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LABOUR CA

Latin America’s missing
spark UN vote request

__ The strip of plastic along the top of the
laminated photo of a husband missing
almost 11 years is perforated with pin-
marks. Sola Sierra has obviously worn this
emblem of courage and grief for a long
time.

The husband, Waldo Pizarro Molina,
was taken and beaten by men in civilian
clothes while standing on a street corner in
Santiago, the capital of Chile on Dec. 15,
1976. He and the man he was talking with,
Fernando Ortiz Letelier, have not been seen
since,

Since then Sierra has been a member, and
is now president, of the Committee of the
Detained and Disappeared, which seeks to
discover the whereabouts and fate of more
than 2,500 missing people in the Chile of
dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Thousands more have been detained and
become part of the “disappeared” since the
day Sierra’s husband, a mining technician
and Communist Party regional secretary,
was grabbed. Human rights organization
estimate that 100 Chileans are killed each
year, either by soldiers or members of
Chile’s secret service.

Sierra, who addressed a Vancouver
audience Oct. 30 while on a tour of Canada,
has also faced death from her activities on
behalf of Chile’s disappeared.

“TI myself have been detained for hours,
beaten up and told I would be killed,” Sierra
told the Tribune through a translator.”

The missing person issue goes back to the
bloody days of the September, 1973 coup by
the CIA-backed Pinochet, a general in
Chile’s army. His fascist forces overthrew,
after a period of destablization engineered
by Washington, the Popular Unity gov-
ernment of President Salvador Allende.

An estimated 40,000 people have been
killed since those days, Sierra said.

Of the more than 2,500 disappeared, sev-
eral hundred — by 1978, the number stood
at 758 —. have been proven to be the work

On the contra

Ron Newton, Simon Fraser University,
Burnaby, writes: Alarmed by the arrival of
several contingents of Honduran refugees at
Vancouver airport, the Canadian govern-
Ment recently imposed a visa requirement
to stem this flow. It asserted that they were,
in fact, economic refugees, since political
Violence in Honduras was negligible. Pre-
mier Bill Vander Zalm did not let ignorance
of the matter prevent him from speaking in
the same wise.

Because Honduras is so little known, the
government’s action provoked little com-
ment. Nevertheless, its assumptions are
incorrect. There are death squads in Hon-
duras, dissidents have disappeared, political
Violence occurs every day. And because the
Honduran government has no idea how to
dispose of thousands of well-armed.contras
Who will join the unemployed when the
Central American peace plan takes effect in
November, violence is likely to grow.

Honduras’ four million people are, next
to Haiti’s, the poorest in the Western Hem-
isphere. Fifty per cent are under- or unem-
ployed; half the urban population and 78
per cent of the rural are illiterate; 72 per cent
of Hondurans under five suffer malnutri-
tion. The infant mortality rate of 80 per
thousand is, after Haiti’s, the highest in the
Western Hemisphere.

Dominated historically by United Fruit,
Honduras is the classic banana republic.
Only 15 per cent of the land is cultivated;
land reform has not been implemented. The
Situation is made worse in the south by the
Contras who appropriate land, cattle and

of DINA, the forerunner to Pinochet’s
dreaded secret service, CNI.

In the early years Pinochet’s henchmen
also concocted an elaborate scheme to
cloak their role in detaining Allende sup-
porters, several of whom had fled to neigh-
bouring Argentina and Brazil.

In Argentina a magazine called Lea, pub-
lished by the minister of internal affairs,
listed 60 names of Chileans it claimed had
been killed in individual violent conflicts in
Argentina. In Brazil, Odea, a newspaper
defunct since 1922, was resurrected to pro-
duce one issue listing the names of Chilean
refugees also cited as having died through
personal confrontations.

In fact, the political refugees were the
victims of collusion between DINA and the
security forces of the two countries, Sierra
said.

“Years later we figured that the lists were
published primarily to justify the death
— the assassination — of Gen. Carlos
Prats, the general who remained loyal to
Allende and who was killed by DINA in
Buenos Aires shortly after the coup,” she
said.

Relatives of the disappeared searched
individually for loved ones in the first days
of the junta, Sierra related. But in 1975 they
founded the committee, with aims beyond
that of finding missing individuals.

“There are the same\concerns in Gua-
temala, El Salvador, Uruguay and several
other Latin countries,” said Sierra, noting
that more than 90,000 people have disap-
peared in Latin America since 1976.

That led to the formation in 1981 of the
Federation of the Families of Relatives of
the Detained and Disappeared in Latin
America. Among other things, the federa-
tion fights against so-called “immunity
laws,” such as those the U.S.-backed regime
in El Salvador wants to implement under
the new Central American peace plan.

“Such laws would allow the generals and

SOLA
SIERRA
with
photo

of her
husband,
Waldo
Pizarro
Molina:
more
than
2,500
are
missing.

others who have perpetrated crimes against
the people to go free, and we won’t allow
that,” she said.

The federation also seeks a United
Nations “convention” declaring the forcible
disappearance of people a crime against
humanity.

Sierra said the convention has several
implications.

“We would be able to find the guilty
parties, discover the whereabouts of the dis-
appeared, stop the practice of detaining and
convict those who are guilty,” she said.

She charges that Pinochet lately has been
“trying to revive the climate of terror” most
intensely practiced during the early years of
the junta. :

(The committee is demanding the Chi-
lean junta tell the whereabouts of five stu-
dent leaders missing since Sept. 7. They are
Alejandro Alberto Pinochet Arenas, Gon-
zalo Jesus Sepulveda Sanchez, Gonzalo

Ivan Fuenzalida, Luis Munoz Otarola and
Jose. Julian Pena Maltes.

(Also detained are union leaders Manuel
Bustos, Moises Labrana, Arturo Martinez,
Jose Sanfuentes and Juan Parra as well as
United Left leader and investigative journal-
ist Fanny Pollarolo, who has been working
on an expose of the killing of Gen. Prats.)

Buta series of daily political actions since
the launching of a successful national strike
Oct. 7 is countering Pinochet’s attempts,
Sierra said.

While in Canada, Sierra wants to meet
with government officials to urge Canada’s
support for the proposed UN bill on detai-
nees.

She is also urging Canadians to write
Chile’s interior minister to demand the
release of the latest detainees. They should
write to: Sr. Sergio Fernandez, Ministro del
Interior, Edificio Diego Portales, Santiago,
Chile.

, there IS political violence in Honduras

Letters

firewood for military purposes, using land
mines and summary evictions. About
12,000 people have fled from these zones
into cities ill-prepared to house or feed
them. -

Refugees cause economic and political
strains which Honduras does not need. In
May, 1987, the United Nations recorded
46,031 refugees, 10,000 fewer than a year
before, but still the highest number in Cen-
tral America.

The U.S. military, its Panamanian bases
threatened by devolution of the control over
the canal to Panama, has sought to make
Honduras its unsinkable aircraft carrier in
Central America. From 1980 through 1987,
it poured $1,262.5 million (acknowledged)

into Honduras, two-thirds of it for military
and security purposes.

But the net inflow is much less. Honduras
must continue to meet payments on its for-
eign debt, almost all of it held by U.S. lend-
ing sources, even though its export earnings
have collapsed in recent years along with the
world market in bananas and coffee. —

Much aid money is lost to corruption.
Vice-president Jaime Rosenthal admitted
on U.S. television that 30 per cent of foreign
aid (including $57 million from the Cana- :
dian International Development Agency,

according to the Vancouver Sun) is stolen;
half the remainder is not used efficiently.
Graft and “humanitarian” aid money are
diverted to Florida real estate, drug deals
and fur coats for generals’ wives; vendors of
booze, T-shirts and girls to American GIs
share a lesser prosperity. In the same period,
the Gross National Product has dropped by
12 per cent, private investment by 65 per
cent. Education, public works, agrarian
reform and health budgets have been cut, in
the case of health by $3.5 million in 1987.

The U.S. does not want its client seen asa
military dictatorship. Therefore, in Nov-
ember, 1985, the Americans spent a reputed
$3 million on the election of Jose Azcona of
the Liberal Party as president. A recent
issue of Central American Update quoted a
Honduran official as stating: “Basically,
what the U.S. is doing here is paying our
armed forces not to take over the civilian
government.”

No insurrectionary movement — nor
even much detailed knowledge of the Nica-
raguan revolution — exists in Honduras.
Nevertheless, hard-pressed trade unionists
have begun to demonstrate and peasant
groups have begun to occupy unused lands.
The regime has responded with violence.
Union and peasant leaders, teachers and

religious personnel are especially at risk;
many have already been killed. Repression
has occurred especially around San Pedro
Sula, the point of origin for the refugees
who caused such alarm at Vancouver air-
port.
A former sergeant, Florencio Caballero,
confirmed an earlier account by Gen. Wal-
ter Lopez, the former Armed Forces chief,
that the 316th Battalion of FUSEP, the
internal security force, carries out torture,
murders and disappearances. And the pace
increases: 175 murders/disappearances from
1980 to 1984; 66 in the last four months of
1986; and 49 murders and seven disappear-
ances in June, 1987 alone.

President Azcona officially acknowl-
edged the contra presence in Honduras only
in May, 1986. He must now get rid of them
by Nov. 7 to comply with Hondurans’
commitment under the Central American
peace plan. Unfortunately, he lacks the pol-
itical muscle to do so. President Reagan’s
refusal to end the contra war makes his task
impossible.

Reagan offers Honduras $180 million in
1988 to comply with American wishes.
(How Honduras is to get rid of the Ameri-
cans is a question no one cares to address.)
Azcona refuses to set up the National Con-
ciliation Commission urged under the peace
plan, saying that there is nothing to recon-
cile. Not everyone agrees. But disagreement
leaves Hondurans three alternatives: shut
up and starve; speak up and risk a grisly
disappearance; or flee to a friendlier coun-
try — like Canada.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, NOVEMBER 4, 1987 e 5