he represents legitimately]

majority of the Salvadoran ‘ people, and_’said that the FDR is considering the possibility of establishing -a provisional gov— ’ ernment-in-exile. ,

And he also asserted that it is not right—wing death squads, but in fact actual government troops ' and their associates that are

Gomez said the situation with its violence has been building up for three decades, as the people of El Salvador revolted agains the political repression and vio- lence of a succession of Ameri- can-backed military regimes. He claimed that the past history of El '- Salvador, indeed of all of ‘ Central America, including most ' recently Nicaragua, backs him

.up_.

' represents the sentiment of the i .

Gomez went on to say that the greatest threat facing the Sal- I vadoran people is not the destruction resulting from the in-

, evitable revolution, as other na-

tions have gone through similar upheavals and then managed to rebuild, but the possibility of

I o I a ‘ ‘. overt American military inter-

vention. . _ . I . The United States is already

' involved in El Salvador .with ex—

tensive military and political sup- port tor the junta, sucn as me re- cently approved $5 million donation of military supplies, and theloan to the junta’s mili-

tary command of 200 American I

military advisors and experts in counter-insurgency (see last Fri- day’s Calgary Herald). These Americans are accompanying- the Salvadoran National Guard

, on their operations, both in the

,doing all of this Quoting " statistics compiled by the San

countryside and inthe cities. . But Gomez fears that-this in-

tervention ificrease.

The junta has lost so much of its

according to Gomez. Currently

~'out, with a moderate junta in the . Cluding Pf€5idem Romero’s stationed off the Pacific coast of . middle trying to preserve order. , feign 0f teTIOL

.El Salvador are two American {aircraft carriers, with 60 planes and a total of 3,000 Marines. Along with this is the US. Rapid Deployment Force, stationed in ‘Miami and the Panama Canal

l ' Zone, ready to defend American ' ‘strategic interests’ in the region; I the FDR has vocally denounced

’ this force as a preparation for in-

tervention.

Less diE’Jyffh—erue are 37 US. advisors working in neigh— boring Honduras and more in

' Guatemala, purportedly training

etc-Nicaraguan National Guards- men and anti-Castro Cuban exiles for mercenary action in El Salvador. Interestingly, the re- moval of the advisors in Hon-

‘ duras was one of the demands of

the Honduran high-school stu- dents who recently occupied the Venezuelan embassy in that country, the claim also being that the Americans were stationed there in preparation for interven— tion in El Salvador. ‘ ’

So Gomez stressed the neces- sity of international political pres- "sure; to._discourage any potential American intervention, or inter— vention by proxy, and pointed out the important role of that solidarity in the recent victory of the Nicaraguan people. Even if the US. does intervene, he said, the Salvadoran people know their. strength, and will seize power sooner or later anyway.

. Gomez was pleased with the success of the FDR coalition in building unity among the popu- lar opposition forces, and felt that this unity was the major

reason behind this year’s ‘upsurge in the opposition politic ' cal activity.

, He made a special appeal for' i support from the university com-

munity on the U of C campus, ' pointing out that his own univer-- lsity, the only major post~second- lary institution in El Salvador, had been completely shut down .and occupied by the military, as ‘-a result of opposition to the

government from' students and

faculty.