World

They are a part of the opposition in El
Salvador, although they don’t carry guns.

Unlike the armed opposition battling for
10 years against fascist rule, the rural cam-
pesinos of the tiny Central American nation
engage in farming and construction.

They are the people repopulating the
scorched countryside, and they have come
back to stay, Magdalena Hernandez says.

“People could no longer survive in the
refugee camps. There are diseases and they
felt jailed up. And people wanted to work
the land,” Hernandez, a former resident of
the Mesa Grande refugee camp in neigh-
bouring Honduras, relates.

“People decided they were Salvadorans,
not Hondurans. If they were going to be
assassinated, that’s the way it would be,”
says the president of the women’s council of
the rebuilt village of Las Vueltas.

Hernandez was forced to flee her village
in 1980, after the Salvadoran army entered
and killed several villagers, including her
husband and three of her sons.

Hernandez’ family had been sheltering
people from an adjacent village who were
fleeing an army massacre. On hearing that
the army was approaching, the refugees fled
for the mountains again.

“They said, ‘Come with us, there’s
danger.’ But I was seven months pregnant
and had small children. And my husband
said we hadn’t done anything wrong.”

When the army arrived, soldiers searched
every house before gathering all the men
together, Hernandez relates.

“They took the men into an abandoned
house and sliced their throats. They told my
sons to run, and then shot them in the back.

“They didn’t allow us to bury them. They
kept watch over the bodies for three days
and nights, leaving them on the road where
the vultures and dogs began to eat them.”

Salvadoran villagers
repopulating towns
despite military actions

Hernandez and the other villagers fled,
returning a few days later to find that the
houses were robbed and burned. The army
refused to allow them to re-enter.

The residents of Las Vueltas joined thou-
sands of others fleeing the massacres to the
mountains, and then to refugee camps like
Mesa Grande in Honduras and San Jose de
la Montana in the capital, San Salvador.

Army massacres have obliterated villages
in El Salvador since the mid-Seventies,
when campesinos formed organizations
and demanded that fallow land owned by
the country’s richest families be released for
farming by the peasants. Mass killings of
peasants and supporting university students
took place after a large protest march in
1976, several years before the Farabundo
Marti National Liberation Front took up
arms.

Hernandez was a resident in San Jose de
la Montana when she ventured out for food
on Nov. 19, 1985. She was captured and
taken in an unmarked car with polarized
windows to an unknown location.

“They said I was from Chalatenango (the
province where Las Vueltas is located) and
was therefore a bad person,” Hernandez
says.

Hernandez was blindfolded and tied and
interrogated ‘‘in a dark, cold place.”

But after 11 days she was freed due to the
efforts of the church, the International Red
Cross, El Salvador’s Human Rights Com-
mission and international solidarity organi-
zations.

“They kept asking for me by name. For
that reason they weren’t able to disappear
me.”

A year later, news came that Mesa
Grande refugees were returning to their
former villages. On Oct. 13, 1987, Hernan-
dez returned to Las Vueltas.

“There was only tall grass and bushes
there. We slept in the open air,” she relates.

But with aid from the Lutheran Church,
the villagers were soon constructing houses
at the rate of three per day, establishing
potable water sources, building corrals and
planting crops.

Today Las Vueltas has tin, sewing and
carpentry workshops, two daycare centres,
health and dental clinics, community stores
and schooling, so far limited to the grade 4
level.

It also has a women’s council, with Her-
nandez as president.

But the re-established village of 1,500 still
suffers persecution. Villagers are frequently
stopped at military check-points, medicines
are seized, aerial bombings continue and the
army burns the crops.

Ona cross-country tour sponsored by the

MAGDALENA HERNANDEZ... resident of Las Vueltas on Canadian tour.

Canadian aid organization, SalvAide, Her-
nandez recently visited Windsor city council
which is twinned with her village. The coun-
cil gave the visitor a new city flag to fly as
protection against army raids, and resolved
to petition both the Salvadoran government
and the United Nations to ensure that food
and medical supplies get through to Las
Vueltas.

Locally, NDP MP Svend Robinson’s rid-
ing of Burnaby-Kingsway twinned with the
repopulated village of Teocinte, also in Cha-
latenango: FEASTS! “1 i

SalvAide aims to raise $15,000 to aid
refugees returning from Mesa Grande to
their villages. The organization is also wag-
ing a letter writing campaign to urge Exter-
nal Affairs Minister Joe Clark to rescind all
bi-lateral aid to El Salvador’s government.

By TOM MORRIS

On Oct. 15, after spending a total of 181
years in apartheid jails, eight political pri-
soners, including Walter Sisulu, former
general secretary of the African National
Congress, were released to be met by thou-
sands of jubilant people.

At a news conference, Sisulu, 77, who
spent the last 26 years in prison, imme-
diately called for the release of Nelson
Mandela. The men, while expressing
happiness at their own freedom, declared:
“We must add that there can be no real joy
about our release when we now think of
the comrades we have left behind, espe-
cially our comrade Nelson Mandela, who
has been in prison longer than any of us.”

Released with Walter Sisulu were:

Ahmed Kathrada, 60, a member of the
ANC military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe,.
and a member of the South African
Communist Party (SACP), who was sent-
enced to life imprisonment along with
Mandela at the Rivonia trials in 1964.

Raymond Mhlaba, 69, chair of the
ANC’s Port Elizabeth branch and a
member of the SACP, a Rivonia defend-
ant, jailed in 1964.

Wilton Mkwayi, member of the ANC
and the South African Congress of Trade
Unions and a commander of Umkhonto

Mandela in 1964.

we. Sizwe, also imprisoned along with

Andrew Mlangeni, 63, journalist and
Johannesburg ANC secretary, jailed in
1964.

Elias Motsoaledi, 65, member of the
ANC military wing, the South African
Congress of Trade Unions and the SACP,
also convicted at Rivonia in 1964.

Oscar Mpetha, 80, ANC organizer in
the Cape region, convicted of incitement
in 1983 and given a five-year term. A dia-
betic, his leg was amputated while in pri-
son.

Jafta Masemola, 58, a leader of the Pan-
African Congress, sentenced in 1963 on
charges of sabotage.

At their press conference, the ANC
leaders set out the conditions required for
any future talks with the government.
They include a lifting of the 29-year-old
ban against the ANC and the legalization
of other mass democratic people’s organi-
zations, a lifting of banning restrictions
against individuals, a return of exiles, the
ending of the country-wide state of emer-
gency and the release of all political pri-
soners.

As well, the leaders refused to drop their
support for military struggle as a compo-
nent of the anti-apartheid struggle. “If the
government does not meet our demands,
we have no alternative but to fight for our
freedom,” Andrew Mlangeni told the
media.

WALTER SISULU

Responding to the news of the release,
officials at the ANC Mission in Canada
said that years of pressure on successive
apartheid regimes to release the Rivonia
defendants and other political prisoners
has brought about this partial victory.

“Tt must be clearly understood,” they

Freed apartheid prisoners vow to continue fight

said, “that (South African president) F.W.
de Klerk was forced to release these pri-
soners because of uncontrollable political
events and the revolutionary situation
unfolding inside the country — namely
the massive, open defiance campaign that
our people are engaged in, as well as the
devastating impact of sanctions on the
South African economy.

“This is what forced de Klerk into
releasing our leaders and heroes, rather
than so-called goodwill or good faith, of
which he has demonstrably shown to be
lacking when he was minister of the notor-
ious Bantu education department under
Botha’s regime.

“The release of Sisulu and others,
though welcome and necessary, is in itself
not sufficient to create the conditions con-
ducive to negotiate that would lead to the
dismantling of the racist apartheid system,
and its replacement by a non-racial,
democratic, free South Africa. The de
Klerk regime must be pressured through
mass defiance campaigns and the intensi-
fication of sanctions, into ending the state
of emergency, the unbanning of the ANC
and all mass, democratic organizations, to
allow free political expression, ie: rallies,
demonstrations and meetings and, last but
not least, the removal of South African
Defence Force troops from the town-
ships.”

Pacific Tribune, October 30, 1989 « 9